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  • The Paris Review

    Lost and Pound

    by Daniel Swift Oct 02, 2017 4 minutes

    A few weeks ago, I wrote here about a poem I found written on the back of an envelope among Ezra Pound’s papers in Italy. It is a small poem and it runs in full:

    Hast thou 2 loaves of bread
    Sell one + with the dole
    Buy straightaway some hyacinths
    To feed thy soul.

    It does not look much like a Pound poem. It is perhaps too tender, too straightforward. Yet, I suggested, it is filled with Pound’s perpetual concerns: with economics, in a minor key; with the possibility of the spiritual in the world of capitalist trade; and with the eternal problems of

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