Books: The Sightless Seer

EZRA POUND (493 pp.)—Charles Norman—Mocm/7/on ($6.95).

"Personae," the word with which Ezra Pound titled his first book of poems, originally meant masks. Ezra Weston Loomis Pound, who is 75 this week, has worn many. There is Pound the poet, critic, scholar and esthetic perfectionist. There is Pound the economic crank, anti-Semite and Fascist apologist. There is Pound the expatriate bohemian, the discoverer, friend, advocate and ally of Eliot and Joyce, who got them into print. He begged, wheedled, scolded, scandalized others and scanted himself to secure bread-and-but ter money for them and for many another subsequently famed writer. In that role he...