Michael Glover on his passion for Ezra Pound

How to account for my obsession with Ezra Pound? The book has been at least 40 years in the making: those first fumbles, followed by the writing, the un-writing, the re-writing … What was it that Auden once said about poems? That they were never finished, only ever abandoned? This is such a book. Many people told me to let go, not to bother my head over such a daft thing. In Andrew Edmunds Restaurant in Soho, for example, some years back, the art critic Adrian Clark told me to set aside all this madness. No one reads him now, he said. He himself was doing John Rothenstein. Good luck to him, I thought.
Or the friend who lives near Carcassonne, who read an early draft and told me I’d never finish it. He said that all of 20 years ago. That was a bit of a spur: to prove him wrong. To face down the naysayers …

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