The Pisan Cantos (Paperback)

by Ezra Pound (Author), Richard Sieburth (Editor) "The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant's bent shoulders Manes!..." (more)
Key Phrases: pas artificiel, thy vanity, Hooo Fasa, John Adams, Unkle George

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 [London], 4 June 2004

The introduction is one of the best short essays I have read on ...the great memory poem...The Pisan Cantos. -- Marjorie Perloff, Boston Review, April/May 2004

Product Description
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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation; 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.com Sales Rank: #395,534 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	dpk - See all my reviews

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!

4 of 5 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 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.

7 of 14 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)

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?