In this book, Ezra Pound, with rancor and prejudice, examines topics such as literary instruction, publishing, degrees of writer greatness, why books?, language, the history of writing, critics and criticism, music, and poetry. He provides a brief but provocative checklist of writers and their works as foundations for reading with perspicacity. Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic, and a major figure in the early modernist movement, known for "The Pisan Cantos," "Personae," "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," and "Homage to Sextus Propertius." Pound was known for his erratic intellectual brilliance and increasingly eccentric personal and political behavior. Accused of treason during World War II, he never stood trial, but spent years in a Washington, D.C. mental hospital (1945-1958).