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 poetrv 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 hegin 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 e/oquentia.
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 Englisb 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.