Sometimes it helps to draw out the context around things. Â This is how I made sense of Ezra Pound and his place in modernist poetry as I was thumbing through his Translations on Christmas Eve. Â I always knew he’d helped propel T.S. Eliot into stardom, but I actually didn’t realize how close he was with Gertrude Stein (the once mondo expat-patroness of the arts in Paris), or how generous he was in helping many other writers–Ernest Hemingway, most notably.
I think with this mind-map, I accidentally sketched out the grid of writers that I’d like to shake closer hands with in 2013.