The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Directions Paperbook) (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

Addendum For Canto 100
Canto 1
Canto 10
Canto 100
Canto 101
Canto 102
Canto 103
Canto 104
Canto 105
Canto 106
Canto 107
Canto 108
Canto 109
Canto 11
Canto 110
Canto 111 (notes Therefor)
Canto 112 (therefrom)
Canto 113
Canto 114
Canto 116
Canto 12
Canto 13
Canto 14
Canto 15
Canto 16
Canto 17
Canto 18
Canto 19
Canto 2
Canto 20
Canto 21
Canto 22
Canto 23
Canto 24
Canto 25
Canto 26
Canto 27
Canto 28
Canto 29
Canto 3
Canto 30
Canto 31
Canto 32
Canto 33
Canto 34
Canto 35
Canto 36
Canto 37
Canto 38
Canto 39
Canto 4
Canto 40
Canto 41
Canto 42
Canto 43
Canto 44
Canto 45
Canto 46
Canto 47
Canto 48
Canto 49
Canto 5
Canto 50
Canto 51
Canto 52
Canto 53
Canto 54
Canto 55
Canto 56
Canto 57
Canto 58
Canto 59
Canto 6
Canto 60
Canto 61
Canto 62
Canto 63
Canto 64
Canto 65
Canto 66
Canto 67
Canto 68
Canto 69
Canto 7
Canto 70
Canto 71
Canto 72
Canto 74 (the Pisan Cantos)
Canto 75 (the Pisan Cantos)
Canto 76 (the Pisan Cantos)
Canto 77 (the Pisan Cantos)
Canto 78 (the Pisan Cantos)
Canto 79 (the Pisan Cantos)
Canto 8
Canto 80 (the Pisan Cantos)
Canto 81 (the Pisan Cantos)
Canto 82 (the Pisan Cantos)
Canto 83 (the Pisan Cantos)
Canto 84
Canto 85
Canto 86
Canto 87
Canto 88
Canto 89
Canto 9
Canto 90
Canto 91
Canto 92
Canto 93
Canto 94
Canto 95
Canto 96
Canto 97
Canto 98
Canto 99
Fragment (1966)
Notes For Canto 117 Et Seq.
The Scientists Are In Terror
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Collection of poems by Ezra Pound, who began writing these philosophical reveries in 1915. The first were published in Poetry magazine in 1917; through the decades the writing of cantos gradually became Pound's major poetic occupation, and the last were published in 1968. The complete edition of The Cantos (1970) consists of 117 sections. In his early cantos Pound offered personal, lyrical reactions to such writers as Homer, Ovid, Dante, and Remy de Gourmont, as well as to sundry politicians and economists. The early verses include memories of his teenage trips to Europe. The Pisan Cantos (1948), written while Pound was incarcerated--first in a prison camp for war criminals and later in a hospital for the criminally insane--were among the most admired sections of the poem; they won a Bollingen Prize in 1949. -- The Merriam-Webster Encylopedia of Literature --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Description

1st paper edtn, incl English tr of Canto LXXII

Product Details

• Paperback: 824 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation (June 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811213269
• ISBN-13: 978-0811213264
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #116,257 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A stunning treasure, September 1, 2001

By	Vladimir (Valencia, Spain) - See all my reviews

"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.

24 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fury and Conviction., November 7, 2001

By	S. C Rice - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

26 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Make it new", March 3, 2004

By	John McConnell (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Directions Books) (Hardcover)

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.