Ezra Pound

No single person did more to build modern literature than Ezra Pound, and almost no one did more to damage his own place in it. From London and then Paris, he operated as the movement's one-man infrastructure: he edited The Waste Land into its final shape (Eliot's dedication — 'il miglior fabbro,' the better craftsman — was earned), championed Joyce's Ulysses into print, drilled the young Hemingway in cutting every spare word, and invented or promoted half the era's -isms.

His own work ran from the perfect small machines of Imagism to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley — his savage farewell to a civilization that had fed a generation to the war — and then into The Cantos, the sprawling, decades-long 'poem including history' that is by turns the summit of modernist ambition and a cautionary tale about it.

The cautionary tale extends to the life. Pound spent the Second World War broadcasting fascist propaganda from Mussolini's Italy, was arrested for treason, and passed twelve years in a Washington asylum; strains of that politics, including open antisemitism, run through the later Cantos. We shelve him the only honest way: as essential, and as a warning. Reading him means holding both.