Ezra Pound entered the life of Dorothy Shakespear early in 1909. They were married in April 1914. Their private correspondence, as well as a tender and engaging exchange in itself, covers some of the crucial years of Pound's literary development and the shaping of modernism. Two hundred letters and diary entries from this important but unexplored period of Pound's life are published in this volume, almost all of them for the first time. They provide a detailed record of his search for a new and personal style, and give an unfamiliar portrait of the dynamic young expatriate involved simultaneously in two literary generations - the companion of Years and Ford Madox Hueffer, as well as of Wyndham Lewis and Guadier-Brzeska. The correspondence also sheds poignant light on the Pisan Cantos of 1945, where amid the ruins of his life Pound recalled again and again events and people described in these precious early letters, as if the memory of the years before 1914 were the only stable point in his disintegrating universe...