The Cantos

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This article is about the series of cantos written by Ezra Pound. For other uses, see Canto.
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1913 photograph of Ezra Pound by Alvin Langdon Coburn

The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 116 sections, each of which is a canto.
Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned
and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work,
widely considered to present formidable difficulties to the reader. The Cantos is generally
considered one of the most significant works of modernist poetry in the 20th century. As in
Pound's prose writing, the themes of economics, governance and culture are integral to the
work's content.
The most striking feature of the text, to a casual browser, is the inclusion of Chinese characters
as well as quotations in European languages other than English. Recourse to scholarly
commentaries is almost inevitable for a close reader. The range of allusion to historical events is
very broad, and abrupt changes occur with little transition. There is also wide geographical
reference; Pound added to his earlier interests in the classical Mediterranean culture and East
Asia selective topics from medieval and early modern Italy and Provence, the beginnings of the
United States, England of the 17th century, and details from Africa he had obtained from Leo
Frobenius. References without explanation abound. Pound initially believed that he possessed
poetic and rhetorical techniques which would themselves generate significance, but as time
passed he became more concerned with the messages he wished to convey.

The section he wrote at the end of World War II, begun while he was interned in Americanoccupied Italy, has become known as The Pisan Cantos. It was awarded the first Bollingen Prize
in 1948. There were many repercussions, since this in effect honoured a poet who was under
indictment for treason.

Contents

1 Background
o 1.1 Publication history
o 1.2 Controversy
2 Structure
3 IXVI
4 XVIIXXX
5 XXXIXLI (XI New Cantos)
6 XLIILI (Fifth Decad, called also Leopoldine Cantos)
7 LIILXI (The China Cantos)
8 LXIILXXI (The Adams Cantos)
9 LXXIILXXIII (The Italian Cantos)
10 LXXIVLXXXIV (The Pisan Cantos)
11 LXXXVXCV (Section: Rock-Drill)
12 XCVICIX (Thrones)
13 Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CXCXVII
14 Legacy
15 Notes
16 Sources
17 External links

Background
Publication history
The earliest part of The Cantos to be published in book form was released by Three Mountains
Press in 1925 under the title A Draft of XVI Cantos. The first nearly complete edition was New
Directions' The Cantos (1-120) (1970). This was reissued in paperback in 1986 with the addition
of the Italian Cantos 72-73. In 2015 Carcanet Press published a volume of Posthumous Cantos, a
selection of discarded and uncollected drafts, ca. 1915-1970.[1]

Controversy
The Cantos has always been a controversial work, initially so because of the experimental nature
of the writing. The controversy has intensified since 1940 when Pound's very public stance on
the war in Europe and his support for Benito Mussolini's fascism became widely known. Much
critical discussion of the poem has focused on the relationship between, on the one hand, the
economic thesis on usura, Pound's antisemitism, his adulation of Confucian ideals of
government and his attitude towards fascism, and, on the other, passages of lyrical poetry and the

historical scene-setting that he performed with his 'ideographic' technique. At one end of the
spectrum George P. Elliot has drawn a parallel between Pound and Adolf Eichmann based on
their antisemitism,[2] while at the other Marjorie Perloff places Pound's antisemitism in a wider
context by examining the political views of many of his contemporaries, arguing that "We have
to try to understand why" antisemitism was widespread in the early twentieth century, "and not
say let's get rid of Ezra Pound, who also happens to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th C." [3]
However, all of this is complicated by the fact that The Cantos themselves contain very little
evidence of Pound's otherwise blatant antisemitism: in fact, in a close study of the poem, Wendy
Stallard Flory concluded that it contained only seven passages of antisemitic sentiment in the 803
pages she read.[4] Further, when Allen Ginsberg visited him in Rapallo in October 1967, Pound
described his previous work to Ginsberg as: "A mess ... stupidity and ignorance all the way
through." And later (as they dined in the Pensione Alle Salute da Cici restaurant in Venice) he
even admitted to Ginsberg, Peter Russell, and Michael Reck that: "... my worst mistake was the
stupid suburban anti-Semitic prejudice, all along that spoiled everything ... I found after seventy
years that I was not a lunatic but a moron ... I should have been able to do better ..."[5] Even his
views on usury shifted in his later years: two weeks before his 87th birthday he read for a
gathering of friends at a caf: "re USURY / I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. /
The cause is AVARICE."[6] However, even despite his earlier views, Pound still had defenders:
Louis Zukofsky (who was Jewish) defended Pound on the basis of his personal knowledge of
antisemitism on the level of human exchange even though (according to William Cookson[7])
their correspondence contained some of Pound's offensive views. Thus, although Pound indeed
distrusted the masses, "foreigners," and so forth, The Cantos themselves (with their references to
Confucius, the agrarian populism of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democracy, and even the
"enlightened despotism" of Leopold II) reflect the underlying conservative sentiment behind his
more well-known social and economic views (including his antisemitism.)[citation needed]

Structure
The Cantos can appear on first reading to be chaotic or structureless because it lacks plot or a
definite ending. R.P. Blackmur, an early critic, wrote,
The Cantos are not complex, they are complicated; they are not arrayed by logic or driven by
pursuing emotion, they are connected because they follow one another, are set side by side, and
because an anecdote, an allusion or a sentence begun in one Canto may be continued in another
and may never be completed at all; and as for a theme to be realized, they seem to have only, like
Mauberley, the general sense of continuity not unity which may arise in the mind when
read seriatim. The Cantos are what Mr Pound himself called them in a passage now excised from
the canon, a rag-bag.[8]
The issue of incoherence of the work is reflected by the equivocal note sounded in the final two
more-or-less completed cantos; according to William Cookson, the final two cantos show that
Pound has been unable to make his materials cohere, while they insist that the world itself still
does cohere.[9] Pound and T. S. Eliot had previously approached the subject of fragmentation of
human experience: while Eliot was writing, and Pound editing, The Waste Land, Pound had said
that he looked upon experience as similar to a series of iron filings on a mirror.[10] Each filing is

disconnected, but they are drawn into the shape of a rose by the presence of a magnet. The
Cantos takes a position between the mythic unity of Eliot's poem and Joyce's flow of
consciousness and attempting to work out how history (as fragment) and personality (as
shattered by modern existence) can cohere in the "field" of poetry.[citation needed]
Nevertheless, there are indications in Pound's other writings that there may have been some
formal plan underlying the work. In his 1918 essay A Retrospect, Pound wrote "I think there is a
'fluid' as well as a 'solid' content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as
water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical forms have certain uses. That a vast number of
subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms". Critics
like Hugh Kenner who take a more positive view of The Cantos have tended to follow this hint,
seeing the poem as a poetic record of Pound's life and reading that sends out new branches as
new needs arise with the final poem, like a tree, displaying a kind of unpredictable
inevitability.[citation needed]
Another approach to the structure of the work is based on a letter Pound wrote to his father in the
1920s, in which he stated that his plan was:
A. A. Live man goes down into world of dead.
C. B. 'The repeat in history.'
B. C. The 'magic moment' or moment of metamorphosis, bust through from quotidian
into 'divine or permanent world.' Gods, etc.
[The letter columns ACB/ABC may indicate the sequences in which the concepts could be
presented.] In the light of cantos written later than this letter, it would be possible to add other
recurring motifs to this list, such as: periploi ('voyages around'); vegetation rituals such as the
Eleusinian Mysteries; usura, banking and credit; and the drive towards clarity in art, such as the
'clear line' of Renaissance painting and the 'clear song' of the troubadours.[citation needed]
The poem's symbolic structure also makes use of an opposition between darkness and light.
Images of light are used variously, and may represent Neoplatonic ideas of divinity, the artistic
impulse, love (both sacred and physical) and good governance, amongst other things. The moon
is frequently associated in the poem with creativity, while the sun is more often found in relation
to the sphere of political and social activity, although there is frequent overlap between the two.
From the Rock Drill sequence on, the poem's effort is to merge these two aspects of light into a
unified whole.[citation needed]
The Cantos was initially published in the form of separate sections, each containing several
cantos that were numbered sequentially using Roman numerals (except cantos 85109, first
published with Arabic numerals). The original publication dates for the groups of cantos are as
given below.[citation needed]

IXVI
Published in 1924/5 as A Draft of XVI Cantos by the Three Mountains Press in Paris.

Pound had been considering writing a long poem since around 1905, but work did not begin until
May 1915 when Pound wrote to his mother that he was working on a long poem. He published
the first three cantos in June, July and August 1917, in the journal Poetry. In this version, the
poem began as an address by the poet to Robert Browning. Pound came to believe that this
narrative voice compromised the intent of his poetic vision, and these first three ur-cantos were
soon abandoned and a new starting point sought. The answer was a Latin version of Homer's
Odyssey by the Renaissance scholar Andreas Divus that Pound had bought in Paris sometime
between 1906 and 1910.
Using the metre and syntax of his 1911 version of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer, Pound
made an English version of Divus' rendering of the nekuia episode in which Odysseus and his
companions sail to Hades in order to find out what their future holds. In using this passage to
open the poem, Pound introduces a major theme: the excavating of the "dead" past to illuminate
the present and future. He also echoes Dante's opening to The Divine Comedy in which the poet
also descends into hell to interrogate the dead. The canto concludes with some fragments from
the Second Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, in a Latin version by Georgius Dartona which Pound
found in the Divus volume, followed by "So that:"an invitation to read on.
Canto II opens with some lines rescued from the ur-cantos in which Pound reflects on the
indeterminacy of identity by setting side by side four different versions of the troubadour poet
Sordello:[11] Browning's poem of that name, the actual Sordello of flesh and blood, Pound's own
version of the poet, and the Sordello of the brief life appended to manuscripts of his poems.
These lines are followed by a sequence of identity shifts involving a seal, the daughter of Lir,
and other figures associated with the sea: Eleanor of Aquitaine who, through a pair of Homeric
epithets that echo her name, shifts into Helen of Troy, Homer with his ear for the "sea surge", the
old men of Troy who want to send Helen back over the sea, and an extended, Imagistic retelling
of the story of the abduction of Dionysus by sailors and his transformation of his abductors into
dolphins. Although this last story is found in the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, also contained in
the Divus volume, Pound draws on the version in Ovid's poem Metamorphoses, thus introducing
the world of ancient Rome into the poem.

Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta "built a temple so full of pagane works" (Canto XI). Portrait by
Piero della Francesca.
The next five cantos (IIIVII), again drawing heavily on Pound's Imagist past for their technique,
are essentially based in the Mediterranean, drawing on classical mythology, Renaissance history,
the world of the troubadours, Sappho's poetry, a scene from the legend of El Cid that introduces
the theme of banking and credit, and Pound's own visits to Venice to create a textual collage
saturated with Neoplatonic images of clarity and light.
Cantos VIIIXI draw on the story of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, 15th-century poet,
condottiere, lord of Rimini and patron of the arts. Quoting extensively from primary sources,
including Malatesta's letters, Pound especially focuses on the building of the church of San
Francesco, also known as the Tempio Malatestiano. Designed by Leon Battista Alberti and
decorated by artists including Piero della Francesca and Agostino di Duccio, this was a landmark
Renaissance building, being the first church to use the Roman triumphal arch as part of its
structure. For Pound, who spent a good deal of time seeking patrons for himself, Joyce, Eliot and
a string of little magazines and small presses, the role of the patron was a crucial cultural
question, and Malatesta is the first in a line of ruler-patrons to appear in The Cantos.
Canto XII consists of three moral tales on the subject of profit.[12] The first and third of these
treat of the creation of profit ex nihilo by exploiting the money supply, comparing this activity
with "unnatural" fertility. The central parable contrasts this with wealth-creation based on the
creation of useful goods. Canto XIII then introduces Confucius, or Kung, who is presented as the
embodiment of the ideal of social order based on ethics.
This section of The Cantos concludes with a vision of Hell. Cantos XIV and XV use the
convention of the Divine Comedy to present Pound/Dante moving through a hell populated by
bankers, newspaper editors, hack writers and other 'perverters of language' and the social order.
In Canto XV, Plotinus takes the role of guide played by Virgil in Dante's poem. In Canto XVI,
Pound emerges from Hell and into an earthly paradise where he sees some of the personages
encountered in earlier cantos. The poem then moves to recollections of World War I, and of
Pound's writer and artist friends who fought in it. These include Richard Aldington, T. E. Hulme,
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway and Fernand Lger, whose war
memories the poem includes a passage from (in French). Finally, there is a transcript of Lincoln
Steffens' account of the Russian Revolution. These two events, the war and revolution, mark a
decisive break with the historic past, including the early modernist period when these writers and
artists formed a more-or-less coherent movement.

XVIIXXX
XVIIXXVII published in 1928 as A Draft of the Cantos 17-27 by John Rodker in
London. Cantos IXXX published in 1930 in A Draft of XXX Cantos by Nancy Cunard's
Hours Press.
Originally, Pound conceived of Cantos XVIIXXVII as a group that would follow the first
volume by starting with the Renaissance and ending with the Russian Revolution. He then added

a further three cantos and the whole eventually appeared as A Draft of XXX Cantos in an edition
of 200 copies. The major locus of these cantos is the city of Venice.
Canto XVII opens with the words "So that", echoing the end of Canto I, and then moves on to
another Dionysus-related metamorphosis story. The rest of the canto is concerned with Venice,
which is portrayed as a stone forest growing out of the water. Cantos XVIII and XIX return to
the theme of financial exploitation, beginning with the Venetian explorer Marco Polo's account
of Kublai Khan's paper money. Canto XIX deals mainly with those who profit from war,
returning briefly to the Russian Revolution, and ends on the stupidity of wars and those who
promote them.
Canto XX opens with a grouping of phrases, words and images from Mediterranean poetry,
ranging from Homer through Ovid, Propertius and Catullus to the Song of Roland and Arnaut
Daniel. These fragments constellate to form an exemplum of what Pound calls "clear song".
There follows another exemplum, this time of the linguistic scholarship that enables us to read
these old poetries and the specific attention to words this study requires. Finally, this "clear
song" and intellectual activity is implicitly contrasted with the inertia and indolence of the lotus
eaters, whose song completes the canto. There are references to the Malatesta family and to
Borso d'Este, who tried to keep the peace between the warring Italian city states.
Canto XXI deals with the machinations of the Medici bank, especially with the Medicis' effect
on Venice. These are contrasted with the actions of Thomas Jefferson, who is shown as a
cultured leader with an interest in the arts. A phrase from one of Sigismondo Pandolfo's letters
inserted into the Jefferson passage draws an explicit parallel between the two men, a theme that
is to recur later in the poem. The next canto continues the focus on finance by introducing the
Social Credit theories of C.H. Douglas for the first time.
Canto XXIII returns to the world of the troubadours via Homer and Renaissance Neoplatonism.
Pound saw Provenal culture as a nexus of survival of the old pagan beliefs, and the destruction
of the Cathar stronghold at Montsgur at the end of the Albigensian Crusade is held up as an
example of the tendency of authority to crush all such alternative cultures. The destruction of
Montsgur is implicitly compared with the destruction of Troy in the closing lines of the canto.
Canto XXIV then returns to 15th-century Italy and the d'Este family,[13] again focusing on their
Venetian activities and Niccolo d'Este's voyage to the Holy Land.
Cantos XXV and XXVI draw on the Book of the Council Major in Venice and Pound's personal
memories of the city. Anecdotes on Titian and Mozart deal with the relationship between artist
and patron. Canto XXVII returns to the Russian Revolution, which is seen as being destructive,
not constructive, and echoes the ruin of Eblis from Canto VI. XXVIII returns to the
contemporary scene, with a passage on transatlantic flight. The last two cantos in the series
return to the world of "clear song". In Canto XXIX, a story from their visit to the Provenal site
at Excideuil contrasts Pound and Eliot on the subject of Christianity, with Pound implicitly
rejecting that religion. Finally, the series closes with a glimpse of the printer Hieronymus
Soncinus of Fano preparing to print the works of Petrarch.

XXXIXLI (XI New Cantos)

Published as Eleven New Cantos XXXIXLI. New York: Farrar & Rinehart Inc., 1934.
The first four cantos of this volume (Cantos XXXIXXXIV) quote extensively from the letters
and other writings of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson,
Martin Van Buren and others to deal with the emergence of the fledgling United States and,
particularly, the American banking system. Canto XXXI opens with the Malatesta family motto
Tempus loquendi, tempus tacendi ("a time to speak, a time to be silent") to link again Jefferson
and Sigismondo as individuals and the Italian and American "rebirths" as historical movements.
Canto XXXV contrasts the dynamism of Revolutionary America with the "general indefinite
wobble" of the decaying aristocratic society of Mitteleuropa. This canto contains some distinctly
unpleasant expressions of antisemitic opinions. Canto XXXVI opens with a translation of
Cavalcanti's canzone Donna mi pregha ("A lady asks me"). This poem, a lyric meditation of the
nature and philosophy of love, was a touchstone text for Pound. He saw it as an example of the
post-Montsegur survival of the Provenal tradition of "clear song", precision of thought and
language, and nonconformity of belief. The canto then closes with the figure of the 9th-century
Irish philosopher and poet John Scotus Eriugena, who was an influence on the Cathars and
whose writings were condemned as heretical in both the 11th and 13th centuries. Canto XXXVII
then turns to Jackson, Van Buren, Nicholas Biddle, Alexander Hamilton and the Bank War and
also contains a reference to the Peggy Eaton affair.
Canto XXXVIII opens with a quotation from Dante in which he accuses Albert of Germany of
falsifying the coinage. The canto then turns to modern commerce and the arms trade and
introduces Frobenius as "the man who made the tempest". There is also a passage on Douglas'
account of the problem of purchasing power. Canto XXXIX returns to the island of Circe and the
events before the voyage undertaken in the first canto unfolds as a hymn to natural fertility and
ritual sex. Canto XL opens with Adam Smith on trade as a conspiracy against the general public,
followed by another periplus, a condensed version of Hanno the Navigator's account of his
voyage along the west coast of Africa. The book closes with an account of Benito Mussolini as a
man of action and another lament on the waste of war.

XLIILI (Fifth Decad, called also Leopoldine Cantos)

Published as The Fifth Decad of the Cantos XLIILI. London: Faber & Faber, 1937.
Cantos XLII, XLIII and XLIV move to the Sienese bank, the Monte dei Paschi di Siena, and to
the 18th-century reforms of Pietro Leopoldo, Habsburg Arch Duke of Tuscany. Founded in
1624, the Monte dei Paschi was a low-interest, not-for-profit credit institution whose funds were
based on local productivity as represented by the natural increase generated by the grazing of
sheep on community land (the "BANK of the grassland" of Canto XLIII). As such, it represents a
Poundian non-capitalist ideal.

Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo, who sought to end state debt and protected agricultural implements
from sequestration for personal debt. (Portrait by Stefano Gaetano Neri.)
Canto XLV is a litany against Usura or usury, which Pound later defined as a charge on credit
regardless of potential or actual production and the creation of wealth ex nihilo by a bank to the
benefit of its shareholders. The canto declares this practice as both contrary to the laws of nature
and inimical to the production of good art and culture. Pound later came to see this canto as a key
central point in the poem.
Canto XLVI contrasts what has gone before with the practices of institutions such as the Bank of
England that are designed to exploit the issuing of credit to make profits, thereby, in Pound's
view, contributing to poverty, social deprivation, crime and the production of "bad" art as
exemplified by the baroque.
In Canto XLVII, the poem returns to the island of Circe and Odysseus about to "sail after
knowledge". There follows a long lyrical passage in which a ritual of floating votive candles on
the bay at Rapallo near Pound's home every July merges with the cognate myths of Tammuz and
Adonis, agricultural activity set in a calendar based on natural cycles, and fertility rituals.
Canto XLVIII presents more instances of what Pound considers to be usury, some of which
display signs of his antisemitic position. The canto then moves via Montsegur to the village of
St-Bertrand-de-Comminges, which stands on the site of the ancient city of Lugdunum
Convenarum. The destruction of this city represents, for the poet, the treatment of civilisation by
those he considers barbarous.
Canto XLIX is a poem of tranquil nature derived from a Chinese picture book that Pound's
parents brought with them when they retired to Rapallo. Canto L, which again contains
antisemitic statements, moves from John Adams to the failure of the Medici bank and more
general images of European decay since the time of Napoleon I. The final canto in this sequence
returns to the usura litany of Canto XLV, followed by detailed instructions on making flies for
fishing (man in harmony with nature) and ends with a reference to the anti-Venetian League of
Cambrai and the first Chinese written characters to appear in the poem, representing the

Rectification of Names from the Analects of Confucius (the ideogram representing honesty at the
end of Canto XLI was added when The Cantos was published as a single volume).

LIILXI (The China Cantos)

Confucius "cut 3000 odes to 300".

First published in Cantos LIILXXI. Norfolk Conn.: New Directions, 1940.
These eleven cantos are based on the first eleven volumes of the twelve-volume Histoire
generale de la Chine by Joseph-Anna-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla. De Mailla was a French
Jesuit who spent 37 years in Peking and wrote his history there. The work was completed in
1730 but not published until 17771783. De Mailla was very much an Enlightenment figure and
his view of Chinese history reflects this; he found Confucian political philosophy, with its
emphasis on rational order, much to his liking. He also disliked what he saw as the superstitious
pseudo-mysticism promulgated by both Buddhists and Taoists, to the detriment of rational
politics. Pound, in turn, fitted de Mailla's take on China into his own views on Christianity, the
need for strong leadership to address 20th-century fiscal and cultural problems, and his support
of Mussolini. In an introductory note to the section, Pound is at pains to point out that the
ideograms and other fragments of foreign-language text incorporated in The Cantos should not
put the reader off, as they serve to underline things that are in the English text.
Canto LII opens with references to Duke Leopoldo, John Adams and Gertrude Bell, before
sliding into a particularly virulent antisemitic passage, directed mainly at the Rothschild family.
The remainder of the canto is concerned with the classic Chinese text known as the Li Ki or

Classic of Rites, especially those parts that deal with agriculture and natural increase. The diction
is the same as that used in earlier cantos on similar subjects.
Canto LIII covers the period from the founding of the Hai dynasty to the life of Confucius and up
to circa 225 BCE. Special mention is made of emperors that Confucius approved of and the
sage's interest in cultural matters is stressed. For example, we are told that he edited the Book of
Odes, cutting it from 3000 to 300 poems. The canto also ascribes the Poundian motto (and title
of a 1934 collection of essays) Make it New to the emperor Tching Tang. Canto LIV moves the
story on to around 805 CE. The line "Some cook, some do not cook, / some things can not be
changed" refers to Pound's domestic situation and recurs, in part, in Canto LXXXI.
Canto LV is mainly concerned with the rise of the Tatars and the Tartar Wars, ending about
1200. There is a lot on money policy in this canto and Pound quotes approvingly the Tartar ruler
Oulo who noted that the people "cannot eat jewels". This is echoed in Canto LVI when KinKwa
remarks that both gold and jade are inedible. This canto is mainly concerned with Genghis and
Kublai Khan and the rise of their Yuan dynasty. The canto closes with the overthrow of the Yeun
and the establishment of the Ming dynasty, bringing us to around 1400.
Canto LVII opens with the story of the flight of the emperor Kien Ouen Ti in 1402 or 1403 and
continues with the history of the Ming up to the middle of the 16th century. Canto LVIII opens
with a condensed history of Japan from the legendary first emperor, Emperor Jimmu, who
supposedly ruled in the 7th century BCE, to the late-16th-century Toyotomi Hideyoshi
(anglicised by Pound as Messier Undertree), who issued edicts against Christianity and raided
Korea, thus putting pressure on China's eastern borders. The canto then goes on to outline the
concurrent pressure placed on the western borders by activities associated with the great Tartar
horse fairs, leading to the rise of the Manchu dynasty.
The translation of the Confucian classics into Manchu opens the following canto, Canto LIX.
The canto is then concerned with the increasing European interest in China, as evidenced by a
Sino-Russian border treaty and the founding of the Jesuit mission in 1685 under Jean-Franois
Gerbillon. Canto LX deals with the activities of the Jesuits, who, we are told, introduced
astronomy, western music, physics and the use of quinine. The canto ends with limitations being
placed on Christians, who had come to be seen as enemies of the state.
The final canto in the sequence, Canto LXI, covers the reigns of Yong Tching and Kien Long,
bringing the story up to the end of de Mailla's account. Yong Tching is shown banning
Christianity as "immoral" and "seeking to uproot Kung's laws". He also established just prices
for foodstuffs, bringing us back to the ideas of Social Credit. There are also references to the
Italian Risorgimento, John Adams, and Dom Metello de Souza, who gained some measure of
relief for the Jesuit mission.

LXIILXXI (The Adams Cantos)

John Adams: "the man who at certain points /made us / at certain points / saved us" (Canto
LXII).
First published in Cantos LIILXXI. Norfolk Conn.: New Directions, 1940.
This section of the cantos is, for the most part, made up of fragmentary citations from the
writings of John Adams. Pound's intentions appear to be to show Adams as an example of the
rational Enlightenment leader, thereby continuing the primary theme of the preceding China
Cantos sequence, which these cantos also follow from chronologically. Adams is depicted as a
well-rounded figure; he is a strong leader with interests in political, legal and cultural matters in
much the same way that Malatesta and Mussolini are portrayed elsewhere in the poem. The
English jurist Sir Edward Coke, who is an important figure in some later cantos, first appears in
this section of the poem. Given the fragmentary nature of the citations used, these cantos can be
quite difficult to follow for the reader with no knowledge of the history of the United States in
the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Canto LXII opens with a brief history of the Adams family in America from 1628. The rest of
the canto is concerned with events leading up to the revolution, Adams' time in France, and the
formation of Washington's administration. Alexander Hamilton reappears, again cast as the
villain of the piece. The appearance of the single Greek word "THUMON", meaning heart,
returns us to the world of Homer's Odyssey and Pound's use of Odysseus as a model for all his
heroes, including Adams. The word is used of Odysseus in the fourth line of the Odyssey: "he
suffered woes in his heart on the seas".
The next canto, Canto LXIII, is concerned with Adams' career as a lawyer and especially his
reports of the legal arguments presented by James Otis in the Writs of Assistance case and their
importance in the build-up to the revolution. The Latin phrase Eripuit caelo fulmen ("He
snatched the thunderbolt from heaven") is taken from an inscription on a bust of Benjamin
Franklin. Cavalcanti's canzone, Pound's touchstone text of clear intellection and precision of
language, reappears with the insertion of the lines "In quella parte / dove sta memoria" into the
text.

Canto LXIV covers the Stamp Act and other resistance to British taxation of the American
colonies. It also shows Adams defending the accused in the Boston Massacre and engaging in
agricultural experiments to ascertain the suitability of Old-World crops for American conditions.
The phrases Cumis ego oculis meis, tu theleis, respondebat illa and apothanein are from the
passage (taken from Petronius' Satyricon) that T.S. Eliot used as epigraph to The Waste Land at
Pound's suggestion. The passage translates as "For with my own eyes I saw the Sibyl hanging in
a jar at Cumae, and when the boys said to her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'I want to
die.'"
The nomination of Washington as president dominates the opening pages of Canto LXV. The
canto shows Adams concerned with the practicalities of waging war, particularly of establishing
a navy. Following a passage on the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, the canto returns
to Adams' mission to France, focusing on his dealings with the American legation in that
country, consisting of Franklin, Silas Deane and Edward Bancroft and with the French foreign
minister, the Comte de Vergennes. Intertwined with this is the fight to save the rights of
Americans to fish the Atlantic coastline. A passage on Adams' opposition to American
involvement in European wars is highlighted, echoing Pound's position on his own times. In
Canto LXVI, we see Adams in London serving as minister to the Court of St. James's. The body
of the canto consists of quotations from Adams' writings on the legal basis for the Revolution,
including citations from Magna Carta and Coke and on the importance of trial by jury (per pares
et legem terrae).
Canto LXVII opens with a passage on the limits on the powers of the British monarch drawn
from Adams' writings under the pseudonym Novanglus. The rest of the canto is concerned with
the study of government and with the requirements of the franchise. The following canto,
LXVIII, begins with a meditation on the tripartite division of society into the one, the few and
the many. A parallel is drawn between Adams and Lycurgus, the just king of Sparta. Then the
canto returns to Adams' notes on the practicalities of funding the war and the negotiation of a
loan from the Dutch.
Canto LXIX continues the subject of the Dutch loan and then turns to Adams' fear of the
emergence of a native aristocracy in America, as noted in his remark that Jefferson feared rule by
"the one" (monarch or dictator), while he, Adams, feared "the few". The remainder of the canto
is concerned with Hamilton, James Madison and the affair of the assumption of debt certificates
by Congress which resulted in a significant shift of economic power to the federal government
from the individual states.
Canto LXX deals mainly with Adams' time as vice-president and president, focusing on his
statement "I am for balance", highlighted in the text by the addition of the ideogram for balance.
The section ends with Canto LXXI, which summarises many of the themes of the foregoing
cantos and adds material on Adams' relationship with Native Americans and their treatment by
the British during the Indian Wars. The canto closes with the opening lines of Epictetus' Hymn of
Cleanthus, which Pound tells us formed part of Adams' paideuma. These lines invoke Zeus as
one "who rules by law", a clear parallel to the Adams presented by Pound.

