That he should be included in a volume devoted to American criticism would have both amused and delighted Ezra Pound. His relationship to his native country was so charged, so fretful, so variable, that it is at once impossible to classify him as an American critic and impossible to exclude him from the category. His first important critical gesture may have been his decision to leave this country, but he never ceased to cast attentive glances, hopeful and reproachful, toward his place of origin and the site of his indignity.

The estrangement of the American sensibility from its European past is a common preoccupation; it can lead to what Pound called in Guide to Kulchur (1938) "pusillanimous subservience." But it is well worth noting that the distance of America from Europe has another far more productive consequence which is nowhere better exemplified than in the critical career of Ezra...