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The Cantos

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Poetry & Opera

   Ezra Pound in 1913.
   Enlarge
   Ezra Pound in 1913.

   The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections,
   each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1922,
   although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as
   finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work,
   widely considered to present formidable difficulties to the reader.
   Strong claims have been made for it as the most significant work of
   modernist poetry of the twentieth century. As in Pound's prose writing,
   the themes of economics, governance, and culture are integral to its
   content.

   The most striking feature of the text, to a casual browser, is the
   inclusion of Chinese characters as well as quotations in European
   languages other than English. Recourse to scholarly commentaries is
   almost inevitable for a close reader. The range of allusion to
   historical events is very broad, and abrupt changes occur with the
   minimum of stage directions.

   There is also a wide geographical spread; Pound added to his earlier
   interests in the classical Mediterranean culture and East Asia
   selective topics from medieval and early modern Italy and Provence, the
   beginnings of the United States, England of the seventeenth century,
   and details from Africa he had obtained from Leo Frobenius. References
   left without explanation abound.

   The section he wrote at the end of World War II, a composition started
   while he was interned by American occupying forces in Italy, has become
   known as The Pisan Cantos, and is the part of the work most often
   viewed as free-standing. It was awarded the first Bollingen Prize in
   1948. The repercussions were widespread, since this in effect honoured
   a poet who had lost all stature as a citizen of his native country, and
   was also diagnosed as prey to a serious and disabling mental illness.

Controversy

   The Cantos has always been a controversial work, initially so because
   of the experimental nature of the writing. The controversy has
   intensified since 1940 when Pound's very public stance on the war in
   Europe and his support for Mussolini's fascism became widely known.
   Much critical discussion of the poem has focused on the relationship
   between, on the one hand, the economic thesis on usura, Pound's
   anti-Semitism, his adulation of Confucian ideals of government and his
   attitude towards fascism, and, on the other, passages of lyrical poetry
   and the historical scene-setting that he performed with his
   'ideographic' technique. At one end of the spectrum, George P. Elliot
   has drawn a parallel between Pound and Adolph Eichmann based on their
   anti-Semitism (in an essay called Poet of Many Voices reprinted in
   Sullivan) while at the other Marjorie Perloff places Pound's
   anti-Semitism in a wider context by pointing up the political views of
   many of his contemporaries and says "We have to try to understand why
   and not say let's get rid of Ezra Pound, who also happens to be one of
   the greatest poets of the 20th C." In another exercise in
   contextualisation, Wendy Stallard Flory made a close study of the poem
   and concluded that it contains, in all, seven passages of anti-Semitic
   sentiment in the 803 pages of the edition she used ( Flory (1999)).

   Pound has always had serious if select defenders and disciples. Louis
   Zukofsky was both, and also Jewish; according to William Cookson he
   defended Pound on the basis of personal knowledge from anti-Semitism on
   the level of human exchange, even though, as reported by Basil Bunting,
   their correspondence contained some of Pound's offensive views. What is
   more, Zukofsky's similarly formidable but distinctive long poem "A"
   follows in its ambitious scope the model of The Cantos.

Structure

   As it lacks any plot or definite ending, The Cantos can appear on first
   reading to be chaotic or structureless. One early critic, R.P.
   Blackmur, wrote, in his 1934 essay Masks of Ezra Pound (reprinted in
   Sullivan) "The work of Ezra Pound has been for most people almost as
   difficult to understand as Soviet Russia… The Cantos are not complex,
   they are complicated". The issue of incoherence of the work is
   reflected in the equivocal note sounded in the final two more-or-less
   completed cantos; according to the William Cookson guide (p.264), they
   show that Pound has been unable to make his materials cohere, while
   they insist that the world itself still does cohere. Pound and T. S.
   Eliot had both approached the subject of fragmentation of human
   experience. While Eliot was writing, and Pound editing, The Waste Land,
   Pound had said that he looked upon experience as similar to a series of
   iron filings on a mirror. Each is disconnected, but the iron filings
   are drawn into the shape of a rose by the presence of a magnet. The
   Cantos, then, can be seen as taking a position between the mythic unity
   of Eliot's poem and Joyce's flow of consciousness and attempting to
   work out how history (as fragment) and personality (as shattered by
   modern existence) can cohere in the "field" of poetry.

   Nevertheless, there are indications in Pound's other writings that
   there may have been some formal plan underlying the work. In his 1918
   essay A Retrospect, Pound wrote "I think there is a 'fluid' as well as
   a 'solid' content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form,
   some as water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical forms have
   certain uses. That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and
   therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms". Critics like
   Hugh Kenner who take a more positive view of The Cantos have tended to
   follow this hint, seeing the poem as a poetic record of Pound's life
   and reading that sends out new branches as new needs arise with the
   final poem, like a tree, displaying a kind of unpredictable
   inevitability.

   Another approach to the structure of the work is based on a letter
   Pound wrote to his father in the 1920s, in which he stated that his
   plan was:

          A. A. Live man goes down into world of dead.
          C. B. 'The repeat in history.'
          B. C. The 'magic moment' or moment of metamorphosis, bust
          through from quotidian into 'divine or permanent world.' Gods,
          etc.

   [The letters ABC/ACB indicate the sequences in which the concepts could
   be presented.] In the light of cantos written later than this letter,
   it would be possible to add other recurring motifs to this list, such
   as: periploi ('voyages around'); vegetation rituals such as the
   Eleusinian Mysteries; usura, banking and credit; and the drive towards
   clarity in art, such as the 'clear line' of Renaissance painting and
   the 'clear song' of the troubadours.

   The poem's symbolic structure also makes use of an opposition between
   darkness and light. Images of light are used variously, and may
   represent neoplatonic ideas of divinity, the artistic impulse, love
   (both sacred and physical) and good governance, amongst other things.
   The moon is frequently associated in the poem with creativity, while
   the sun is more often found in relation to the sphere of political and
   social activity, although there is frequent overlap between the two.
   From the Rock Drill sequence on, the poem's effort is to merge these
   two aspects of light into a unified whole.