LXXIILXXIII (The Italian Cantos)

Written between 1944 and 1945.

These two cantos, written in Italian, were not collected until their posthumous inclusion in the
1987 revision of the complete text of the poem. Pound reverts to the model of Dante's Divine
Comedy and casts himself as conversing with ghosts from Italy's remote and recent past.[14]
In Canto LXXII, imitative of Dante's tercets (terza rima), Pound meets the recently dead Futurist
writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and they discuss the current war and the dangers of excessive
love of the past (Pound's librarian friend, Manlio Torquato Dazzi) or of the future (Marinetti).
Then the violent ghost of Dante's Ezzelino III da Romano, brother of Cunizza of Cantos VI and
XXIX, explains to Pound that he has been misrepresented as an evil tyrant only because he was
against the Pope's party, and goes on to attack the present Pope Pius XII and "traitors" (like King
Victor Emmanuel III) who "betrayed" Mussolini, and to promise that the Italian troops will
eventually "return" to El Alamein.
Canto LXXIII is subtitled "Cavalcanti Republican Correspondence" and is written in the style
of Cavalcanti's "Donna mi prega" of Canto XXXVI. Guido Cavalcanti appears on horseback to
tell Pound about a heroic deed of a girl from Rimini who led a troop of Canadian soldiers to a
mined field and died with the "enemy". (This was a propaganda story featured in Italian
newspapers in October 1944; Pound was interested in it because of the connection with
Sigismondo Malatesta's Rimini.)
Both cantos end on a positive and optimistic note,[15] typical of Pound, and are unusually
straightforward. Except for a scathing reference (by Cavalcanti's ghost) to "Roosevelt, Churchill
and Eden / bastards and small Jews", and for a denial (by Ezzelino) that "the world was created
by a Jew", they are notably free of antisemitic content, although it must be said that there are
several positive references to Italian fascism and some racist expressions (e.g., "pieno di
marocchini ed altra immondizia""full of Moroccans and other crap", Canto LXXII). Italian
scholars have been intrigued by Pound's idiosyncratic recreation of the poetry of Dante and
Cavalcanti. For example, Furio Brugnolo of the University of Padua claims that these cantos are
"the only notable example of epic poetry in 20th-century Italian literature".[16]

LXXIVLXXXIV (The Pisan Cantos)

First published as The Pisan Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1948.
With the outbreak of war in 1939, Pound was in Italy, where he remained, despite a request for
repatriation he made after Pearl Harbor. During this period, his main source of income was a
series of radio broadcasts he made on Rome Radio. He used these broadcasts to express his full
range of opinions on culture, politics and economics, including his opposition to American
involvement in a European war and his antisemitism. In 1943, he was indicted for treason in
absence, and wrote a letter to the indicting judge in which he claimed the right to freedom of
speech in his defence.
Pound was arrested in Rapallo by Italian partisans on May 3, 1945, was detained in Genoa, and
was eventually transferred to the American Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) north of Pisa on

May 22. Here he was held in a specially reinforced cage, initially sleeping on the ground in the
open air. After three weeks, he had a breakdown that resulted in his being given a cot and pup
tent in the medical compound. Here he gained access to a typewriter. For reading matter, he had
a regulation-issue Bible along with three books he was allowed to bring in as his own "religious"
texts: a Chinese text of Confucius, James Legge's translation of the same, and a Chinese
dictionary. He later found a copy of the Pocket Book of Verse, edited by Morris Edmund Speare,
in the latrine. The only other thing he brought with him was a eucalyptus pip. Throughout the
Pisan sequence, Pound repeatedly likens the camp to Francesco del Cossa's March fresco
depicting men working at a grape arbour.

Sheet of toilet paper showing start of Canto LXXXIV, c. May 1945, part of The Pisan Cantos,
suggesting Pound may have begun it while in the steel cage
With his political certainties collapsing around him and his library inaccessible, Pound turned
inward for his materials and much of the Pisan sequence is concerned with memory, especially
of his years in London and Paris and of the writers and artists he knew in those cities. There is
also a deepening of the ecological concerns of the poem. The awarding of the Bollingen Prize to
the book caused considerable controversy, with many people objecting to the honoring of
someone they saw as a madman and/or traitor. However, The Pisan Cantos is generally the most
admired and read section of the work. It is also among the most influential, having affected poets
as different as H.D. and Gary Snyder.
Canto LXXIV immediately introduces the reader to the method used in the Pisan Cantos, which
is one of interweaving themes somewhat in the manner of a fugue. These themes pick up on
many of the concerns of the earlier cantos and frequently run across sections of the Pisan
sequence. This canto begins with Pound looking out of the DTC at peasants working in the fields
nearby and reflecting on the news of the death of Mussolini, "hung by the heels".

In the first thread, the figure of Pound/Odysseus reappears in the guise of "OY TIS", or No Man,
the name the hero uses in the Cyclops episode of the Odyssey. This figure blends into the
Australian rain god Wuluwaid, who had his mouth closed up by his father (was deprived of
freedom of speech) because he "created too many things". He, in turn, becomes the Chinese
Ouan Jin, or "man with an education". This theme recurs in the line "a man on whom the sun has
gone down", a reference to the nekuia from canto I, which is then explicitly referred to. This
recalls The Seafarer, and Pound quotes a line from his translation, "Lordly men are to earth
o'ergiven", lamenting the loss of the exiled poet's companions. This is then applied to a number
of Pound's dead friends from the London/Paris years, including W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Ford
Madox Ford, Victor Plarr and Maurice Hewlett. Finally, Pound/Odysseus is seen "on a raft
blown by the wind".
Another major theme running through this canto is that of the vision of a goddess in the poet's
tent. This starts from the identification of a nearby mountain with the Chinese holy mountain
Taishan and the naming of the moon as sorella la luna (sister moon). This thread then runs
through the appearance of Kuanon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, the moon spirit from
Hagaromo (a Noh play translated by Pound some 40 years earlier), Sigismondo's lover Ixotta
(linked in the text with Aphrodite via a reference to the goddess' birthplace Cythera), a girl
painted by Manet and finally Aphrodite herself, rising from the sea on her shell and rescuing
Pound/Odysseus from his raft. The two threads are further linked by the placement of the Greek
word brododactylos ("rosy-fingered") applied by Homer to the dawn but given here in the dialect
of Sappho and used by her in a poem of unrequited love. These images are often intimately
associated with the poet's close observation of the natural world as it imposes itself on the camp;
birds, a lizard, clouds, the weather and other images of nature run through the canto.
Images of light and brightness associated with these goddesses come to focus in the phrase "all
things that are, are lights" quoted from John Scotus Eriugena. He, in turn, brings us back to the
Albigensian Crusade and the troubadour world of Bernard de Ventadorn. Another theme sees
Ecbatana, the seven-walled "city of Dioce", blend with the city of Wagadu, from the African tale
of Gassire's Lute that Pound derived from Frobenius. This city, four times rebuilt, with its four
walls, four gates and four towers at the corners is a symbol for spiritual endurance. It, in turn,
blends with the DTC in which the poet is imprisoned.
The question of banking and money also recurs, with an antisemitic passage aimed at the banker
Mayer Amschel Rothschild. Pound brings in biblical injunctions on usury and a reference to the
issuing of a stamp scrip currency in the Austrian town of Wrgl. The canto then moves on to a
longish passage of memories of the moribund literary scene Pound encountered in London when
he first arrived, with the phrase "beauty is difficult", quoted from Aubrey Beardsley, acting as a
refrain. After more memories of America and Venice, the canto ends in a passage that brings
together Dante's celestial rose, the rose formed by the effect of a magnet on iron filings, an image
from Paul Verlaine of a fountain playing in the moonlight, and a reference to a poem by Ben
Jonson in a composite image of hope for "those who have passed over Lethe".
Canto LXXV is mainly a facsimile of the German pianist Gerhart Mnch's violin setting of the
16th-century Italian Francesco Da Milano's transcription for lute of French composer Clment
Janequin's choral work Le Chant des oiseaux, an ancient song recalled to Pound's mind by the

