[1] Written as a contradiction to the nationalistic and normative literary studies of the time, in The Spirit of Romance Pound advocates a synchronous scholarship of literature in which one can weigh "Theocritus and Yeats with one balance".

[2] In his discussion, Pound provides partial translations of works from a variety of European authors, including Guido Cavalcanti and François Villon, many of whom had been forced outside the canon by earlier critics.

Intending to write about jesters in the works of Lope de Vega, the outspoken Pound – who often challenged his professors' assertions, insisting that George Bernard Shaw was a better writer than Shakespeare – was eventually told that he was wasting his own time and that of the institution and left the university, his doctorate incomplete.

[6] Philological studies at the University of Pennsylvania were focused mainly on 19th-century theories and methods, through which Pound "floundered somewhat ineffectually" as a graduate student.

[7] This trend, against which Pound eventually rebelled, focused on the study of works from a single background to construct national identities and literary canons, "cultural legacies".

[13] This addition, according to Richard Sieburth, means that the work reaches further back, to the "Eleusinian sexual rites of Ancient Greece".

The essays provide an outline of what philology should be,[12] a form of comparative literature which Anne Birien defines as "the studies of forces traceable across texts",[16] works without which are but artifacts.

[2] Menocal writes that, through The Spirit of Romance, Pound attempted to continue the work of Dante Alighieri in De vulgari eloquentia, "saving" poets from the exile of normative literary canon.

[23] In his foreword to the 2005 edition of The Spirit of Romance, Sieburth writes that the book can be read as "a preparation of the palette" for Pound's later (unfinished) epic poem, The Cantos.

[1] Both The Spirit of Romance and The Cantos depend heavily on quotation and references to other works, a technique Pound later named excernment.

[26] The full title was The Spirit of Romance: An Attempt to Define Somewhat the Charm of the Pre-Renaissance Literature of Latin Europe, credited to Ezra Pound, M.A.

The prose, however, remained similar to the original edition, which Hugh Kenner in Poetry attributes to Pound understanding that significant changes to the content "would require a wholly new book".

In a 1911 letter to Yone Noguchi, Pound wrote that he was considering sending the Japanese poet a copy of his book, but "it has many flaws of workmanship".

[31][a] In the foreword to the 1929 republishing of The Spirit of Romance, Pound wrote that the work could "be greatly improved", though "the mode or statement ... will have to stand as a partial confession of where I was in the year 1910".

[32] According to Pound, The Spirit of Romance received little attention when first published, as sending such works to literary critics was then uncommon, and that he "could not conveniently have afforded the stamps".

Ker wrote that, though the "book ought to be an encouragement to many young people to undertake some explorations, and make discoveries for themselves", it was extremely difficult for readers without the necessary background knowledge to understand, even if they wanted to learn of the poetry.

He also found that Pound erred in abandoning philology, for "the study of poetry, if it is to be anything but monotonous praise, is bound to be technical and analytic".