From his youth Pound was interested in the poetry of the Troubadours. He studied them carefully, translated them, imitated and adapted their poems and their poetic techniques, quoted them and wrote poems where they figured either as his personae or as the major figures. He walked the roads of France, exploring their landscapes and breathing the air out of “Provence”, creating some of his finest early poems from this imaginative recreation of life in “Provincia Deserta”. One of his first books, The Spirit of Romance, was a study devoted to them. For Pound:
 
    Any study of European poetry is unsound if it does not commence with a study of that art in Provence…  If we are to understand that part of our civilisation which is the art of verse, we must begin at the root, and that root is medieval. The poetic art of Provence paved the way for the poetic art of Tuscany, and to this Dante bears sufficient witness in the De vulgari eloquentia.
 
    At the time of the 16th International Pound Conference, which took place in Brantôme, in the country of Arnaut Daniel, Arnaut de Mareuil and Bertran de Born, and which Pound visited with T. S. Eliot in 1919, Pound scholars and Troubadours specialists from around the world gathered together to explore some of the relationships between Pound’s renovation of English poetry and the poetry of his first masters, the Troubadours. For Pound tried, in parts, to “resuscitate the dead art of poetry”, by drawing on his extensive knowledge and inimitable understanding of these outstanding  XIIth century predecessors. A selection of these contributions are presented in this volume.