singing of birds on the fence of the DTC, and a symbol for him of an indestructible form
preserved and transmitted through many versions, times, nations and artists. (Compare the
nekuia of canto I.) Mnch was a friend and collaborator of Pound in Rapallo, and the short prose
section at the beginning of the canto celebrates his work on other early music figures.
Canto LXXVI opens with a vision of a group of goddesses in Pound's room on the Rapallo
hillside and then moves, via Mont Segur, to memories of Paris and Jean Cocteau. There follows
a passage in which the poet recognises the Jewish authorship of the prohibition on usury found in
Leviticus. Conversations in the camp are then cross-cut into memories of Provence and Venice,
details of the American Revolution and further visions. These memories lead to a consideration
of what has or may have been destroyed in the war. Pound remembers the moment in Venice
when he decided not to destroy his first book of verse, A Lume Spento, an affirmation of his
decision to become a poet and a decision that ultimately led to his incarceration in the DTC. The
canto ends with the goddess, in the form of a butterfly, leaving the poet's tent amid further
references to Sappho and Homer.
The main focus of Canto LXXVII is accurate use of language, and at its centre is the moment
when Pound hears that the war is over. Pound draws on examples of language use from
Confucius, the Japanese dancer Michio It, who worked with Pound and Yeats in London, a
Dublin cab driver, Aristotle, Basil Bunting, Yeats, Joyce and the vocabulary of the U.S. Army.
The goddess in her various guises appears again, as does Awoi's hennia, the spirit of jealousy
from Aoi No Ue, a Noh play translated by Pound. The canto closes with an invocation of
Dionysus (Zagreus).
After opening with a glimpse of Mount Ida, an important locus for the history of the Trojan War,
Canto LXXVIII moves through much that is familiar from the earlier cantos in the sequence: del
Cossa, the economic basis of war, Pound's writer and artist friends in London, "virtuous" rulers
(Lorenzo de Medici, the emperors Justinian, Titus and Antoninus, Mussolini), usury and stamp
scripts culminating in the Nausicaa episode from the Odyssey and a reference to the Confucian
classic Annals of Spring and Autumn in which "there are no righteous wars".
The moon and clouds appear at the opening of Canto LXXIX, which then moves on through a
passage in which birds on the wire fence recall musical notation and the sounds of the camp and
thoughts of Wolfgang Mozart, del Cossa and Marshal Philippe Ptain meld to form musical
counterpoint. After references to politics, economics, and the nobility of the world of the Noh
and the ritual dance of the moon-nymph in Hagaromo that dispels mortal doubt, the canto closes
with an extended fertility hymn to Dionysus in the guise of his sacred lynx.
Canto LXXX opens in the camp in the shadow of death and soon turns to memories of London,
Paris and Spain, including a recollection of Walter Rummel, who worked with Pound on
troubadour music before World War I and of Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Laurence Binyon and
others. The canto is concerned with the aftermath of war, drawing on Yeats' experiences after the
Irish Civil War as well as the contemporary situation. Hagoromo appears again before the poem
returns to Beardsley, also in the shadow of death, declaring the difficulty of beauty with a phrase
from Symons and Sappho/Homer's rosy-fingered dawn woven through the passage.

Pound writes of the decline of the sense of the spirit in painting from a high-point in Sandro
Botticelli to the fleshiness of Rubens and its recovery in the 20th century as evidenced in the
works of Marie Laurencin and others. This is set between two further references to Mont Segur.
Pound/Odysseus is then saved from his sinking raft by Walt Whitman and Richard Lovelace as
discovered in the anthology of poetry found in the camp toilet and the other prisoners are
compared with Odysseus' crew, "men of no fortune". The canto then closes with two passages,
one a pastiche of Browning, the other of Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,
lamenting the lost London of Pound's youth and an image of nature as designer.
Canto LXXXI opens with a complex image that illustrates well Pound's technical approach. The
opening line, "Zeus lies in Ceres' bosom", merges the conception of Demeter, passages in
previous cantos on ritual copulation as a means of ensuring fertility, and the direct experience of
the sun (Zeus) still hidden at dawn by two hills resembling breasts in the Pisan landscape. This is
followed by an image of the other mountain that reminded the poet of Taishan surrounded by
vapors and surmounted by the planet Venus ("Taishan is attended of loves / under Cythera,
before sunrise").
The canto then moves through memories of Spain, a story told by Basil Bunting, and anecdotes
of a number of familiar personages and of George Santayana. At the core of this passage is the
line "(to break the pentameter, that was the first heave)", Pound's comment on the "revolution of
the word" that led to the emergence of Modernist poetry in the early years of the century.
The goddess of love then returns after a lyric passage situating Pound's work in the great
tradition of English lyric, in the sense of words intended to be sung. This heralds perhaps the
most widely quoted passages in The Cantos, in which Pound expresses his realisation that "What
thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross" and an acceptance of the need for human humility in
the face of the natural world that prefigures some of the ideas associated with the deep ecology
movement.
The opening of Canto LXXXII marks a return to the camp and its inmates. This is followed by a
passage that draws on Pound's London memories and his reading of the Pocket Book of Verse.
Pound laments his failure to recognise the Greek qualities of Swinburne's work and celebrates
Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Rudyard Kipling, Ford Madox Ford, Walt Whitman, Yeats and others.
After an expanded clarification of the Annals of Spring and Autumn / "there are no righteous
wars" passage from Canto LXXVIII, this canto culminates in images of the poet drowning in
earth (in a quasi-sexual embrace) and a recurrence of the Greek word for weeping, ending with
more bird-notes seen as a periplum.
After a number of cantos in which the elements of earth and air feature so strongly, Canto
LXXXIII opens with images of water and light, drawn from Pindar, George Gemistos Plethon,
John Scotus Eriugena, the mermaid carvings of Pietro Lombardo and Heraclitus' phrase panta rei
("everything flows"). A passage addressed to a Dryad speaks out against the death sentence and
cages for wild animals and is followed by lines on equity in government and natural processes
based on the writings of Mencius. The tone of placid acceptance is underscored by three Chinese
characters that translate as "don't help to grow that which will grow of itself" followed by
another appearance of the Greek word for weeping in the context of remembered places.

Close observation of a wasp building a mud nest returns the canto to earth and to the figure of
Tiresias, last encountered in Cantos I and XLVII. The canto moves on through a long passage
remembering Pound's time as Yeats' secretary in 1914 and a shorter meditation on the decline in
standards in public life deriving from a remembered visit to the senate in the company of Pound's
mother while that house was in session. The closing lines, "Down derry-down / Oh let an old
man rest", return the poem from the world of memory to the poet's present plight.
Canto LXXXIV opens with the delivery of Dorothy Pound's first letter to the DTC on October 8.
This letter contained news of the death in the war of J.P. Angold, a young English poet whom
Pound admired. This news is woven through phrases from a lament by the troubadour Bertran de
Born (which Pound had once translated as "Planh for the Young English King") and a double
occurrence of the Greek word tethneke ("died") remembered from the story of the death of Pan in
Canto XXIII.
This death, reviving memories of the poet's dead friends from World War I, is followed by a
passage on Pound's 1939 visit to Washington, D.C. to try to avert American involvement in the
forthcoming European war. Much of the rest of the canto is concerned with the economic basis
of war and the general lack of interest in this subject on the part of historians and politicians;
John Adams is again held up as an ideal. The canto also contains a reproduction, in Italian, of a
conversation between the poet and a "swineherd's sister" through the DTC fence. He asks her if
the American troops behave well and she replies OK. He then asks how they compare to the
Germans and she replies that they are the same.
The moon/goddess reappears at the core of the canto as "pin-up" and "chronometer" close to the
line "out of all this beauty something must come". The closing lines of the canto, and of the
sequence, "If the hoar frost grip thy tent / Thou wilt give thanks when night is spent", sound a
final note of acceptance and resignation, despite the return to the sphere of action, prompted by
the death of Angold, that marks most of the canto.

LXXXVXCV (Section: Rock-Drill)

Published in 1956 as Section: Rock-Drill, 8595 de los cantares by New Directions, New
York.
Pound was flown from Pisa to Washington to face trial on a charge of treason on the 16th of
November 1945. Found unfit to stand trial because of the state of his mental health, he was
incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital, where he was to remain until 1958. Here he began to
entertain writers and academics with an interest in his work and to write, working on translations
of the Confucian Book of Odes and of Sophocles' play Women of Trachis as well as two new
sections of the cantos; the first of these was Rock Drill.

Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who opposed the establishment of the Bank of the United States.
His Thirty Years View is a key source for this section of The Cantos.
The two main written sources for the Rock Drill cantos are the Confucian Classic of History, in
an edition by the French Jesuit Sraphin Couvreur, which contained the Chinese text and
translations into Latin and French under the title Chou King (which Pound uses in the poem), and
Senator Thomas Hart Benton's Thirty Years View: Or A History of the American Government for
Thirty Years From 18201850, which covers the period of the bank wars. In an interview given
in 1962, and reprinted by J. P. Sullivan (see References), Pound said that the title Rock Drill
"was intended to imply the necessary resistance in getting a main thesis across hammering." It
was suggested by the heading ("The Rock Drill") of Wyndham Lewis's 1951 review of The
Letters of Ezra Pound.[17]
The first canto in the sequence, Canto LXXXV, contains 104 Chinese characters from the Chou
King, in addition to a number of Latin phrases, mostly taken from Couvreur's translation. There
are also a small number of Greek words. The overall effect for the English-speaking reader is
one of unreadability, and the canto is hard to elucidate unless read alongside a copy of
Couvreur's text.
The core meaning is summed up in Pound's footnote to the effect that the History Classic
contains the essentials of the Confucian view of good government. In the canto, these are
summed up in the line "Our dynasty came in because of a great sensibility", where sensibility
translates the key character Ling, and in the reference to the four Tuan, or foundations,
benevolence, rectitude, manners and knowledge. Rulers who Pound viewed as embodying some
or all of these characteristics are adduced: Queen Elizabeth I, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, as
are Napoleon III, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Dexter White, who stand for everything
Pound opposes in government and finance.
The world of nature, Pound's source of wealth and spiritual nourishment, also features strongly;
images of roots, grass and surviving traces of fertility rites in Catholic Italy cluster around the
sacred tree Yggdrasil. The natural world and the world of government are related to tekhne or art.

