At 07:02 AM 3/29/1999 -0500, Tim Romano wrote, about my fall Pound course:
 
>What other texts do you have so far?
 
The course will deal with a pair of major American poets, each
controversial in his own time: Pound and Whitman. The idea will be for the
students to read some (not all) of each poet's work and place it in
biographical and historical context, then write their own studies in
biography. So I've paired up the books I'm going to put on library reserve,
with (for instance) normative academic biographies of Pound and Whitman
alongside William Douglas O'Connor's polemic _The Good Gray Poet_ and
Eustace Mullins' polemic _This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound_. I'll also
be using a pair of disguised autobiographies: Richard Maurice Bucke's _Walt
Whitman_ (substantially ghosted by Whitman) and Pound's _Gaudier-Brzeska_.
 
As to the primary texts I'll want students to buy: for Pound they're the
obvious choices: _Selected Poems_, _Selected Cantos_, and _ABC of Reading_.
Those are all in stock at W. W. Norton, the successor to New Directions.
But I haven't heard yet from Norton about the_Selected Letters_, and about
that one I'm biting my nails. Until somebody gives us an affordable
one-vololume selection from the newer books of correspondence (are you
listening, publishers?), the _Selected Letters_ will remain essential. I
hope Norton isn't going to let it die.
 
Jonathan Morse