Customer Reviews

The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Directions Books)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

"Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" was the first Pound's poem I read and I fell in the net of the deep beauty of Pound's works becoming an enthusiastic student of him. A lot of stupidities has been told against his verses, but the authentic poetry provides itself the stunning evidence that can outlast all the poisonous criticism. Pound was a giant as one of the reviewers of this page has said.
It is true that Pound wrote some verses in Italian, Greek,... and used chinese ideograms as constructive elements of his "Cantos" (his great masterpiece) and this is not a shortcoming but a necessity. "Poetry" told once T.S.Elliot "can communicate before being understood". This is the case of Pound's poetry. Words and fragments in different languages are used not as superfluous ornaments but in order to articulate a strong feeling and providing pleasure to "the expert". The "non-expert" is attracted also by the surroundings of these elements and the imaginist grounds of each "Canto". It's just poetry! To convince of that I copy here some verses of the Cantos

"nothing matters but the quality
of the affection
in the end"
(Canto LXXVI)

"Pull down thy vanity.
Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail"
[...]
"What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage"
[...]
"The ant's a centaur in his dragon world"
(Canto LXXXI)

"The valley is thick with leaves, with leaves, the trees,
The sunlight glitters, glitters a-top,
Like a fish-scale roof,
Like the church roof in Poictiers
If it where gold.
Beneath it, beneath it
Not a ray, not a slivver, not a spare disk of sunlight;
Flaking the black, soft water;[...]
Ivory dipping in silver
Shadow'd, o'ershadow'd
Ivory dipping in silver
Not a splotch, not a lost shatter of sunlight"
(Canto IV)

The latter are only some few examples you can find in his work, where each word is always (almost) necessary and not superfluous.

1. THE BACKGROUND
Harold Bloom observes in his book The Western Canon that for major literary heavyweights Dante Alighieri tends to be the role model. Joseph Campbell observes as much regarding James Joyce: "The model for Joyce's life was Dante". Dante felt strongly that educated people have a duty to assist practically in the betterment of humanity. Being a mere aesthete, for Dante, was burying one's talents at best and moral cowardice in the face of the enemy at worst. Pound accepted Dante's challenge. Throughout the Cantos Pound wages war on the perennial demonic forces always endangering the home, environment, culture, and representative government. The Cantos are a poetic attack strategy for recognizing and overcoming such forces. Often autobiographical, the Cantos also chronicle Pound's odyssey through the tumultuous twentieth century. The work commences by invoking the muses in an immemorial Ulysses quest (Canto I), then serially time-travels through European culture via paratactic histories and biographies of heroes who successfully (or unsuccessfully) combated the blind demonic forces of cultural barbarism and hedonism. In this sense, the Cantos are a modern-day Plutarch's Lives - history interpreted by a poet.

2. THE CRISES
Pound's first personal crisis followed the First World War, in which many of his own friends died. "I sought to discover what causes war", he said. His conclusion after years of exhaustive historical research was that wars are fomented by elite power groups: Corrupt government officials colluding with militarists, industrialists, and international bankers for their own personal (and treasonous) gain. It was then that both the Cantos' character, and Pound's character, changed (somewhere around Canto 45, the famous-infamous Usury Canto). Pound's study of history taught him that *rates of interest* are an accurate gauge to the civilization or barbarity of any culture: High levels of interest, usury, correspond to levels of philistine barbarism in which the weak are devoured by the strong. Pound's view became that social Darwinism, political economy, rampant capitalism, and debasement of currency are all destroyers of home, environment, culture, and honest government. The key demon, then, to be summoned and exorcized in Pound's poetic grimoire was "Greed" - Mammon. It was natural given this view for Pound to be attracted to Confucianism, with its accent on the home and family as the central hub from which all virtue and therefore true culture radiate. A large part of the Cantos is taken up with Pound's presentation of Confucian precepts.