Richard of St. Victor, with his emphasis on modes of thinking, makes an appearance, in close
company with Eriugena, the philosopher of light.
Canto LXXXVI opens with a passage on the Congress of Vienna and continues to hold up
examples of good and bad rulers as defined by the poet with Latin and Chinese phrases from
Couvreur woven through them. The word Sagetrieb, meaning something like the transmission of
tradition, apparently coined by Pound, is repeated after its first use in the previous canto,
underlining Pound's belief that he is transmitting a tradition of political ethics that unites China,
Revolutionary America and his own beliefs.
Canto XCVIII reintroduces Ocellus, a fictional character whose name derives from the Latin
word for "eye." Ocellus is first introduced in Canto LXXXVII, "Y Yin, Ocellus, Erigena." This
tripling is crucial to an understanding of Pound's motivations. Here, he combines Confucianism
with Neo-PlatonismY Yin was a Chinese minister famous for his justice, while Erigena refers
to the Irish Neo-Platonist who emphasized regeneration and polytheism. Ocellus is hence the
imagined amalgamation of Eastern Confucianism and Western Neo-Platonism.[18]
Canto LXXXVII opens on usury and moves through a number of references to "good" and "bad"
leaders and lawgivers interwoven with Neoplatonic philosophers and images of the power of
natural process. This culminates in a passage bringing together Laurence Binyon's dictum
slowness is beauty, the San Ku, or three sages, figures from the Chou King who are responsible
for the balance between heaven and earth, Jacques de Molay, the golden section, a room in the
church of St. Hilaire, Poitiers built to that rule where one can stand without throwing a shadow,
Mencius on natural phenomena, the 17th-century English mystic John Heydon (who Pound
remembered from his days working with Yeats) and other images relating to the worship of light
including "'MontSegur, sacred to Helios". The canto then closes with more on economics.
The following canto, Canto LXXXVIII, is almost entirely derived from Benton's book and
focuses mainly on John Randolph of Roanoke and the campaign against the establishment of the
Bank of the United States. Pound viewed the setting up of this bank as a selling out of the
principles of economic equity on which the U.S. Constitution was based. At the centre of the
canto there is a passage on monopolies that draws on the lives and writings of Thales of Miletus,
the emperor Antoninus Pius and St. Ambrose, amongst others.
Canto LXXXIX continues with Benton and also draws on Alexander del Mar's A History of
Money Systems. The same examples of good rule are drawn on, with the addition of the Emperor
Aurelian. Possibly in defence of his focus on so much "unpoetical" material, Pound quotes
Rodolphus Agricola to the effect that one writes "to move, to teach or to delight" (ut moveat, ut
doceat, ut delectet), with the implication that the present cantos are designed to teach. The
naturalists Alexander von Humboldt and Louis Agassiz are mentioned in passing.
Apart from a passing reference to Randolph of Roanoke, Canto XC moves to the world of myth
and love, both divine and sexual. The canto opens with an epigraph in Latin to the effect that
while the human spirit is not love, it delights in the love that proceeds from it. The Latin is
paraphrased in English as the final lines of the canto. Following a reference to signatures in
nature and Yggdrasil, the poet introduces Baucis and Philemon, an aged couple who, in a story

from Ovid's Metamorphoses, offer hospitality to the gods in their humble house and are
rewarded. In this context, they may be intended to represent the poet and his wife.
This canto then moves to the fountain of Castalia on Parnassus. This fountain was sacred to the
Muses and its water was said to inspire poetry in those who drank it. The next line, "Templum
aedificans not yet marble", refers to a period when the gods were worshiped in natural settings
prior to the rigid codification of religion as represented by the erection of marble temples. The
"fount in the hills fold" and the erect temple (Templum aedificans) also serve as images of sexual
love.
Pound then invokes Amphion, the mythical founder of music, before recalling the San Ku/St
Hilaire/Jacques de Molay/Eriugena/Sagetrieb cluster from Canto LXXXVII. Then the goddess
appears in a number of guises: the moon, Mother Earth (in the Randolph reference), the Sibyl
(last encountered in the context of the American Revolution in Canto LXIV), Isis and Kuanon. In
a litany, she is thanked for raising Pound up (m'elevasti, a reference to Dante's praise of his
beloved Beatrice in the Paradiso) out of hell (Erebus).
The canto closes with a number of instances of sexual love between gods and humans set in a
paradisiacal vision of the natural world. The invocation of the goddess and the vision of paradise
are sandwiched between two citations of Richard of St. Victor's statement ubi amor, ibi oculuc
est ("where love is, there the eye is"), binding together the concepts of love, light and vision in a
single image.
Canto XCI continues the paradisiacal theme, opening with a snatch of the "clear song" of
Provene. The central images are the invented figure Ra-Set, a composite sun/moon deity whose
boat floats on a river of crystal. The crystal image, which is to remain important until the end of
The Cantos, is a composite of frozen light, the emphasis on inorganic form found in the writings
of the mystic Heydon, the air in Dante's Paradiso, and the mirror of crystal in the Chou King
amongst other sources. Apollonius of Tyana appears, as do Helen of Tyre, partner of Simon
Magus and the emperor Justinian and his consort Theodora. These couples can be seen as
variants on Ra-Set.
Much of the rest of the canto consists of references to mystic doctrines of light, vision and
intellection. There is an extract from a hymn to Diana from Layamon's 12th-century poem Brut.
An italicised section, claiming that the 1913 foundation of the Federal Reserve Bank, which took
power over interest rates away from Congress, and the teaching of Karl Marx and Sigmund
Freud in American universities ("beaneries") are examples of what Julien Benda termed La
trahison des clercs, contains antisemitic language. Towards the close of the canto, the reader is
returned to the world of Odysseus; a line from Book Five of the Odyssey tells of the winds
breaking up the hero's boat and is followed shortly by Leucothea, "Kadamon thugater" or
Cadmon's daughter) offering him her veil to carry him to shore ("my bikini is worth yr raft").
An image of the distribution of seeds from the sacred mountain opens Canto XCII, continuing
the concern with the relationship between natural process and the divine. The kernel of this canto
is the idea that the Roman Empire's preference for Christianity over Apollonius and its lack
respect for its currency resulted in the almost total loss of the "true" religious tradition for a

thousand years. A number of Neoplatonic philosophers, familiar from earlier cantos but with the
addition of Avicenna, are listed as representing a fine thread of light in these Dark Ages.
Canto XCIII opens with a quote, "A man's paradise is his good nature", taken from The Maxims
of King Kati to His Son Merikara.[19] The canto then proceeds to look at examples of benevolent
action by public figures that, for Pound, illustrate this maxim. These include Apollonius making
his peace with animals, Saint Augustine on the need to feed people before attempting to convert
them, and Dante and William Shakespeare writing on distributive justice, an aspect of their work
that the poet points out is generally overlooked. Central to this aspect is a fragment from Dante,
non fosse cive, taken from a passage in Paradiso, Canto VIII, in which Dante is asked "would it
be worse for man on earth if he were not a citizen?" and unhesitatingly answers in the
affirmative.
Towards the end of the canto, the Make it new ideograms from Canto LIII reappear as the poem
moves back towards the world of myth, closing with another phrase from the Divine Comedy,
this time from Purgatorio, Canto XXVIII. The phrase tu mi fai rimembrar translates as "you
remind me" and comes from a passage in which Dante addresses Matilda, the presiding spirit of
the Garden of Eden. What she reminds him of is Persephone at the moment that she is abducted
by Hades and the spring flowers fell from her lap. This blending of a pagan sense of the divine
into a Christian context stands for much of what appealed to Pound in medieval mysticism.
We return to the world of books in Canto XCIV. The canto opens with the name of Hendrik van
Brederode, a lost leader of the Dutch Revolution, forgotten while William I, Prince of Orange is
remembered. This name is lifted from correspondence between John Adams and Benjamin Rush
which was finally published in 1898 by Alexander Biddle, a descendant of Pound's "villain"
Nicholas. The rest of the canto consists mainly of paraphrases and quotations from Philostratus'
Life of Apollonius. At its conclusion, the poem returns to the world of light via Ra-Set and
Ocellus.
Canto XCV opens with the word "LOVE" in block capitals and recaps many of the Rock Drill
examples of the relationship between love, light and politics. A passage deriving polis from a
Greek root word for ploughing also returns us to Pound's belief that society and economic
activity are based on natural productivity. The canto, and sequence, then closes with an extended
treatment of the passage from the fifth book of the Odyssey in which a drowning
Odysseus/Pound is rescued by Leucothea.

XCVICIX (Thrones)
First published as Thrones: 96109 de los cantares. New York: New Directions, 1959.
Thrones was the second volume of cantos written while Pound was incarcerated in St.
Elizabeths. In the same 1962 interview, Pound said of this section of the poem: "The thrones in
Dante's Paradiso are for the spirits of the people who have been responsible for good
government. The thrones in The Cantos are an attempt to move out from egoism and to establish
some definition of an order possible or at any rate conceivable on earth Thrones concerns the
states of mind of people responsible for something more than their personal conduct."

The opening canto of the sequence, Canto XCVI, begins with a fragmentary synopsis of the
decline of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Byzantine Empire in the east and of the
Carolingian Empire, Germanic kingdoms and the Lombards in Western Europe. This culminates
in a detailed passage on the Book of the Prefect (or Eparch; in Greek the Eparchikon Biblion), a
9th-century edict of the Emperor Leo VI the Wise. This document, which was based on Roman
law, lays out the rules that governed the Byzantine Guild system, including the setting of just
prices and so on. The original Greek is quoted extensively and an aside claiming the right to
write for a specialist audience is included. The close attention paid to the actual words prefigures
the closer focus on philology in this section of the poem. This focus on words ties in closely with
what Pound referred to as the method of "luminous detail", in which fragments of language
intended to form the most compressed expression of an image or idea act as tesserae in the
making of these late cantos.
Canto XCVII draws heavily on Alexander del Mar's History of Monetary Systems in a survey
ranging from Abd al Melik, the first Caliph to strike distinctly Islamic coinage, through
Athelstan, who helped introduce the guild system into England, to the American Revolution. The
canto closes with a passage that sees the return of the goddess as moon and Fortuna together with
Greek forms of solar worship and the Flamen Dialis that is intended to integrate gold and silver
as attributes of coin and the divine.
After an opening passage that draws together many of the main themes of the poem through
images of Ra-Set, Ocellus on light (echoing Eriugena), the tale of Gassire's Lute, Leucothoe's
rescue of Odysseus, Helen of Troy, Gemisto, Demeter, and Plotinus, Canto XCVIII turns to the
Sacred Edict of the emperor K'ang Hsi. This is a 17th-century set of maxims on good
government written in a high literary style, but later simplified for a broader audience. Pound
draws on one such popular version, by Wang the Commissioner of the Imperial Salt Works in a
translation by F.W. Baller. Comparison is drawn between this Chinese text and the Book of the
Prefect, and the canto closes with images of light as divine creation drawn from Dante's
Paradiso.
K'ang Hsi's son, Iong Cheng, published commentaries on his father's maxims and these form the
basis for Canto XCIX. The main theme of this canto is one of harmony between human society
and the natural order, and a number of passing references are made to related items from earlier
cantos: Confucius, Kati, Dante on citizenship, the Book of the Prefect and Plotinus amongst
them. Canto C covers a range of examples of European and American statesman who Pound sees
as exemplifying the maxims of the Sacred Edict to a greater or lesser extent. At the core of this
canto, the motif of Luecothoe's veil (kredemnon) resurfaces; this time, the hero has reached the
safety of the shore and returns the magic garment to the goddess.
The focus of Canto CI is around the Greek phrase kalon kagathon ("the beautiful and good"),
which calls to mind Plotinus' attitude to the world of things and the more general Greek belief in
the moral aspect of beauty. This canto introduces the figure of St. Anselm of Canterbury, who is
to feature over the rest of this section of the long poem. Canto CII returns to the island of
Calypso and Odysseus' voyage to Hades from Book Ten of the Odyssey. There are a number of
references to vegetation cults and sacrifices, and the canto closes by returning to the world of
Byzantium and the decline of the Western Empire.

