1. On Pound’s populist American background, see Wendy Flory, The American Ezra Pound (Yale University Press, London: 1989);
2. and on his revolutionary temperament more generally see, for example, Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Radical Modernism (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 1993), chs. 2 and 4.
3. Helen Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists (Jonathan Cape, London: 2009), 3.
4. See Sherry, Radical Modernism, ch. 1; Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries, 207ff; and on Pound’s correspondence, see the revised, 1950 collection edited by D.D. Paige, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound (Faber and Faber, London: 1971).
5. See Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound; hereafter Carpenter/ASC. This phrase is also employed by John Tytell, Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (Bloomsbury, London: 1987).