During the thirties, Pound crafted the American or "Adams" cantos, which laud American democratic values and the Founding Fathers' creation of a true republic. Armed with his knowledge of Western cultural history, Pound clearly foresaw the oncoming Second World War. He engaged in extensive and articulate letter-writing campaigns with several US senators, urging avoidance of all foreign entanglements, as had George Washington. During the war Pound - having failed to leave Italy before his visa expired and finding himself trapped in fascist Italy - engaged in a series of polemical and highly idiosyncratic radio broadcasts, slamming this latest world war as nothing more than another example of the economically powerful preying on the naivete of the politically weak. (Unfortunately for Pound and his message, he also argued what is clearly an anti-Jewish interpretation of history in these broadcasts. In many he does not sound at all cogent.) Pound wrote only two cantos during this time, the Italian Cantos, but the sense of the broadcasts is already clear in those cantos preceding the war.

Pound's second personal crisis followed the Second World War. Once the war ended, the sixty year-old Ezra Pound was incarcerated in a gorilla cage, lying on cold concrete, left to the open air, with a night-time spotlight shining on him as he tried to sleep. Pound had made powerful political enemies: His incarcerators were not sadistic fascists but the victorious US Army in Pisa, Italy. It was here, incarcerated in Pisa, that Pound wrote the Pisan Cantos, which would earn him the first Bollingen Prize of 1948. By the time of the award, however, Pound was already a political prisoner in St Elizabeth's mental hospital in Washington, DC. Based on subsequent assertions of Pound's attorney, Pound was in no danger of the US government's treason charge. But Pound's wife, to protect him at all costs, opted to have Ezra committed in St Elizabeth's rather than risk his facing a possible capital charge of treason in time of war for his wartime radio broadcasts. It was during his twelve-year stay in St Elizabeth's that Pound would write the Rock-Drill and Thrones sections of the Cantos, and St Elizabeth's would become a site of pilgrimage for poets and authors from all countries.

3. THE TRUTHS
The simple truth is Pound's anti-Jewish sentiments aside, Pound was right on all points. What we watch daily on television is exactly what Pound warned us was coming. His analysis of the debasement of US political will and honor through the 1913 creation of the Federal Reserve is now confirmed by many (US Representative Ron Paul, film maker Aaron Russo, and many many other authors and concerned citizens); "endless war"; fiscal corruption; the destruction of millions of lives in the name of "Mammon" - about all these things Pound warned us.

The simple truth also is Pound's works languish in US English departments. When he is invoked it's usually to be denigrated. The ignorance of liberal arts professors of the import of Pound's political and economic messages would be funny were it not so ghastly: Eisenhower's farewell address; USMC Commandant Smedley Butler's essay War is a Racket; FDR's now-proven foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack; the six million deaths caused by the US paramilitary since 1947; the proposed fake terror of Operation Northwoods; the daylight assassination of the only American president to oppose and attempt to abolish the Federal Reserve Bank; the faked Gulf of Tonkin incident used to justify the Vietnam War; the Saturday Night Massacre; the Wag the Dog spectacle of modern US politics; the infiltration of the US media in Operation Mockingbird; the current endless war for endless peace: the Pentagon's "loss" of 2.3 trillion dollars; US ambassador to Iraq Paul Bremer's "loss" of nine billion dollars of taxpayers' dollars during his brief one-year tenure - and receiving a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his service; Douglas Feith's Office of Strategic Plans that lied the US into war with Iraq and then awarded "no-bid" contracts to his long-standing business clients Northrup Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, et alia - Pound warned us of all these nightmares and prophesied their coming.

4. THE MESSAGE
The Poundian Message is clear. War corrupts and destroys the home, environment, culture, and representative government. It does this in almost all cases to enrich the strong at the cost of the weak. War is a tool of Mammon, and when you hear "endless war" touted you are hearing your own death knell and that of all you love. You should familiarize yourself with Eustace Mullin's Secrets of the Federal Reserve and the online film Zeitgeist to grasp how far Ezra Pound's understanding of economics outstrips most English professors who genteelly stand above the fray. I once described Pound's economic ideas to a neighbor, an economist, and his immediate reply was, "That's right. He's exactly right."