Cantos CIII and CIV range over a number of examples of the relationships between war, money
and government drawn from American and European history, mostly familiar from earlier
sections of the work. The latter canto is notable for Pound's suggestion that both Honor
Mirabeau in his imprisonment and Ovid in his exile "had it worse" than Pound in his
incarceration.[20]

Sir Edward Coke: "the clearest mind ever in England" (Canto CVII).
At the core of Canto CV are a number of citations and quotations from the writings of St.
Anselm. This 11th-century philosopher and inventor of the ontological argument for the
existence of God who wrote poems in rhymed prose appealed to Pound because of his emphasis
on the role of reason in religion and his envisioning of the divine essence as light. In the 1962
interview already quoted, Pound points to Anselm's clash with William Rufus over his
investiture as part of the history of the struggle for individual rights. Pound also claims in this
canto that Anselm's writings influenced Cavalcanti and Franois Villon.
Canto CVI turns to visions of the goddess as fertility symbol via Demeter and Persephone, in her
lunar, love aspect as Selena, Helen and Aphrodite Euploia ("of safe voyages") and as hunter
Athene (Proneia: "of forethought", the form in which she is worshiped at Delphi) and Diana
(through quotes from Layamon). The sun as Zeus/Helios also features. These vision fragments
are cross-cut with an invocation of the Taoist Kuan Tzu (Book of Master Kuan). This work
argues that the mind should rule the body as the basis of good living and good governance.
Another such figure, the English jurist and champion of civil liberties Sir Edward Coke,
dominates the final three cantos of this section. These cantos, CVII, CVIII, CIX, consist mainly
of "luminous details" lifted from Coke's Institutes, a comprehensive study of English law up to
his own time. In Canto CVII, Coke is placed in a river of light tradition that also includes
Confucius, Ocellus and Agassiz. This canto also refers to Dante's vision of philosophers that
reveal themselves as light in the Paradiso. In Canto CVIII, Pound highlights Coke's view that
minting coin "Pertain(s) to the King onely" and has passages on sources of state revenue. He also
draws a comparison between Coke and Iong Cheng. A similar parallel between Coke and the
author of the Book of the Eparch is highlighted in Canto CIX.

The canto and section end with a reference to the following lines from the second canto of the
Paradiso
O voi che siete in piccioletta barca,
desiderosi dascoltar, seguiti
dietro al mio legno che cantando varca,
tornate a riveder li vostri liti:
non vi mettete in pelago, ch forse,
perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti.
which read, in the translation by Charles Eliot Norton, "O ye, who are in a little bark, desirous
to listen, following behind my craft which singing passes on, turn to see again Your shores; put
not out upon the deep; for haply losing me, ye would remain astray." This reference signalled
Pound's intent to close the poem with a final volume based on his own paradisiacal vision.

Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CXCXVII

First published as Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CXCXVII. New York: New
Directions, 1969.
In 1958, Pound was declared incurably insane and permanently incapable of standing trial.
Consequent on this, he was released from St. Elizabeths on condition that he return to Europe,
which he promptly did. At first, he lived with his daughter Mary in Tyrol, but soon returned to
Rapallo. In November 1959, Pound wrote to his publisher James Laughlin (speaking in the third
person) that he "has forgotten what or which politics he ever had. Certainly has none now". His
crisis of belief, together with the effects of aging, meant that the proposed paradise cantos were
slow in coming and turned out to be radically different from anything the poet had envisaged.

Voltaire, who said "I hate no one / not even Frron" (Canto CXIV), reflecting the theme of
confronting hatred in this section of the poem.

Pound was reluctant to publish these late cantos, but the appearance in 1967 of a pirate edition of
Cantos 110116 forced his hand. Laughlin pushed Pound to publish an authorised edition, and
the poet responded by supplying the more-or-less abandoned drafts and fragments he had, plus
two fragments dating from 1941. The resulting book, therefore, can hardly be described as
representing Pound's definitive planned ending to the poem. This situation has been further
complicated by the addition of more fragments in editions of the complete poem published after
the poet's death. One of these was labelled "Canto CXX" at one point, on no particular authority.
This title was later removed.
Although some of Pound's intention to "write a paradise" survives in the text as we have it,
especially in images of light and of the natural world, other themes also intrude. These include
the poet's coming to terms with a sense of artistic failure, and jealousies and hatreds that must be
faced and expiated.
Canto CX opens with a pun on the word wake, conflating the wake of the little boat from the end
of the previous canto and an image of Pound waking in his daughter's house in Tyrol, both from
sleep and, by extension, from the nightmare of his prolonged incarceration. The goddess appears
as Kuanon, Artemis and Hebe (through her characteristic epithet Kallistragalos, "of fair ankles"),
the goddess of youth. The Buddhist painter Toba Sojo represents directness of artistic handling.
The Noh figure of Awoi (from AOI NO UE), ravaged by jealousy, reappears together with the
poet Ono no Komachi, the central character in two more Noh plays translated by Pound. She
represents a life spent meditating on beauty which resulted in vanity and ended in loss and
solitude. The canto draws to a close with the phrase Lux enim ("light indeed") and an image of
the oval moon.
Pound's "nice, quiet paradise" is seen, in the notes for Canto CXI, to be based on serenity, pity,
intelligence and individual acceptance of responsibility as illustrated by the French diplomat
Talleyrand. This theme is continued in the short extract titled from Canto CXII, which also
draws on the work of the anthropologist and explorer Joseph F. Rock in recording legends and
religious rituals from China and Tibet. Again, this section of the poem closes with an image of
the moon.
Canto CXIII opens with an image of the sun moving through the zodiac, the first of a number of
cycle images that occur through the canto, recalling a line from Pound's version of AOI NO UE:
"Man's life is a wheel on the axle, there is no turn whereby to escape". A reference to Marcella
Spann, a young woman whose presence in Tyrol further complicated the already strained
relationships between the poet, his wife Dorothy and his lover Olga Rudge, casts further light on
the recurrent jealousy theme. The phrase "Syrian onyx" lifted from his 1919 Homage to Sextus
Propertius, where it occurs in a section that paraphrases Propertius' instructions to his lover on
how to behave after his death, reflects the elderly Pound's sense of his own mortality.
The theme of hatred is addressed directly at the opening of Canto CXIV, where Voltaire is
quoted to the effect that he hates nobody, not even his archenemy Elie Frron. The remainder of
this canto is primarily concerned with recognising indebtedness to the poet's genetic and cultural
ancestors. The short extract from Canto CXV is a reworking from an earlier version first

published in the Belfast-based magazine Threshold in 1962 and centres around two main ideas.
The first of these is the hostilities that existed amongst Pound's modernist friends and the
negative impact that it had on all their works. The second is the image of the poet as a "blown
husk", again a borrowing from the Noh, this time the play Kakitsubata.
Canto CXVI was the last canto completed by Pound. It opens with a passage in which we see the
Odysseus/Pound figure, homecoming achieved, reconciled with the sea-god. However, the home
achieved is not the place intended when the poem was begun but is the terzo cielo ("third
heaven") of human love. The canto contains the following well-known lines:
I have brought the great ball of crystal;
Who can lift it?
Can you enter the great acorn of light?
But the beauty is not the madness
Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.
This passage has often been taken as an admission of failure on Pound's part, but the reality may
be more complex. The crystal image relates back to the Sacred Edict on self-knowledge and the
demigod/cohere lines relate directly to Pound's translation of the Women of Trachis. In this, the
demigod Herakles cries out "WHAT SPLENDOUR / IT ALL COHERES" as he is dying. These
lines, read in conjunction with the later "i.e. it coheres all right / even if my notes do not cohere",
point toward the conclusion that towards the end of his effort, Pound was coming to accept not
only his own "errors" and "madness" but the conclusion that it was beyond him, and possibly
beyond poetry, to do justice to the coherence of the universe. Images of light saturate this canto,
culminating in the closing lines: "A little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour".
These lines again echo the Noh of Kakitsubata, the "light that does not lead on to darkness" in
Pound's version.
This final complete canto is followed by the two fragments of the 1940s. The first of these,
"Addendum for C", is a rant against usury that moves a bit away from the usual antisemitism in
the line "the defiler, beyond race and against race". The second is an untitled fragment that
prefigures the Pisan sequence in its nature imagery and its reference to Jannequin.
Notes for Canto CXVII et seq. originally consisted of three fragments, with a fourth, sometimes
titled Canto CXX, added after Pound's death. The first of these has the poet raising an altar to
Bacchus (Zagreus) and his mother Semele, whose death was as a result of jealousy. The second
centres on the lines "that I lost my center / fighting the world", which were intended as an
admission of mistakes made as a younger man.[21] The third fragment is the one that is also
known as Canto CXX. It is, in fact, some rescued lines from the earlier version of Canto CXV,
and has Pound asking forgiveness for his actions from both the gods and those he loves. The
final fragment returns to beginnings with the name of Franois Bernonad, the French printer of A
Draft of XVI Cantos. After quoting two phrases from Bernart de Ventadorn's Can vei la lauzeta
mover, a poem in which the speaker contemplates a lark's flight as a token of the coming of

spring, the fragment closes with the line "To be men not destroyers." This stood as the close of
The Cantos until later editions appended a brief dedicatory fragment addressed to Olga Rudge.

