The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Directions Paperbook) Paperback – June 17, 1996

"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 (errors aside, it asks the right questions) 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 - "And then went down to the ship / Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea..."