   The Cantos was initially published in the form of separate sections,
   each containing several cantos that were numbered sequentially using
   Roman numerals (except cantos 85-109, first published with Arabic
   numerals). The original publication dates for the groups of cantos are
   as given below. The complete collection of cantos was published
   together in 1987 (including a final short coda or fragment, dated 24
   August 1966). In 2002 a bilingual edition of “Posthumous Cantos” (Canti
   postumi) appeared in Italy. This is a concise selection from the mass
   of drafts (circa 1915-1965) uncollected or unpublished by Pound, and
   contains many passages of intrinsic merit that also throw light on The
   Cantos as we have it.

I – XVI

          Published in 1924/5 as A Draft of XVI Cantos by the Three
          Mountains Press in Paris.

   Portrait of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta who built a temple so full of
   pagan works (Canto XI) (Portrait by Piero della Francesca).
   Enlarge
   Portrait of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta who built a temple so full of
   pagan works (Canto XI) (Portrait by Piero della Francesca).

   Pound had been discussing the possibility of writing a long poem since
   around 1905, but work did not begin until sometime between 1912 and
   1917, when the initial versions of the first three cantos of the
   proposed 'poem of some length' were published in the journal Poetry. In
   this version, the poem began very much as a direct address by the poet,
   not to the reader but to the ghost of Robert Browning. Pound came to
   realise that this need to be a controlling narrative voice was working
   against the revolutionary intent of his own poetic position, and these
   first three ur-cantos were soon abandoned and a new starting point
   sought. The answer was a Latin version of Homer's Odyssey by the
   Renaissance scholar Andreas Divus that Pound had bought in Paris
   sometime between 1906 and 1910. Using the metre and syntax of his 1911
   version of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer, Pound made an English
   version of Divus' rendering of the Nekuia episode in which Odysseus and
   his companions sail to Hades in order to find out what their future
   holds. In using this passage to open the poem, Pound introduces a major
   theme; the excavating of the 'dead' past to illuminate both present and
   future. He also echoes Dante's opening to The Divine Comedy in which
   the poet also descends into hell to interrogate the dead. The canto
   concludes with some fragments from the Second Homeric Hymn to
   Aphrodite, in a Latin version by Georgius Dartona which Pound found in
   the Divus volume, followed by "So that:", an invitation to read on.

   Canto II opens with some lines rescued from the ur-cantos in which
   Pound reflects on the indeterminacy of identity by setting side by side
   four different versions of the troubadour poet Sordello: Browning's
   poem of that name, the actual Sordello of flesh and blood, Pound's own
   version of the poet and the Sordello of the brief life appended to
   manuscripts of his poems. These lines are followed by a sequence of
   identity shifts involving a seal, the daughter of Lir and other figures
   associated with the sea: Eleanor of Aquitaine who, through a pair of
   Homeric epithets that echo her name, shifts into Helen of Troy, Homer
   with his ear for the 'sea surge', the old men of Troy who want to send
   Helen back over the sea, and an extended, imagistic retelling of the
   story of the abduction of Dionysus by sailors and his transformation of
   his abductors into dolphins. Although this last story is found in the
   Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, also contained in the Divus volume, Pound
   draws on the version in Ovid's poem Metamorphoses, thus introducing the
   world of ancient Rome into the poem.

   The next 5 cantos (III-VII), again drawing heavily on Pound's Imagist
   past for their technique, are essentially based in the Mediterranean,
   drawing on classical mythology, Renaissance history, the world of the
   troubadours, Sappho's poetry, a scene from the legend of El Cid that
   introduces the theme of banking and credit, and Pound's own visits to
   Venice to create a textual collage saturated with neoplatonist images
   of clarity and light.

   Cantos VIII - XI draw on the story of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta,
   15th century poet, condottiero, lord of Rimini and patron of the arts.
   Quoting extensively from primary sources, including Malatesta's
   letters, Pound especially focuses on the building of the church of San
   Francesco, also known as the Tempio Malatestiano. Designed by Leon
   Battista Alberti and decorated by artists including Piero della
   Francesca and Agostino di Duccio, this was a landmark Renaissance
   building, being the first church to use the Roman triumphal arch as
   part of its structure. For Pound, who spent a good deal of time seeking
   patrons for himself, Joyce, Eliot and a string of little magazines and
   small presses, the role of the patron was a crucial cultural question,
   and Malatesta is the first in a line of ruler-patrons to appear in The
   Cantos.

   Canto XII consists of three moral tales on the subject of profit. The
   first and third of these treat of the creation of profit ex nihilo by
   exploiting the money supply, comparing this activity with 'unnatural'
   fertility. The central parable contrasts this with wealth-creation
   based on the creation of useful goods. Canto XIII then introduces
   Confucius, or Kung, who is presented as the embodiment of the ideal of
   social order based on ethics.

   This section of The Cantos concludes with a vision of Hell. Cantos XIV
   and XV use the convention of the Divine Comedy to present Pound/Dante
   moving through a hell populated by bankers, newspaper editors, hack
   writers and other 'perverters of language' and the social order. In
   Canto XV, Plotinus takes the role of guide played by Virgil in Dante's
   poem. In Canto XVI, Pound emerges from Hell and into an earthly
   paradise where he sees some of the personages encountered in earlier
   cantos. The poem then moves to recollections of World War I, and of
   Pound's writer and artist friends who fought in it. These include
   Richard Aldington, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, Ernest
   Hemingway and Fernand Leger, whose war memories the poem includes a
   passage from (in French). Finally, there is a transcript of Lincoln
   Steffens' account of the Russian Revolution. These two events, the war
   and revolution, mark a decisive break with the historic past, including
   the early modernist period when these writers and artists formed a
   more-or-less coherent movement.

XVII – XXX

          XVII - XXVII published in 1924/5 as A Draft of XVI Cantos by the
          Three Mountains Press in Paris. Cantos I - XXX published in 1930
          in A Draft of XXX Cantos by Nancy Cunard's Hours Press.

