The Pisan Cantos [Paperback]

Ezra Pound (Author), Richard Sieburth (Editor)

Book Description

Series: New Directions Paperbook | Publication Date: October 2003

At last, a definitive, paperback edition of Ezra Pound's finest work.

Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos was written in 1945, while the poet was being held in an American military detention center near Pisa, Italy, as a result of his pro-Fascist wartime broadcasts to America on Radio Rome. Imprisoned for some weeks in a wire cage open to the elements, Pound suffered a nervous collapse from the physical and emotional strain. Out of the agony of his own inferno came the eleven cantos that became the sixth book of his modernist epic, The Cantos, themselves conceived as a Divine Comedy for our time. The Pisan Cantos were published in 1948 by New Directions and in the following year were awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry by the Library of Congress. The honor came amid violent controversy, for the dark cloud of treason still hung over Pound, incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Yet there is no doubt that The Pisan Cantos displays some of his finest and most affecting writing, marking an elegaic turn to the personal while synthesizing the philosophical and economic political themes of his previous cantos. They are now being published for the first time as a separate paperback, in a fully annotated edition prepared by Richard Sieburth, who also contributes a thoroughgoing introduction, making Pound's master-work fully accessible to students and general readers.

Editorial Reviews

Review

It is in The Pisan Cantos that we can approach Pound most closely as a person. (James Laughlin - Pound As Wuz )

Sieburth has done a strikingly good job....His introduction...is a model of its kind...a serious work of criticism. (Clive Wilmer - Times Literary Supplement )

The introduction is one of the best short essays [on Pound] I have read. (Marjorie Perloff - Boston Review )

About the Author

New Directions has been the primary publisher of Ezra Pound in the U.S. since the founding of the press when James Laughlin published New Directions in Prose and Poetry 1936. That year Pound was fifty-one. In Laughlin’s first letter to Pound, he wrote: “Expect, please, no fireworks. I am bourgeois-born (Pittsburgh); have never missed a meal. . . . But full of ‘noble caring’ for something as inconceivable as the future of decent letters in the US.” Little did Pound know that into the twenty-first century the fireworks would keep exploding as readers continue to find his books relevant and meaningful.

Richard Sieburth has edited Ezra Pound’s Poems & Translations, New Selected Poems and Translations, The Pisan Cantos and A Walking Tour in Southern France.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; New Edition edition (October 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081121558X
• ISBN-13: 978-0811215589
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #206,976 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb edition, December 23, 2005

By 

dpk - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pisan Cantos (Paperback)

This superbly edited volume makes Pound's "Pisans" readily available in an attractive and affordable paperback edition. This is some of the most important American poetry of the post-War period, with intelligent and helpful annotations to make the work fully accessible even to those not versed in Poundian arcana. Indispensable!

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gorgeously wrought, July 6, 2006

By 

VoidMagazine.com "VoidMagazine.com" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pisan Cantos (Paperback)

This magnum opus of one of the most celebrated and controversial figures in literature was written while he was being held in detention for treason. He was a fascist, and anti-Semite, but how the chicks, and Allen Ginsberg, dug him. And you should, too--politics aside. Pound's writings on poetry were monumental in the formation of greats like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and the aforementioned Ginsberg. The Cantos are gorgeously wrought, and range from exquisitely beautiful to fantastically erudite and opaque. And it's fun to watch him make up arbitrary meanings for Chinese ideograms because some posthumously debunked scholar misled him.

9 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ambition and madness, October 15, 2006

By 

DEH JONES "Picture Writer" (The Dull Midwest) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Pisan Cantos (Paperback)

The Pantos Cantos takes us back to the days of Modernism when artists had heart and desired to experiment. These days, writers have to pander to illiterate readers, ambitious editors and know-nothing marketing departments. This is in-your-face art for art's sake, gloriously elitist, ugly, difficult, sprawling, all that good and high art should be. Who needs readers? Who needs post-modernist defence of the popular and accessible?