The Cantos are beautiful and diaphanous (even the tedious sections are impeccably crafted) but they are often dense. Pound meant every word he wrote. The profundity and sincerity expressed in his poetry is clear. As such, the Cantos, like Pound's life, are a document of personal courage.

Good luck on your odyssey.

The Cantos are monolithic, and I think one of the most valuable pieces of literature to read from Western Civilization. Sure, they don't contain the secrets to the universe, but they do contain the thoughts of a genius who was trying to get his mind wrapped around truth. I do not think that Pound always speaks the truth in his works. But he is always trying to and is always fanatically convinced of what he is saying. For the conviction and emotional tonality alone this work is worth reading. Pound rages on the page and you can feel it. Reading it can be like getting shouted at for an hour. He also finds sympathy for some and you feel his description of them as a close friend relating a nostalgic tale. He can also be grim, and his words seem the perfect eulogy for Western Civilization. Reading it is like getting pummeled! Yet with each struggle one comes out feeling a desire to know more about the world and to search out truth.
When I first opened the Cantos, I felt that they were not well written, because the writing is choppy, in places it seems haphazard and sloppy. One can also read his `Guide to Culture' and find that it reads like a notebook; not for public consumption. However, Pound's power does not lie with his `technical' skill. There I would look perhaps to Louis Zukofsky, whose style and thought was similar, but whose technique is profound and impeccable. By contrast, Pound gives the impression of writing with incredible haste and bluster, as if fighting with his life to complete this work before his death. There is no real pattern to all of the cantos. It probably should be read more as a collection of poems on similar themes than in a Dantesque sort of way. But you see the unfolding of Pound's wild and weird life as the Cantos unfold, and his intellect and passions fight against the world that would ultimately defeat him. The cantos are not written to be accepted technically; they are about teaching life (Pound would say wisdom; APPLIED knowledge) and about truth, and not about words.
Reading Pound, one feels the weight of civic responsibility. Pound rages at what he sees rending Western Civilization from its roots. He discloses history by mentioning it, using events as metaphors, as expressions, as examples of his points, and in doing this he expects you to know them. Pound's poetry convicts one to read Dante, to read Homer, to read the Troubadours. And if you took nothing more away from that Cantos than that, that isn't bad. But you see in this work someone who is absolutely dedicated to how he felt the world should be. There is no apathy here. We can all stand to nod to Pound's conviction. I do not agree with him on many issues (although some I do), but I think that even if one disagreed on all counts with Pound, they could take from the Cantos the fervor and mission of a man dedicated to changing the world for what he saw as the better. You can still feel his intent and intensity on these pages. I think that as long as people read it, they will. Read this.

I have had the privelege of living and studying with Pound's daughter Mary de Rachewiltz at Brunnenburg castle. She taught her father's poetry well to a group of undergraduate students with basic knowledge of Pound and the Cantos. I'm not going to lie Pound's Cantos is probably the hardest thing I have ever read. His allusions range from the Odyssey to the most obscure Spanish tales to Chinese philosophy. However, the language and beauty of his words make up for the obscure refrences. I highly reccommend The Pisan Cantos, The Fragments. Most of the Cantos is pretentious and heavy handed but when finishing the Cantos with Mary we came across one of the last fragments written...when Pound was writing his Paradiso Terrestre...and this fragment more than made up for the pretentiousness.
"That her acts
Olga's acts
of beauty
be remembered.
Her name was courage
& is written olga

These lines are for the
ultimate CANTO
whatever I may write
in the interim."
The Cantos are worth the difficulty, I recommend getting a good guidbook, however, because some of the refrences are very obscure.

After mere squib praise, it seems better to speak to the work, rather than reactions to it. The Modern is the Victorian gone mad. Most especially in poetry. Compare this work to the attempts at all encompassing poetic works, works by Hardy, Tennyson, Browning - and it instantly becomes appearant for what it is. A work which attempts to encompass history as a prolegmania. All of the material of the past - language, history, literature - in every form - is taken as raw material for the poet. The point of this vast drawing of sources and references is to produce an expression of the inner narrative.