   Venice: "Flat water before me, / and the trees growing in water, /
   Marble trunks out of stillness, / On past the palazzi, / in the
   stillness, The light now, not of the sun" (Canto XVII)
   Enlarge
   Venice: "Flat water before me, / and the trees growing in water, /
   Marble trunks out of stillness, / On past the palazzi, / in the
   stillness, The light now, not of the sun" (Canto XVII)

   Originally, Pound conceived of Cantos XVII - XXVII as a group that
   would follow the first volume by starting with the Renaissance and
   ending with the Russian Revolution. He then added a further three
   cantos and the whole eventually appeared as A Draft of XXX Cantos in an
   edition of 200 copies. The major locus of these cantos is the city of
   Venice.

   Canto XVII opens with the words 'So that', echoing the end of Canto I,
   and then moves on to another Dionysus-related metamorphosis story. The
   rest of the canto is concerned with Venice, which is portrayed as a
   stone forest growing out of the water. Cantos XVIII and XIX return to
   the theme of financial exploitation, beginning with the Venetian
   explorer Marco Polo's account of Kublai Khan's paper money. Canto XIX
   deals mainly with those who profit from war, returning briefly to the
   Russian Revolution, and ends on the stupidity of wars and those who
   promote them.

   Canto XX opens with a grouping of phrases, words and images from
   Mediterranean poetry, ranging from Homer through Ovid, Propertius and
   Catullus to the Song of Roland and Arnaut Daniel. These fragments
   constellate to form an exemplum of what Pound calls 'clear song'. There
   follows another exemplum, this time of the linguistic scholarship that
   enables us to read these old poetries and the specific attention to
   words this study requires. Finally, this 'clear song' and intellectual
   activity is implicitly contrasted with the inertia and indolence of the
   lotus eaters, whose song completes the canto. There are references to
   the Malatesta family and to Borso d'Este, who tried to keep the peace
   between the warring Italian city states.

   Canto XXI deals with the machinations of the Medici bank, especially
   with the Medici's effect on Venice. These are contrasted with the
   actions of Thomas Jefferson, who is shown as a cultured leader with an
   interest in the arts. A phrase from one of Sigismondo Pandolfo's
   letters inserted into the Jefferson passage draws an explicit parallel
   between the two men, a theme that is to recur later in the poem. The
   next canto continues the focus on finance by introducing the Social
   Credit theories of C.H. Douglas for the first time.

   Canto XXIII returns to the world of the troubadours via Homer and
   Renaissance neo-platonism. Pound saw Provençal culture as a nexus of
   survival of the old pagan beliefs, and the destruction of the Cathar
   stronghold at Montsegur at the end of the Albigensian Crusade is held
   up as an example of the tendency of authority to crush all such
   alternative cultures. The destruction of Mont Segur is implicitly
   compared with the destruction of Troy in the closing lines of the
   canto. Canto XXIV then returns to 15th century Italy and the
   peace-making d'Este family, again focusing on their Venetian activities
   and Niccolo d'Este's voyage to the Holy Land.

   Cantos XXV and XXVI draw on the Book of the Council Major in Venice and
   Pound's personal memories of the city. Anecdotes on Titian and Mozart
   deal with the relationship between artist and patron. Canto XXVII
   returns to the Russian Revolution, which is seen as being destructive,
   not constructive, and echoes the ruin of Eblis from Canto VI. XXVIII
   returns to the contemporary scene, with a passage on transatlantic
   flight. The last two cantos in the series return to the world of 'clear
   song'. In Canto XXIX, a story from their visit to the Provençal site at
   Excideuil contrasts Pound and Eliot on the subject of Christianity,
   with Pound implicitly rejecting that religion. Finally, the series
   closes with a glimpse of the printer Hieronymus Soncinus of Fano
   preparing to print the works of Petrarch.

XXXI – XLI (XI New Cantos)

   Thomas Jefferson, who was a new Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, in
   Pound's view.
   Enlarge
   Thomas Jefferson, who was a new Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, in
   Pound's view.

          Published as Eleven New Cantos XXXI-XLI. New York: Farrar &
          Rinehart Inc., 1934.

   The first four cantos of this volume (Cantos XXXI - XXXVI) use
   extensive quotations from the letters and other writings of Thomas
   Jefferson, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van
   Buren and others to deal with the emergence of the fledgling United
   States and, particularly, the American banking system. Canto XXXI opens
   with the Malatesta family motto Tempus loquendi, tempus tacendi (a time
   to speak, a time to be silent) to link again Jefferson and Sigismondo
   as individuals and the Italian and American 'rebirths' as historical
   movements.

   Canto XXXV contrasts the dynamism of Revolutionary America with the
   'general indefinite wobble' of the decaying aristocratic society of
   Mitteleuropa. This canto contains some distinctly unpleasant
   expressions of anti-Semitic opinions. Canto XXXVI opens with a
   translation of Cavalcanti's canzone Donna mi pregha ("A lady asks me").
   This poem, a lyric meditation of the nature and philosophy of love, was
   a touchstone text for Pound. He saw it as an example of the
   post-Montsegur survival of the Provençal tradition of 'clear song',
   precision of thought and language, and nonconformity of belief. The
   canto then closes with the figure of the 9th century Irish philosopher
   and poet John Scotus Eriugena, who was an influence on the Cathars and
   whose writings were condemned as heretical in both the 11th and 13th
   centuries. Canto XXXVII then turns to Jackson, Van Buren, Nicholas
   Biddle, Alexander Hamilton and the Bank Wars and also contains a
   reference to the Peggy Eaton affair.

   Canto XXXVIII opens with a quotation from Dante in which he accuses
   Albert of Germany of falsifying the coinage. The canto then turns to
   modern commerce and the arms trade and introduces Frobenius as "the man
   who made the tempest". There is also a passage on Douglas' account of
   the problem of purchasing power. Canto XXXIX returns to the island of
   Circe and the events before the voyage undertaken in Canto one and
   unfolds as a hymn to natural fertility and ritual sex. Canto XL opens
   with Adam Smith on trade as a conspiracy against the general public,
   followed by another periplus, a condensed version of Hanno the
   Navigator's account of his voyage along the west coast of Africa. The
   book closes with an account of Benito Mussolini as a man of action and
   another lament on the waste of war.

