Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound [Paperback]

Ezra Pound (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Among his fellow modernists, Ezra Pound inspired equal parts admiration and contempt. T.S. Eliot called him "il miglior fabbro" and dedicated "The Waste Land" to him after Pound had surgically stripped down the masterwork. Gertrude Stein, on the other hand, mocked his obsession with "Kulchur" and his pedagogical need to insert his versions of history, thought, economics, and morality into the Cantos. Pound was, she punched, "a village explainer, excellent if you are a village, but if you are not, not."

Turning to the poems affords illumination, though not resolution. The complete Cantos number 117, weigh in at more than 800 pages, and require several companion volumes of exegesis, filled as they are with private matters and forgotten, obscure souls and associations. Selected Cantos, 117 pages in all, contains what Pound called his "beauty spots": evocations of his heroes (from Chinese emperors to the Founding Fathers), cameos and critiques of his contemporaries (Yeats admiring the symbol of Notre Dame more than Notre Dame itself), and scabrous, unbeautiful visions of politicians, war profiteers, and "the perverts, the perverters of language" in hell. A signal irony is that the poet whose goal was to "make it new" is often freshest in his evocations and imitations of the past.

The greatest sequence is, however, "The Pisan Cantos". In 1945, following his pro-fascist Italian radio broadcasts, Pound was imprisoned by the American military. The art that emerged out of desperation, particularly Canto LXXXI, is a litany of nostalgia, pain, and delusion. Pound for once casts a sharp eye (usually reserved for others) on his personal and artistic failings: "Pull down thy vanity / How mean thy hates / Fostered in falsity ..." But even this section is troubling. In the end, the village explainer could explain little.

Review

And If Your Kids Don't Study, That's Your Fault
Canto 1
Canto 116
Canto 13
Canto 14
Canto 16
Canto 31
Canto 4
Canto 44
Canto 45
Canto 53
Canto 81 (the Pisan Cantos)
Canto 84 (the Pisan Cantos)
Canto 9
Canto 95
Elizabeth %angliae Amor
A Factory
Fixed In The Soul, Nell'anima, Of The Illustrious College
Hudor Et Pax
Know Then: %toward Summer When The Sun Is In Hyades
Our Dynasty Came In Because Of A Great Sensibility
Pere Henri Jacques Still
The Scientists Are In Terror
Talleyrand - Mr A. Not Caught Asleep By His Cabinet
To The End:
You Cannot Leave These Things Out
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Paperback: 119 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation (February 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811201600
• ISBN-13: 978-0811201605
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,199,074 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent introduction to the Cantos for newcomers., September 4, 2001

By 

tepi "tepi" - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound (Paperback)

Few would claim that Ezra Pound's Cantos, taken in their entirety, are an unqualified success. As a sequence they lack any clearly discernible structure, and there is just too much in them that is obscure. At the same time, few would deny that they are studded throughout with passages of great force and beauty - brilliant lines, fragments, and even complete cantos which can be extracted from the complete text with little if any loss. One of these is what is perhaps Pound's greatest poem - his impassioned denunciation of 'Usura' : 'With Usura hath no man a house of good stone' - in Canto XLV. It is this canto, along with twenty-three others either in whole or in part, that will be found in the present book. These were selected largely by Pound himself, as he said, 'to provide the best introduction to the whole work for those coming to it for the first time.' Readers of poetry will find much to enjoy here, and some will probably be inspired to go on to a reading of the complete Cantos.

Those who do so would be well advised to get hold of a copy of Carroll F. Terrell's 'A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound' (University of California, 1993 printing), a reference work which contains glosses to Pound's numerous literary and historical allusions, identifications of all proper names and works, and translations of his foreign quotations. Those who become interested in the life of this extraordinary and colorful personality might consider taking a look at Humphrey Carpenter's 'A Serious Character : the Life of Ezra Pound' (Houghton Mifflin, 1988), a hugely entertaining and informative book which is perhaps the finest critical biography of Pound to have yet appeared and one which also helps considerably to elucidate many of Pound's obscurities.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The slight touch of grandeour., April 28, 1999

By 

Germán Vera Concha - See all my reviews

This review is from: Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound (Paperback)

If you like very much Pound's poetry, I really cannot advise you to buy this book. There is certainly great poetry inside it, (Canto XLV and LXXXI are among my favourites), but all the sense of continuity is dramatically lost in this selection. If you are interested in buying a good selection of Pound's Cantos in order to see how 'they look alike', I cannot advise you eihter another better selection than this. But remember, arriving at one Malatesta's Canto without knowing the history and development of the Banca del Paschi, or to arrive to the 'ed ascoltando al leggier mormorio' (Canto LXXXI) without any furhter refernce is like seeing 5 minutes of a very good 2 hour movie. Hence, this book is very good, but you can only expect from it 1/8 of the pleasure of reading the complete Cantos, as it only has 1/8 of its pages.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Certainly a better introduction to this poem--about which opinions are ever divided--than the unabridged collection., January 29, 2007

By 

Christopher Culver - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound (Paperback)

The SELECTED CANTOS of Ezra Pound is the poet's own collection of those portions of his magnum opus that he thought the best and most representative of the work.

I won't attempt here to review the Cantos in any real depth. Suffice it to say that in a work of 818 pages, written from youth through maturity and mental breakdown to senescence, with a wide variety of concerns from Chinese antiquity to kooky modern economics, the material within is quite heterogenous and inconsistent. In the complete work there are portions of total banality and clumsiness, and of course Pound's infamous anti-Semitism. But there are also moments of awesome and inspiring poetry, especially in the exotic Chinese poems and in the chronicle of individual experience in the Pisan cantos. I can't promise to anyone that they will like the Cantos--a reason why all of my reviews of its editions are three stars--but for me, I find some of Pound's own lines to explain my attitude towards the work, "What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross". There's enough here to make me a very happy reader, in spite of all the faults.

What does this SELECTED CANTOS volume offer? Well, for one, it's much more accessible than the complete edition. Instead of an intimidating hardbound 818 pages, we get a softcover of 119 pages. This is much more manageable for one who wants to discover some of the work before committing to buying the whole. The selection was made in 1966, when all but the final two poems were written. It is representative of the whole, as we do get the final cantos where Pound mourns his inability to write a "paradiso". TThe Fragment for the final Canto, which I think doggerel, is thankfully missing. The publisher added 200 more lines to the excepts of Cantos already selected here, as well as some fragments of Cantos which appeared in 1970.

As the selection was made so late, after Pound had to show contrition for his anti-semitic demagogery of the 1930s, the selections here avoid that most uncomfortable and deplorable material. This works out very well. An excerpt is given here from Canto LII that shows a beautiful transformation of a Chinese calendar text into almost Hesiod-like metres; all the awful Jew-hating content from the beginning of that canto, so inconsistent with the following material, is nicely trimmed away. However, Pound's interest in the consequences of usury are still represented. Canto XLV, beginning "With usura hath no man a house of good stone", is one of the most striking poems of the work and did indeed have to be found here.