Legacy
Despite all the controversy surrounding both poem and poet, The Cantos has been influential in
the development of English-language long poems since the appearance of the early sections in
the 1920s. Amongst poets of Pound's own generation, both H.D. and William Carlos Williams
wrote long poems that show this influence. Almost all of H.D.'s poetry from 1940 onwards takes
the form of long sequences, and her Helen in Egypt, written during the 1950s, covers much of the
same Homeric ground as The Cantos (but from a feminist perspective), and the three sequences
that make up Hermetic Definition (1972) include direct quotations from Pound's poem. In the
case of Williams, his Paterson (1963) follows Pound in using incidents and documents from the
early history of the United States as part of its material. As with Pound, Williams includes
Alexander Hamilton as the villain of the piece.
Pound was a major influence on the Objectivist poets, and the effect of The Cantos on
Zukofsky's "A" has already been noted. The other major long work by an Objectivist, Charles
Reznikoff's Testimony (19341978), follows Pound in the direct use of primary source
documents as its raw material. In the next generation of American poets, Charles Olson also
drew on Pound's example in writing his own unfinished Modernist epic, The Maximus Poems.
Pound was also an important figure for the poets of the Beat generation, especially Gary Snyder
and Allen Ginsberg. Snyder's interest in things Chinese and Japanese stemmed from his early
reading of Pound's writings. and his long poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (19651996)
reflects his reading of The Cantos in many of the formal devices used. In Ginsberg's
development, reading Pound was influential in his move away from the long, Whitmanesque
lines of his early poetry, and towards the more varied metric and inclusive approach to a variety
of subjects in the single poem that is to be found especially in his book-length sequences Planet
News (1968) and The Fall of America: Poems of These States (1973). More generally, The
Cantos, with its wide range of references and inclusion of primary sources, including prose texts,
can be seen as prefiguring found poetry. Pound's tacit insistence that this material becomes
poetry because of his action in including it in a text he chose to call a poem also prefigures the
attitudes and practices that underlie 20th-century Conceptual art.
The poetic response to The Cantos is summed up in Basil Bunting's poem, "On the Fly-Leaf of
Pound's Cantos":
There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?
There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,

fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

A fraction of the poem is read near the ending of Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1975 film Sal, or the 120
Days of Sodom.
On Ezra Pound
A young Jewish Lutheran sculptor turned up broke in Rapallo in April 1934. This was Heinz
Clusmann (1906 -1975), who renamed himself Heinz Henghes. He wanted to see Pounds
Gaudiers (sculptors), and Pound took him in, fed him, put him up in what Laughlin described as
a large dog kennel on his roof-top terrace, found him some stone and tools from the cemetery
stone-cutter, and let him get to work. New sculptor loose on roof, and marble dust dappertuuto,
everywhere, Pound wrote by way of explaining the seal on the envelope of his letter to an
American college student. (He was telling her what her generation should be up to.) Henghes
had offered the seal, a little animal carving, to show what he could d; and had shown a drawing
of a seated centaur which later became the New Directions very Gaudier-like book colophon.
According to Laughlin, Pound persuaded Signora Agnelli, wife of the head of Fiat, to acquire
some of his first works at a good price, and Henghes went on to become a successful sculptor
and to win, after the war, prestigious commissions in London and New York

Source:
Ezra Pound: Poet
A Portrait of the Man & His Work Vol. II.
A. David Moody.
Oxford University Press 2014.

Notes
1.
Patrick McGuinness, "Ezra Pound: Posthumous Cantos edited by Massimo Bacigalupo review
fresh insights into an epic masterpiece." Accessed 24.03.2016.
In an essay called Poet of Many Voices reprinted in Sullivan.
Marjorie Perloff, "Discussing Pound." Accessed 11.05.2011.
Flory, Wendy Stallard. "Pound and Antisemitism," in Ira B. Nadel (ed.). The Cambridge
Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Also see Flory, Wendy Stallard. "The Return to Italy: 'To Confess Wrong'". In The
American Ezra Pound. Yale University Press, 1989.

Morgan, Bill. The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, De Capo Press, 2008, p. 340.

For the meeting in the restaurant, see Reck, Michael; Weiss, Theodore; Kazin, Alfred;
and Taplin, Oliver. "An Exchange on Ezra Pound", The New York Review of Books, 9
October 1986.
The above exchange was in response to Kazin, Alfred. "The Fascination and Terror of
Ezra Pound", The New York Review of Books, 13 March 1986.

Tytell 1987, pp. 337339.

Pound, Ezra & Zukofsky Louis & Ahearn Barry (ed). Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of
Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. New York: New Directions, 1987. xxi-xxii
Blackmur, Richard P. The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation. 1962
Cookson p. 264
Schneidau, Herbert N. "Vorticism and the Career of Ezra Pound". Modern Philology,
Volume 65, No. 3, February 1968. 214-227.
Liebregts, 97.
Hartnett, Stephen. "The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism: Analyzing Pound's Cantos 1215". boundary 2, Volume 20, No. 1, Spring, 1993. 65-93.
Peterson, Leland D. "Ezra Pound: The Use and Abuse of History". American Quarterly,
Volume 17, No. 1, Spring, 1965. 33-47.
They also demonstrate Pound's enthusiastic support of Italian Fascism in general and
Mussolini in particular. Canto LXXII indicts Italians for not supporting Mussolini and predicts
victory for Italian Fascism over the Allies. In Canto LXXIII he enshrines an otherwise ridiculous
Fascist propaganda story of a fascist maiden, raped by Allied troops, (suicidally) revenging
herself by guiding hapless Canadian troops to their death in a minefield. Her act is portrayed as
the selfless act of a true patriot. The inclusion of the Italian Cantos in the cycle caused significant
controversy. Pound scholar Richard Sieburth describes the Italian Cantos as marking "the moral
nadir of the poem". Pound, Ezra and Sieburth, Richard (ed). The Pisan Cantos. New York: New
Directions, 2003. xvi
Optimistic for the victory of Italian Fascism.
Brugnolo, Furio. La lingua di cui si vanta Amore: Scrittori stranieri in lingua italiana dal
Medioevo al Novecento. Rome: Carocci editore, 2009. 95-111. ISBN 978-88-430-5069-7.
Stock, Noel (1974). The Life of Ezra Pound. New York: Avon Books. p. 566. ISBN 0-38000191-8.
Christopher Wang, "Clarity from Chaos in the Rock-Drill Cantos Paradise." Accessed
13.08.2013.
Liebregts, 316.
Kenner, Hugh. "The Pound Era". University of California Press, 1992. 536. ISBN 0-52002427-3
21. Reck, Michael & Weiss, Theodore. "An Exchange on Ezra Pound". New York Review
of Books, Volume 33, No 15, October 9, 1986. Retrieved on July 18, 2008.

Sources
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Ackroyd, Peter. Ezra Pound and His World (Thames and Hudson, 1980). ISBN 0-50013069-8
Bacigalupo, Massimo. The Formd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (Columbia
University Press, 1980). ISBN 0-231-04456-9
Cookson, William. A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Anvil, 1985). ISBN 0-89255246-8
D'Epiro, Peter. A Touch of Rhetoric: Ezra Pound's Malatesta Cantos (UMI, 1983). ISBN
0835714047
Eastman, Barbara. Ezra Pound's Cantos: The Story of the Text (Orono: National Poetry
Foundation, 1979). ISBN 0915032023
Flory, Wendy Stallard. "The Return to Italy: 'To Confess Wrong'". In The American
Ezra Pound. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
Flory, Wendy Stallard. "Pound and Antisemitism." The Cambridge Companion to Ezra
Pound. Ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge University Press, 1999) ISBN 0-521-64920-X,
ISBN 0-521-43117-4
Gibson, Mary Ellis (1995). Epic reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians. Cornell
University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-3133-3. Retrieved 12 May 2011.
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era (Faber and Faber, 1975 edition). ISBN 0-571-10668-4
Liebregts, P. Th. M. G. Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism. Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8386-4011-7
Makin, Peter. Pound's Cantos (Allen & Unwin, 1985). ISBN O-04-811001-9
Makin, Peter (ed.). Ezra Pound's Cantos: A Casebook (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006). ISBN 9780195175295
Sullivan, J.P. (ed). Ezra Pound (Penguin critical anthologies series, 1970). ISBN 0-14080033-6
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Press, 1980). ISBN 0-520-08287-7
Wilhelm, James J. The Later Cantos of Ezra Pound (Walker, 1977). ISBN 0-80-270553-7

Online

Ezra Pound's Cantos 72 and 73: An Annotated Translation by Massimo Bacigalupo

Pound's Pisan Cantos in Process by Massimo Bacigalupo
Modernism, Fascism, and the Pisan Cantos by Ronald Bush
[1]
Clarity from Chaos in the Rock-Drill Cantos Paradise by Christopher Wang