LII – LXI (The China Cantos)

   Confucius cut 3000 odes to 300
   Enlarge
   Confucius cut 3000 odes to 300

          First published in Cantos LII-LXXI. Norfolk Conn.: New
          Directions, 1940.

   These eleven cantos are based on the first eleven volumes of the
   twelve-volume Histoire generale de la Chine by Joseph-Anna-Marie de
   Moyriac de Mailla (volume 12 being an index). De Mailla was a French
   Jesuit who spent 37 years in Peking and wrote his history there. The
   work was completed in 1730 but not published until 1777-1783. De Mailla
   was very much an Enlightenment figure and his view of Chinese history
   reflects this. He found Confucian political philosophy, with its
   emphasis on rational order, very much to his liking. He also disliked
   what he saw as the superstitious pseudo-mysticism promulgated by both
   Buddhists and Taoists, to the detriment of rational politics. Pound, in
   turn, fitted de Mailla's take on China into his own views on
   Christianity, the need for strong leadership to address 20th century
   fiscal and cultural problems and his support of Mussolini. In an
   introductory note to the section, Pound is at pains to point out that
   the ideograms and other fragments of foreign-language text incorporated
   in The Cantos should not put the reader off as they serve to underline
   things that are in the English text.

   Canto LII opens with references to Duke Leopoldo, John Adams and
   Gertrude Bell, before sliding into a particularly virulent anti-Semitic
   passage, directed mainly at the Rothschild family. The remainder of the
   canto is concerned with the classic Chinese text known as the Li Ki or
   Classic of Rites, especially those parts that deal with agriculture and
   natural increase. The diction is the same as that used in earlier
   cantos on similar subjects.

   Canto LIII covers the period from the founding of the Hai dynasty to
   the life of Confucius and up to circa 225 BCE. Special mention is made
   of emperors that Confucius approved of and the sage's interest in
   cultural matters is stressed. For example, we are told that he edited
   the Book of Odes, cutting it from 3000 to 300 poems. The canto also
   ascribes the Poundian motto (and title of a 1934 collection of essays)
   Make it New to the emperor Tching Tang. Canto LIV moves the story on to
   around 805 CE. The line "Some cook, some do not cook,/some things can
   not be changed" refers to Pound's domestic situation and recurs, in
   part, in Canto LXXXI.

   Canto LV is mainly concerned with the rise of the Tatars and the Tartar
   Wars, ending about 1200. There is a lot on money policy in this canto
   and Pound quotes approvingly the Tartar ruler Oulo who noted that the
   people "cannot eat jewels". This is echoed in Canto LVI when KinKwa
   remarks that both gold and jade are inedible. This canto is mainly
   concerned with Ghengis and Kublai Khan and the rise of their Yeun
   dynasty. The canto closes with the overthrow of the Yeun and the
   establishment of the Ming dynasty, bringing us up to 1400,
   approximately.

   Canto LVII opens with the story of the flight of the emperor Kien Ouen
   Ti in 1402 or 1403 and continues with the history of the Ming up to the
   middle of the 16th century. Canto LVIII opens with a condensed history
   of Japan from the legendary first emperor, Emperor Jimmu, who
   supposedly ruled in the 7th century BC, to the late 16th century
   Toyotomi Hideyoshi (anglicised by Pound as Messier Undertree), who
   issued edicts against Christianity and raided Korea, thus putting
   pressure on China's eastern borders. The canto then goes on to outline
   the concurrent pressure placed on the western borders by activities
   associated with the great Tartar horse fairs, leading to the rise of
   the Manchu dynasty.

   The translation of the Confucian classics into Manchu opens the
   following canto, Canto LIX. The canto is then concerned with the
   increasing European interest in China, as evidenced by a Sino-Russian
   border treaty and the founding of the Jesuit mission in 1685 under
   Jean-François Gerbillon. Canto LX deals with the activities of the
   Jesuits, who, we are told, introduced astronomy, western music, physics
   and the use of quinine. The canto ends with limitations being placed on
   Christians, who had come to be seen as enemies of the state.

   The final canto in the sequence, Canto LXI, covers the reigns of Yong
   Tching and Kien Long, bringing the story up to the end of de Mailla's
   account. Yong Tching is shown banning Christianity as "immoral" and
   "seeking to uproot Kung's laws". He also established just prices for
   foodstuffs, bringing us back to the ideas of Social Credit. There are
   also references to the Italian Risorgimento, John Adams, and Dom
   Metello de Souza, who gained some measure of relief for the Jesuit
   mission.

LXII – LXXI (The Adams Cantos)

   John Adams: "the man who at certain points/made us/at certain
   points/saved us" Canto LXII
   Enlarge
   John Adams: "the man who at certain points/made us/at certain
   points/saved us" Canto LXII

          First published in Cantos LII-LXXI. Norfolk Conn.: New
          Directions, 1940.

   This section of the cantos is, for the most part, made up of
   fragmentary citations from the writings of John Adams. Pound's
   intentions appear to be to show Adams as an example of the rational
   Enlightenment leader, thereby continuing the primary theme of the
   preceding China Cantos sequence which these cantos also follow from
   chronologically. Adams is depicted as a rounded figure; he is a strong
   leader with interests in political, legal and cultural matters in much
   the same way that Malatesta and Mussolini are portrayed elsewhere in
   the poem. The English jurist Sir Edward Coke, who is an important
   figure in some later cantos, first appears in this section of the poem.
   Given the fragmentary nature of the citations used, these cantos can be
   quite difficult to follow for the reader with no knowledge of the
   history of the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

   Canto LXII opens with a brief history of the Adams family in America
   from 1628. The rest of the canto is concerned with events leading up to
   the revolution, Adams' time in France, and the formation of
   Washington's administration. Alexander Hamilton reappears, again cast
   as the villain of the piece. The appearance of the single Greek word
   "THUMON", meaning heart, returns us to the world of Homer's Odyssey and
   Pound's use of Odysseus as a model for all his heroes, including Adams.
   The word is used of Odysseus in the fourth line of the Odyssey; "he
   suffered woes in his heart on the seas".

