The link to Amazon.com says this:
Known for his delicate perception as well as his passionate opinions, Ezra Pound published this, his first collection of poetry, in 1926. Pound was as much a diviner as he was a poet, and his writing is as much observation and experience as it is prophecy. He was especially drawn to beauty and his writing extols the magnificence of profound emotion and the beguiling wonderment of intellect. From translations and reconstructions of pieces of ancient literature to his own postulations on art, love, and life, this is a worthy addition to any personal library. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
This is wrong on several counts.
The student who did the report produced six or seven different versions, the first from a letter to Harriet Monroe and the last the one that usually appears in books. No words change, but there are interesting variations in spacing and punctuation. The change I find most compelling is the shift from colon to semicolon at the end of the first line. There has apparently been some speculation that it was a printer's error that Pound decided he liked and decided to keep! Well, why not?
I don't know by what standards this little poem could be considered mediocre. It's about the only two-liner I know of that has persisted in the canon for almost a century, and it's still worth discussing for many reasons. Its stature as an interesting artifact of early Modernism strikes me as secondary to its intrinsic interest, though it is of course hard to separate the poem from its milieu.
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