The Cantos are, then, the modern holding a mirror up to its origins. An obession of the modern indeed - to find the first man, the source of law, the begining of written history. Origins of its legal systems and its habits. Also of its consciousness.

In the west this search must return to one of a few figures - those who impelled the scientific revolution, such as Newton - or those who created the artist as hero - Dante, Beethoven, Shakespeare - or those who created the idea of people as hero - the Founding Fathers of the United States.

Pound attempts to combine the last of these two, with, himself, as the unseen artist hero. Where as for Dante the point of having an inner life - as rich as his was - centered on connection to the extrinsic divine, Pound encapsulates all activity into his personal commentary.

What makes this poetic work powerful is that it takes the logical extension of modern verse farther than any other poet. Modern verse obliterated the delicate matrix of prosody, in favor of lines being equivelent to those gaps in thought we experience in the stream of consciousness. This weakens the power of the poetic in itself, and thus yearns to be filled with every possible manner of material.

By weakening form, it allowed more and more dense communication of material. This obsession resembles Schoenberg's statement that as soon as one had a technique in music, one desired to say as much in as little time as possible.

This, not surprisingly, leads to the vast canvas of the Cantos, since, as noted before, the content which fills the void left by structure is any content from any past. The content is only present to focus the reader on the narrative of the self.

What this means is that creating the dense content is how the writer knows he is an active self. The density equates to greater activity. Only by the utmost concentration does the writer experience himself. Since the writer's thread of experience ends with the book, the book must be spun out to its utmost.

The same process occurs with the reader. He <i>is</i> as a being only so long as he is engaged in the parsing of meaning, and the more dense the meaning, the more aware of himself engaged in the act of being, that he can say he lives.

This knot - where parsing is being, and hence intensity of parsing is intensity of being - can be said to be the corner stone of the Modern sense of the purpose of art. The purpose of art is to create a vehicle by which the self experiences itself being.

No work in language presents this in as extended a fashion, with the possible exception of Joyce's Ulysses...

The Cantos are great in what they do for the writer. "Elitism" is the nickname the idiot gives to the question. The Cantos include everything (yes, even Pounds' barbarisms). Man alive! Must I agree with the Bible to read it?

It seems many people prefer to judge Pound by his politics and not by his poetry, to their loss. Make no mistake, the man was a genius, however it may rankle in certain quarters...

Ezra Pound is the greatest American poet.

I love your condemnation of him. And I do not wish to thought of as sarcastic because the controversy is half of the aura about Mr. Pound's dynamic presence in the poetry of the past century.

Robert Graves called Pound a charlatan and I do not know if he is correct. If he is correct than all charlatans must attain to the greatness of Ezra Loomis Pound.

The Cantos of Ezra Pound is not an epic, it is not a notebook of any sort.

And it is relevant to the times in which it was written.

"Make it new." said Pound.

He made it new by gathering the limbs of osiris, resurecting old poets and crowning new ones. He lived in history while he was still alive. He reminds me of myself sometimes.
The Cantos was relevant but one must read between the lines to see that it was relevant. Canto XLV for instance, the famous litany agains Usury, is in particular rlevant to the times it was published, 1937. The Great Depression still upon the US and banks failing, Pound sought to condemn the practice of usury, not saying that it was going on, but as a warning that this is how bad could get worse.

with usura, sin against nature,
is thy bread ever more of stale rags
is thy bread dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour

With those lines, I picture the breadlines stretching around streetcorners with dark looking men, ashen gray, all with rotting overcoats up to their small red eyes. I picture the people starving because of this strange practice of usury, not just during the Depression, but all through time.

Here is yet another theme that is relevant during the time the Cantos were published, human nature being the same so history repeats itself. Pound was trying to prove this by pointing to models for a better future, Confucius, and Pier della Francesca, Pietro Lombardo.

The fact that Pound knew so many languages, translated much, is just incredible. We clearly had a genius in the nuthouse during that vacuous time.
Take the first Canto as an example of Pound's immense Godlike talent.