   The next canto, Canto LXIII, is concerned with Adams' career as a
   lawyer and especially his reports of the legal arguments presented by
   James Otis in the Writs of Assistance case and their importance in the
   build-up to the revolution. The Latin phrase Eripuit caelo fulmen ("He
   snatched the thunderbolt from heaven") is taken from an inscription on
   a bust of Benjamin Franklin. Cavalcanti's canzone, Pound's touchstone
   text of clear intellection and precision of language, reappears with
   the insertion of the lines In quella parte/dove sta memoria into the
   text.

   Canto LXIV covers the Stamp Act and other resistance to British
   taxation of the American colonies. It also shows Adams defending the
   accused in the Boston Massacre and engaging in agricultural experiments
   to ascertain the suitability of Old-World crops for American
   conditions. The phrases Cumis ego oculis meis, tu theleis, respondebat
   illa and apothanein are from the passage (taken from Petronius'
   Satyricon) that T.S. Eliot used as epigraph to The Waste Land at
   Pound's suggestion. The passage translates as "For with my own eyes I
   saw the Sibyl hanging in a jar at Cumae, and when the boys said to her,
   'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'I want to die.'"

   The nomination of Washington as president dominates the opening pages
   of Canto LXV. The canto shows Adams concerned with the practicalities
   of waging war, particularly of establishing a navy. Following a passage
   on the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, the canto returns
   to Adams' mission to France, focusing on his dealings with the American
   legation in that country, consisting of Franklin, Silas Deane and
   Edward Bancroft and with the French foreign minister, the Comte de
   Vergennes. Intertwined with this is the fight to save the rights of
   Americans to fish the Atlantic coastline. A passage on Adams'
   opposition to American involvement in European wars, echoing Pound's
   position on his own times, is highlighted. In Canto LXVI, we see Adams
   in London serving as minister to the Court of St. James's. The body of
   the canto consists of quotations from Adams' writings on the legal
   basis for the Revolution, including citations from Magna Carta and Coke
   and on the importance of trial by jury (per pares et legem terrae).

   Canto LXVII opens with a passage on the limits on the powers of the
   British monarch drawn from Adams' writings under the pseudonym
   Novanglus. The rest of the canto is concerned with the study of
   government and with the requirements of the franchise. The following
   canto, LXVIII, begins with a meditation on the tripartite division of
   society into the one, the few and the many. A parallel is drawn between
   Adams and Lycurgus, the just king of Sparta. Then the canto returns to
   Adams' notes on the practicalities of funding the war and the
   negotiation of a loan from the Dutch.

   Canto LXIX continues the subject of the Dutch loan and then turns to
   Adams' fear of the emergence of a native aristocracy in America, as
   noted in his remark that Jefferson feared rule by "the one" (monarch or
   dictator), while he, Adams, feared "the few". The remainder of the
   canto is concerned with Hamilton, James Madison and the affair of the
   assumption of debt certificates by Congress which resulted in a
   significant shift of economic power to the federal government from the
   individual states.

   Canto LXX deals mainly with Adams' time as vice-president and
   president, focusing on his statement "I am for balance", highlighted in
   the text by the addition of the ideogram for balance. The section ends
   with Canto LXXI, which summarises many of the themes of the foregoing
   cantos and adds material on Adams' relationship with Native Americans
   and their treatment by the British during the Indian Wars. The canto
   closes with the opening lines of Epictetus' Hymn of Cleanthus, which
   Pound tells us formed part of Adams' paideuma. These lines invoke Zeus
   as one "who rules by law", a clear parallel to the Adams presented by
   Pound.

LXXII – LXXIII

          Written between 1944 and 1945.

   These two cantos, written in Italian, were not collected until their
   posthumous inclusion in the 1987 revision of the complete text of the
   poem. Pound reverts to the model of Dante’s Divine Comedy and casts
   himself as conversing with ghosts from Italy’s remote and recent past.

   In Canto LXXII, imitative of Dante’s tercets (terza rima), Pound meets
   the recently dead Futurist writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and they
   discuss the current war and their excessive love of the past (Pound)
   and of the future (Marinetti). Then the violent ghost of Dante’s
   Ezzelino III da Romano, brother of Cunizza of Cantos VI and XXIX,
   explains to Pound tha he has been misrepresented as an evil tyrant only
   because he was against the Pope’s party, and goes on to attack the
   present Pope Pius XII and “traitors” (like king Victor Emmanuel III)
   who betrayed Mussolini, and to promise that the Italian troops will
   eventually “return” to El Alamein.

   Canto LXXIII is subtitled “Cavalcanti – Republican Correpondence” and
   is written in the style of Cavalcanti’s “Donna mi prega” of Canto
   XXXVI. Guido Cavalcanti appears on horseback to tell Pound about a
   heroic deed of a girl from Rimini who led a troop of Canadian soldiers
   to a mined field and died with the “enemy”. (This was a propaganda
   story featured in Italian newspapers in October 1944; Pound was
   interested in it because of the connection with Sigismondo Malatesta’s
   Rimini.) Both cantos end on a positive and optimistic note, typical of
   Pound, and are unusually straightforward. Except for a scathing
   reference (by Cavalcanti’s ghost) to “Roosevelt, Churchill and Eden /
   bastards and small Jews”, and for a denial (by Ezzelino) that "the
   world was created by a Jew", they are notably free of anti-Semitic
   content. Italian scholars have been intrigued by Pound’s idiosyncratic
   recreation of the poetry of Dante and Cavalcanti.

