Ezra Pound

Pound's poems often make me think of Cy Twombly, the painter. They both focus on ancient Greece quite a bit. Twombly is so strange and seems to hint at forests, cold white Greek statuary, the white stone of Ezra Pound’s cantos, and moss, soft under your feet as you trek by.

Pound said in Canto XVII:
… And shipped thence
to the stone place,
Pale white, over water,
known water,
And the white forest of marble, bent bough over bough,
The pleached arbour of stone…


Pound's work in Lustra [here] is great too, with classic, simple neo-classical lines and scenes, like in

The Spring

Cydonian spring with her attendant train,
Maelids and water-girls,
Stepping beneath a boisterous wind from Thrace,
Throughout this sylvan place
Spreads the bright tips,
And every vine-stock is
Clad in new brilliancies.
                                      And wild desire
Falls like black lightning.
O bewildered heart,
Though every branch have back what last year
     lost,
She, who moved here amid the cyclamen,
Moves only now a clinging tenuous ghost.


His other work in Personae [here] is great too, like this one--it's so mysterious and makes me immediately think of Sappho and John William Godward:

Xenia

And
Unto thine eyes my heart
Sendeth old dreams of the spring-time,
Yea of wood-ways my rime
Found thee and flowers in and of all streams
That sang low burthen, and of roses,
That lost their dew-bowed petals for the dreams
We scattered o'er them passing by.