Ezra Pound (1885-1972) is widely remembered not only as one of the most influential voices in twentieth-century literary modernism, but also for his notorious anti-Semitic writings and radio broadcasts that supported Mussolini's Italian Fascist regime. His ideological turn from poetics and aestheticism to extremist economics and politics has long been an area of controversy within literary studies. One Must Not Go Altogether with the Tide collects the letters between Pound and London publisher Stanley Nott (1887-1978) to open a door to Pound's thinking and publications during the 1930s.

Nott, who published Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), was an interested and encouraging interlocutor for a poet seeking re-invention as an economist and political commentator - someone who sustained Pound as he swam against the tide. Pound's close involvement with his publisher illuminates an important episode in literary modernism as well as for the study of print culture in the interwar period. This edition of the letters retains Pound's idiosyncratic epistolary idiom and analyzes letter-writing as a genre critical to Pound's intellectual and cultural project, capturing Pound as a collaborator at work.