SOURCE: "Sordello," in Provence and Pound, University of California Press, 1978, pp. 186-214.

Makin is an educator and Pound scholar. In the following excerpt, he discusses the content, style, and language of Sordello's poetry, and examines the influence of his life and works on Pound's early verse and his Cantos.

Pound's respect for both Browning and Dante gave him good reasons to be interested in Sordello. But in the early years of studying the troubadours he brushed over him; he tended to think of writing as either noble-and-difficult or easy-and-slick, and Sordello was easy.

But when Pound came back to the troubadours he followed Dante's lead even more carefully, and his opinion of Sordello improved. In 1937 he wrote, 'With Sordello the fusion of word, sound, movement is so simple one only understands his superiority to other troubadours after having studied Proven al and half-forgotten it, and come back to...