A Lume Spento
Cover, first printing
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| Author | Ezra Pound |
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| Country | Italy |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Poetry collection |
| Publisher | A. Antonini |
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Publication date
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July 1908 |
| Media type | Print (softcover) |
A Lume Spento (translated by the author as With Tapers Quenched) is a 1908 poetry collection by Ezra Pound. Self-published in Venice, it was his first collection.
Ezra Pound (1885–1972) studied Romance languages and literature, including French, Italian, Provençal, and Spanish at the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College. In these studies Pound—long interested in poetry—had gained an interest in turn-of-the-century English poetry.
Pound dedicated A Lume Spento to Philadelphia artist William Brooke Smith, one of his friends, who had recently died of tuberculosis. The two had met in 1901–02, and Smith—an avid reader—introduced Pound to the works of English decadents such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. The title of the work is an allusion to the third canto of Dante's Purgatory, where it occurs in the speech of Manfred, King of Sicily, as he describes the treatment his excommunicated corpse has endured, exhumed and discarded without light along the banks of the river Verde. The procession of priests with unlit tapers is similar to the imagery in the practice of "bell, book, and candle", but Manfred remains optimistic that "by their curse we are not so destroy'd, / But that the eternal love may turn, while hope / Retains her verdant blossom...". Critic Hugh Witemeyer wrote that, overall, the implication is that Smith had led an unorthodox life like that of Manfred.
The collection was initially meant to be titled La Fraisne ("The Ash Tree"). Although this title was not kept, the poem of the same name was presented second in the collection.
A Lume Spento consists of 45 poems.
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