Books published by publisher New Directions

“Sherwood Anderson had the patience not just of the artist but of the religious man: he knew that there was bright shiny ore beneath the scabby crust.” ― Henry Miller Completed one year after his classic Winesburg, Ohio and long regarded as his finest novel, Sherwood Anderson's Poor White captures the spirit of small-town America during the Machine Age. Hugh McVey is a protagonist Robert Lovett once called "a symbol of the country itself in its industrial progress and spiritual impotence." A lonely and passionate inventor of farm machinery, he struggles to gain love and intimacy in a community where "life had surrendered to the machine." Through his story Anderson aims his criticism at the rise of technology and industry at the turn of the century. Simultaneously, he renders a tale of eloquent naturalism and disturbing beauty. Poor White was praised by such writers as H. L. Mencken and Hart Crane when it was first published. It remains a curiously contemporary novel, and a marvelous testament to Sherwood Anderson's "sombre metaphysical preoccupation and his smouldering sensuousness" (The New Republic).

Included here are all of Pound’s concert reviews and statements; the biweekly columns written under the pen name William Atheling for The New Age in London; articles from other periodicals; the complete text of the 1924 landmark volume Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony; extracts from books and letters, and the poet’s additional writings on the subject of music. The pieces are organized chronologically, with illuminating commentary, thorough footnotes, and an index. Three appendixes complete this comprehensive volume; an analysis of Pound’s theories of “absolute rhythm” and “Great Bass;” a glossary of important musical personalities mentioned in the text and the composer George Antheil’s 1924 appreciation, “Why a Poet Quit the Muses.”