LXXIV – LXXXIV (The Pisan Cantos)

   Aubrey Beardsley: "Beauty is difficult, Yeats' said Aubrey
   Beardsley/when Yeats asked why he drew horrors/or at least not
   Burne-Jones/and Beardsley knew he was dying and had to/make his hit
   quickly .../So very difficult, Yeats, beauty so difficult". (Canto
   LXXX)
   Enlarge
   Aubrey Beardsley: "Beauty is difficult, Yeats' said Aubrey
   Beardsley/when Yeats asked why he drew horrors/or at least not
   Burne-Jones/and Beardsley knew he was dying and had to/make his hit
   quickly .../So very difficult, Yeats, beauty so difficult". (Canto
   LXXX)

          First published as The Pisan Cantos. New York: New Directions,
          1948.

   With the outbreak of war in 1939, Pound was in Italy, where he
   remained, despite a request for repatriation he made after Pearl
   Harbour. During this period, his main source of income was a series of
   radio broadcasts he made on Rome Radio. He used these broadcasts to
   express his full range of opinions on culture, politics and economics,
   including his opposition to American involvement in a European war and
   his anti-Semitism. In 1943, he was indicted for treason in his absence,
   and wrote a letter to the indicting judge in which he claimed the right
   to freedom of speech in his defence.

   Pound was arrested by Italian partisans in April 1945 and was
   eventually transferred to the American Disciplinary Training Centre
   (DTC) on May 22. Here he was held in a specially reinforced cage,
   initially sleeping on the ground in the open air. After three weeks, he
   had a breakdown that resulted in his being given a cot and pup tent in
   the medical compound. Here, he gained access to a typewriter. For
   reading matter, he had a regulation-issue Bible along with three books
   he was allowed to bring in as his own "religious" texts: a Chinese text
   of Confucius, James Legge's translation of the same, and a Chinese
   dictionary. He later found a copy of the Pocket Book of Verse, edited
   by Morris Edmund Speare, in the latrine. The only other thing he
   brought with him was a eucalyptus pip. Throughout the Pisan sequence,
   Pound repeatedly likens the camp to Francesco del Cossa's March fresco
   depicting men working at a grape arbour.

   With his political certainties collapsing around him and his library
   inaccessible, Pound turned inward for his materials and much of the
   Pisan sequence is concerned with memory, especially of his years in
   London and Paris and of the writers and artists he knew in those
   cities. There is also a deepening of the ecological concerns of the
   poem. As already mentioned, the awarding of the Bollingen Prize to the
   book caused considerable controversy, with many people objecting to the
   honouring of someone they saw as a madman and/or traitor. However, the
   Pisan Cantos is generally the most admired and read section of the
   work. It is also among the most influential, having impacted on poets
   as different as H.D. and Gary Snyder.

   Canto LXXIV immediately introduces the reader to the method used in the
   Pisan Cantos, which is one of interweaving themes somewhat in the
   manner of a fugue. These themes pick up on many of the concerns of the
   earlier cantos and frequently run across sections of the Pisan
   sequence. This canto begins with Pound looking out of the DTC at
   peasants working in the fields nearby and reflecting on the news of the
   death of Mussolini, "hung by the heels".

   In the first thread, the figure of Pound/Odysseus reappears in the
   guise of "OY TIS", or no man, the name the hero uses in the Cyclops
   episode of the Odyssey. This figure blends into the Australia rain god
   Wanjina, who had his mouth closed up by his father (was deprived of
   freedom of speech) because he 'created too many things'. He, in turn,
   becomes the Chinese Ouan Jin, or man with an education. This theme
   recurs in the line "a man on whom the sun has gone down", a reference
   to the "Nekuia" from Canto I, which is then explicitly referred to.
   This recalls The Seafarer, and Pound quotes a line from his
   translation, "Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven", lamenting the loss of
   the exiled poet's companions. This is then applied to a number of
   Pound's dead friends from the London/Paris years, including W.B. Yeats,
   James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Victor Plarr and Henry James. Finally,
   Pound/Odysseus is seen "on a raft blown by the wind".

   Another major theme running through this canto is that of the vision of
   a goddess in the poet's tent. This starts from the identification of a
   nearby mountain with the Chinese holy mountain Taishan and the naming
   of the moon as sorella la luna (sister moon). This thread then runs
   through the appearance of Kuanon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, the
   moon spirit from Hagaromo (a Noh play translated by Pound some 40 years
   earlier), Sigismondo's lover Ixotta (linked in the text with Aphrodite
   via a reference to the goddess' birthplace Cythera), a girl painted by
   Manet and finally Aphrodite herself, rising from the sea on her shell
   and rescuing Pound/Odysseus from his raft. The two threads are further
   linked by the placement of the Greek word brododactylos (rosy-fingered)
   applied by Homer to the dawn but given here in the dialect of Sappho
   and used by her in a poem of unrequited love. These images are often
   intimately associated with the poet's close observation of the natural
   world as it imposes itself on the camp; birds, a lizard, clouds, the
   weather and other images of nature run through the canto.

   Images of light and brightness associated with these goddesses come to
   focus in the phrase "all things that are, are lights" quoted from John
   Scotus Eriugena. He, in turn, brings us back to the Albigensian Crusade
   and the troubadour world of Bernard de Ventadorn. Another theme sees
   Ecbatana, the seven-walled "city of Dioce", blend with the city of
   Wagadu, from the tale of Gassire's Lute that Pound learned from
   Frobenius. This city, four times rebuilt, with its four walls, four
   gates and four towers at the corners is a symbol for spiritual
   endurance. It, in turn, blends with the DTC in which the poet is
   imprisoned.

   The question of banking and money also recurs, with an anti-Semitic
   passage aimed at the banker Meyer Anselm. Pound brings in biblical
   injunctions on usury and a reference to the issuing of a stamp script
   currency in the Austrian town of Wörgl. The canto then moves on to a
   longish passage of memories of the moribund literary scene Pound
   encountered in London when he first arrived, with the phrase "beauty is
   difficult", quoted from Aubrey Beardsley acting as a refrain. After
   more memories of America and Venice, the canto ends in a passage that
   brings together Dante's celestial rose, the rose formed by the effect
   of a magnet on iron filings, an image from Paul Verlaine of the human
   soul as a fountain and a reference to a poem by Ben Jonson in a
   composite image of hope for "those who have passed over Lethe".

