And before hell mouth; dry plain
and two mountains;
On the one mountain, a running form,
and another
...
Read full text
Simply a magnificent, important and effortlessly readable chunk of poetry MM
... The poem then moves to recollections of World War I, and of Pound's writer and artist friends who fought in it. These include Richard Aldington, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway and Fernand Léger, whose war memories the poem includes a passage from (in French) . Finally, there is a transcript of Lincoln Steffens' account of the Russian Revolution. These two events, the war and revolution, mark a decisive break with the historic past, including the early modernist period when these writers and artists formed a more-or-less coherent movement. (Wikipedia)