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheeo aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe's this craft, the trim coifed goddess.

I remember when I first read those lines and I was immediately pulled into the work itself and the poetry of Mr. Pound. His controversial anti-semitism, his support of the regime of Mussolini, the absurd trial he had to take for treason against the US (the cage he was placed in, exposed to the elements) and the long internment in the House of Bedlam, St. Elizabeth's Mental Hospital in Washington D.C. from 1946 - 1958. I don't think there is one aspect of the thought and the writings of Ezra Pound that do not facinate me and have taught me how to compose poetry.

So sir, I must say that I have never read the two poets you have named but if they are anything like what I have a feeling they are, they are vastly inferior to the mighty voice of Pound (sounded like a Scottish goat by the way if you were wondering, funny and haunting)

You will probably never read these words so I close by saying that Ezra Pound is my idol poet. I have never read anything that had kept me so captivated and inspired me so. I hope my words shall be read and taken into consideration and be understood.

Thank you.

On Ezra Pound's Cantos

The Modern is the Victorian gone mad. Most especially in poetry. Compare this work to the attempts at all encompassing poetic works, works by Hardy, Tennyson, Browning - and it instantly becomes appearant for what it is. A work which attempts to encompass history as a prolegmania. All of the material of the past - language, history, literature - in every form - is taken as raw material for the poet. The point of this vast drawing of sources and references is to produce an expression of the inner narrative.

The Cantos are, then, the modern holding a mirror up to its origins. An obession of the modern indeed - to find the first man, the source of law, the begining of written history. Origins of its legal systems and its habits. Also of its consciousness.

In the west this search must return to one of a few figures - those who impelled the scientific revolution, such as Newton - or those who created the artist as hero - Dante, Beethoven, Shakespeare - or those who created the idea of people as hero - the Founding Fathers of the United States.

Pound attempts to combine the last of these two, with, himself, as the unseen artist hero. Where as for Dante the point of having an inner life - as rich as his was - centered on connection to the extrinsic divine, Pound encapsulates all activity into his personal commentary.

What makes this poetic work pwoeful is that it takes the logical extension of modern verse farther than any other poet. Modern verse obliterated the delicate matrix of prosody, in favor of lines being equivelent to those gaps in thought we experience in the stream of consciousness. This weakens the power of the poetic in itself, and thus yearns to be filled with every possible manner of material.

By weakening form, it allowed more and more dense communication of material. This obsession resembles Schoenberg's statement that as soon as one had a technique in music, one desired to say as much in as little time as possible.

This, not surprisingly, leads to the vast canvas of the Cantos, since, as noted before, the content which fills the void left by structure is any content from any past. The content is only present to focus the reader on the narrative of the self.

What this means is that creating the dense content is how the writer knows he is an active self. The density equates to greater activity. Only by the utmost concentration does the writer experience himself. Since the writer's thread of experience ends with the book, the book must be spun out to its utmost.

The same process occurs with the reader. He is as a being only so long as he is engaged in the parsing of meaning, and the more dense the meaning, the more aware of himself engaged in the act of being, that he can say he lives.

This knot - where parsing is being, and hence intensity of parsing is intensity of being - can be said to be the corner stone of the Modern sense of the purpose of art. The purpose of art is to create a vehicle by which the self experiences itself being.

No work in language presents this in as extended a fashion, with the possible exception of Joyce's Ulysses...

This is a well constructed book of reasonable size and as such offers a good reading copy of The Cantos. The typeface is sensible and clear. It is a copy that can be stuck in a suitcase or satchel. Since it is hardbound, it is not lightweight or really intended for travel, but it is not a lavish collector's volume, so if it gets knocked about, so what?

I'm not going to comment on Pound's Cantos, his poetry generally or his role in 20th century literature. If you want an expert opinion, find yourself a copy of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. Pound himself was a complex man who left complex tracks. The Cantos certainly remain worth reading (IMHO, they are aging well, and reading them against the backdrop of the current financial nonsense is entertaining, but perhaps I entertain easily?).