   Canto LXXV is mainly a facsimile of the German pianist Gerhart Münch's
   violin setting of the 16th-century Italian Francesco Da Milano's
   transcription for lute of French composer Clément Janequin's choral
   work Le Chant des oiseaux, an ancient song recalled to Pound's mind by
   the singing of birds on the fence of the DTC, and a symbol for him of
   an indestructible form preserved and transmitted through many versions,
   times, nations and artists. (Compare the Nekuia of canto I.) Münch was
   a friend and collaborator of Pound in Rapallo, and the short prose
   section at the beginning of the canto celebrates his work on other
   early music figures.

   Canto LXXVI opens with a vision of a group of goddesses in Pound's room
   on the Rapallo hillside and then moves, via Mont Segur, to memories of
   Paris and Jean Cocteau. There follows a passage in which the poet
   recognises the Jewish authorship of the prohibition on usury found in
   Leviticus. Conversations in the camp are then cross-cut into memories
   of Provence and Venice, details of the American Revolution and further
   visions. These memories lead to a consideration of what has or may have
   been destroyed in the war. Pound remembers the moment in Venice when he
   decided not to destroy his first book of verse, A Lume Spento, an
   affirmation of his decision to become a poet and a decision that
   ultimately led to his incarceration in the DTC. The canto ends with the
   goddess, in the form of a butterfly, leaving the poet's tent amid
   further references to Sappho and Homer.

   The main focus of Canto LXXVII is accurate use of language, and at its
   centre is the moment when Pound hears that the war is over. Pound draws
   on examples of language use from Confucius, the Japanese dancer Michio
   Itô, who worked with Pound and Yeats in London, a Dublin cab driver,
   Aristotle, Basil Bunting, Yeats, Joyce and the vocabulary of the U.S.
   Army. The goddess in her various guises appears again, as does Awoi's
   hennia, the spirit of jealousy from "AOI NO UE", a Noh play translated
   by Pound. The canto closes with an invocation of Dionysus (Zagreus).

   After opening with a glimpse of Mount Ida, an important locus for the
   history of the Trojan war, Canto LXXVIII moves through much that is
   familiar from the earlier cantos in the sequence: del Cossa, the
   economic basis of war, Pound's writer and artist friends in London,
   "virtuous" rulers ( Lorenzo de Medici, the emperors Justinian, Titus
   and Antoninus, Mussolini), usury and stamp scripts culminating in the
   Nausicaa episode from the Odyssey and a reference to the Confucian
   classic Annals of Spring and Autumn in which "there are no righteous
   wars".

   The moon and clouds appear at the opening of Canto LXXIX, which then
   moves on through a passage in which birds on the wire fence recall
   musical notation and the sounds of the camp and thoughts of Mozart, del
   Cossa and Marshal Pétain meld to form musical counterpoint. After
   references to politics, economics, and the nobility of the world of the
   Noh and the ritual dance of the moon-nymph in Hagaromo that dispels
   mortal doubt, the canto closes with an extended fertility hymn to
   Dionysus in the guise of his sacred lynx.

   Canto LXXX opens in the camp in the shadow of death and soon turns to
   memories of London, Paris and Spain, including a recollection of Walter
   Rummel, who worked with Pound on troubadour music before World War I
   and of Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Laurence Binyon and others. The canto is
   concerned with the aftermath of war, drawing on Yeats' experiences
   after the Irish Civil War as well as the contemporary situation.
   Hagoromo appears again before the poem returns to Beardsley, also in
   the shadow of death, declaring the difficulty of beauty with a phrase
   from Symons and Sappho/Homer's rosy-fingered dawn woven through the
   passage.

   Pound writes of the decline of the sense of the spirit in painting from
   a high-point in Sandro Botticelli to the fleshiness of Rubens and its
   recovery in the 20th century as evidenced in the works of Marie
   Laurencin and others. This is set between two further references to
   Mont Segur. Pound/Odysseus is then saved from his sinking raft by Walt
   Whitman and Richard Lovelace as discovered in the anthology of poetry
   found in the camp toilet and the other prisoners are compared with
   Odysseus' crew, "men of no fortune". The canto then closes with two
   passages, one a pastiche of Browning, the other of Edward Fitzgerald's
   Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, lamenting the lost London of Pound's youth
   and an image of nature as designer.

   Canto LXXXI opens with a complex image that illustrates Pound's
   technical approach well. The opening line, "Zeus lies in Ceres bosom",
   merges the conception of Demeter, passages in previous cantos on ritual
   copulation as a means of ensuring fertility, and the direct experience
   of the sun (Zeus) still hidden at dawn by two hills resembing breast in
   the Pisan landscape. This is followed by an image of the other mountain
   that reminded the poet of Taishan surrounded by vapors and surmounted
   by the planet Venus ("Taishan is attended of loves/under Cythera,
   before sunrise").

   The canto then moves through memories of Spain, a story told by Basil
   Bunting, and anecdotes of a number of familiar personages and of George
   Santayana. At the core of this passage is the line "(to break the
   pentameter, that was the first heave)", Pound's comment on the
   "revolution of the word" that led to the emergence of Modernist poetry
   in the early years of the century.

   Then the goddess of love returns after a lyric passage situating
   Pound's work in the great tradition of English lyric, in the sense of
   words intended to be sung. This heralds perhaps the most widely quoted
   passages in The Cantos in which Pound expresses his realisation that
   "What thou lovest well remains,/the rest is dross" and an acceptance of
   the need for human humility in the face of the natural world that
   prefigures some of the ideas associated with the deep ecology movement.

   The opening of Canto LXXXII marks a return to the camp and its inmates.
   This is followed by a passage that draws on Pound's London memories and
   his reading of the Pocket Book of Verse. Pound laments his failure to
   recognise the Greek qualities of Swinburne's work and celebrates
   Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Rudyard Kipling, Ford Madox Ford, Walt Whitman,
   Yeats and others. After an expanded clarification of the Annals of
   Spring and Autumn / "there are no righteous wars" passage from Canto
   LXXVIII, this canto culminates in images of the poet drowning in earth
   and a recurrence of the Greek word for weeping, ending with more
   bird-notes seen as a periplum.

