ABSTRACT
Mr. Ezra Pound's Spirit of Romance deals with the poetry of the Latin races, roughly speaking, from the Provencals to Villon, Camões, and Lope de Vega. It does not pretend to be exhaustive, but to express the opinions of Mr. Pound upon certain representative poets. He is 'interested in poetry', both as a scholar and as a human being, and he writes probably for those who have more humanity than scholarship. His aim is to instruct, his ambition 'to instruct painlessly', and he confines himself to 'such medieval works as still possess an interest other than archaeological for the contemporary reader who is not a specialist'. His quotations are long and numerous; as they are often from little known or difficult writers they are valuable. Whatever may be thought of his opinions and his way of expressing them, there can be no doubt that his translations are in the main admirable, having the two qualities of intelligibility and suggesting the superiority of the original. He says himself that his criticism has 'consisted in selection rather than in presentation of the opinion'. If that were so we should have nothing but praise for the book, but it is not. It is restlessly opinionated. He has, or desires to have, an opinion upon everything; and if he has not then his eccentric speech makes it appear that he has. He relies, in fact, as much upon bis personality as upon his learning. We are delighted to agree with him far more often than we disagree. On the subject of classic and romantic, for example, he says a number of true things, though he must admit that he is just as far as ever from the truth, even if he did not confound everything by saying: 'Certain qualities and certain furnishings are germane to all fine poetry; there is no need to call them either classic or romantic'.
