Ezra Pound (1885–1972) studied Romance languages and literature, including French, Italian, Provençal and Spanish, at the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College.

The title of the work is an allusion to the third canto of Dante's Purgatory,[4][5] where it occurs in the speech of Manfred, King of Sicily, as he describes the treatment his excommunicated corpse has endured, exhumed, and discarded without light along the banks of the river Verde.

[6] The procession of priests with unlit tapers is similar to the imagery in the practice of "bell, book and candle", but Manfred remains optimistic that "by their curse we are not so destroy'd, / But that the eternal love may turn, while hope / Retains her verdant blossom...".

[5] These figures, Witemeyer writes, reflect the spiritualism common in the period, in which the different personae Pound adapts are considered "mediumistic channelings" of the deceased.

In two of the poems ("Famam Librosque Cano" and "Scriptor Ignotus"), he writes, Pound appears to be questioning his own poetry, yet also showing unbound pride at his ability.

[5] Pound was not confident of the quality of the work and considered dumping the proofs into a canal,[12] later writing in Canto LXXVI: shd/I chuck the lot into the tide-water?

In a review of A Lume Spento, the London Evening Standard called it "wild and haunting stuff, absolutely poetic, original, imaginative, passionate, and spiritual".

Moody writes that there is evidence of "some real mastery of rhythm and rhyme" in the work,[9] but the quality of the poems drops dramatically as the collection continues.