Langdon Hammer's Modern Poetry lecture at Yale (ENGL 310) introduces Ezra Pound through the contradictions of his career: his central role shaping other modernist poets alongside his fascism and anti-capitalist economic theories. Hammer spends the middle of the lecture on Pound's translation of the Old English poem The Seafarer, using it to show Pound's characteristic method of reworking older poetic forms into something new. The final section turns to the first Canto of The Cantos, Pound's long unfinished epic, reading it as a meditation on how a poet engages with history and inherited literary tradition. Recorded in spring 2007, the lecture runs just under an hour and follows the chaptered structure of Yale's Open Courses series, moving from biography to close reading of the two poems in turn.