Melancholy in lieu of Recantation: Ezra Pound’s “Drafts and Fragments”

From the clinical point of view, melancholy is this moment of stasis in between two active stages in the development of depression, a moment of transition in which the patient measures the extent of his suffering and recognizes his powerlessness in despair and often in silence. First medical descriptions and diagnoses of melancholy date back to Hippocrates, and the detailed enumerations of its symptoms are also to be found in literature, be it through the observation of others or as a result ...