One of the most dramatic pioneers in 20th century literature, Ezra Pound changed the face of European poetry single-handed. Pound’s life and work trace a fascinating path from Idaho to Venice to the Regent Street Polytechnic to West Sussex to Paris to Italy again. There are stories to be told and poems to be read from all of these places. His hunger for other cultures feeds the spectacular originality of his adventure on the page. His Cantos is one of the great 20th century masterpieces, the controversies around him challenging and graspable. Critic to the stars, he brought W B Yeats’s poetry to new life, cut half of Eliot’s poem ‘The Waste Land’ (the right half), and influenced younger poets on both sides of the Atlantic. He translated with a virtuoso vigour from Chinese, Old English, Provencal, Italian and French.   

The other night I went to a Vaughan Williams concert at the Royal Festival