   After a number of cantos in which the elements of earth and air feature
   so strongly, Canto LXXXIII opens with images of water and light, drawn
   from Pindar, George Gemistos Plethon, John Scotus Eriugena, the mermaid
   carvings of Pietro Lombardo and Heraclitus' phrase panta rei
   ("everything flows"). A passage addressed to a Dryad speaks out against
   the death sentence and cages for wild animals and is followed by lines
   on equity in government and natural processes based on the writings of
   Mencius. The tone of placid acceptance is underscored by three Chinese
   characters that translate as "don't help to grow that which will grow
   of itself" followed by another appearance of the Greek word for weeping
   in the context of remembered places.

   Close observation of a wasp building a mud nest returns the canto to
   earth and to the figure of Tiresias, last encountered in Cantos I and
   XLVII. The canto moves on through a long passage remembering Pound's
   time as Yeats' secretary in 1914 and a shorter meditation on the
   decline in standards in public life deriving from a remembered visit to
   the senate in the company of Pound's mother while that house was in
   session. The closing lines, "Down derry-down/Oh let an old man rest,"
   return the poem from the world of memory to the poet's present plight.

   Canto LXXXIV opens with the delivery of Dorothy Pound's first letter to
   the DTC on October 8. This letter contained news of the death in the
   war of J.P. Angold, a young English poet whom Pound admired. This news
   is woven through phrases from a lament by the troubadour Bertran de
   Born (which Pound had once translated as "Planh for the Young English
   King") and a double occurrence of the Greek word tethneke ("is dead")
   remembered from the story of the death of Pan in Canto XXIII.

   This death, reviving memories of the poet's dead friends from World War
   I, is followed by a passage on Pound's 1939 visit to Washington, D.C.
   to try to avert American involvement in the forthcoming European war.
   Much of the rest of the canto is concerned with the economic basis of
   war and the general lack of interest in this subject on the part of
   historians and politicians; John Adams is again held up as an ideal.
   The canto also contains a reproduction, in Italian, of a conversation
   between the poet and a "swineherd's sister" through the DTC fence. He
   asks her if the American troops behave well and she replies OK. He then
   asks how they compare to the Germans and she replies that they are the
   same.

   The moon/goddess reappears at the core of the canto as "pin-up" and
   "chronometer" close to the line "out of all this beauty something must
   come". The closing lines of the canto, and of the sequence, "If the
   hoar frost grip thy tent / Thou wilt give thanks when night is spent",
   sound a final note of acceptance and resignation, despite the return to
   the sphere of action, prompted by the death of Angold, that marks most
   of the canto.

LXXXV – XCV (Section: Rock-Drill)

   Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who opposed the establishment of the Bank
   of the United States. His Thirty Years View is a key source for this
   section of The Cantos.
   Enlarge
   Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who opposed the establishment of the Bank
   of the United States. His Thirty Years View is a key source for this
   section of The Cantos.

          Published in 1956 as Section: Rock-Drill, 85-95 de los cantares
          by New Directions, New York.

   Pound was flown from Pisa to Washington to face trial on a charge of
   treason in 1946. Found unfit to stand trial because of the state of his
   mental health, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital, where he
   was to remain until 1958. Here he began to entertain writers and
   academics with an interest in his work and to write, working on
   translations of the Confucian Book of Odes and of Sophocles' play Women
   of Trachis as well as two new sections of the cantos; the first of
   these was Rock Drill.

   The two main written sources for the Rock Drill cantos are the
   Confucian Classic of History, in an edition by the French Jesuit
   Séraphin Couvreur, which contained the Chinese text and translations
   into Latin and French under the title Chou King (which Pound uses in
   the poem), and Senator Thomas Hart Benton's Thirty Years View: Or A
   History of the American Government for Thirty Years From 1820-1850,
   which covers the period of the bank wars. In an interview given in
   1962, and reprinted by J. P. Sullivan (see References), Pound said that
   the title Rock Drill "was intended to imply the necessary resistance in
   getting a main thesis across — hammering."

   The first canto in the sequence, Canto LXXXV, contains 104 Chinese
   characters from the Chou King, in addition to a number of Latin
   phrases, mostly taken from Couvreur's translation. There are also a
   small number of Greek words. The overall effect for the
   English-speaking reader is one of unreadability, and the canto is hard
   to elucidate unless read along side a copy of Couvreur's text.

   The core meaning is summed up in Pound's footnote to the effect that
   the History Classic contains the essentials of the Confucian view of
   good government. In the canto, these are summed up in the line "Our
   dynasty came in because of a great sensibility", where sensibility
   translates the key character Ling, and in the reference to the four
   Tuan, or foundations, benevolence, rectitude, manners and knowledge.
   Rulers who Pound viewed as embodying some or all of these
   characteristics are adduced: Queen Elizabeth I, Cleopatra, Alexander
   the Great, as are Napoleon III, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Dexter
   White, who stand for everything Pound opposes in government and
   finance.

   The world of nature, Pound's source of wealth and spiritual
   nourishment, also features strongly; images of roots, grass and
   surviving traces of fertility rites in Catholic Italy cluster around
   the sacred tree Yggdrasil. The natural world and the world of
   government are related to tekhne or art. Richard of St. Victor, with
   his emphasis on modes of thinking, makes an appearance, in close
   company with Eriugena, the philosopher of light.

   Canto LXXXVI opens with a passage on the Congress of Vienna and
   continues to hold up examples of good and bad rulers as defined by the
   poet with Latin and Chinese phrases from Couvreur woven through them.
   The word Sagetrieb, meaning something like the transmission of
   tradition, apparently coined by Pound, is repeated after its first use
   in the previous canto, underlining Pound's belief that he is
   transmitting a tradition of political ethics that unites China,
   Revolutionary America and his own beliefs.

   Canto LXXXVII opens on usury and moves through a number of references
   to 'good' and 'bad' leaders and lawgivers interwoven with neo-platonist
   philosophers and images of the power of natural process. This
   culminates in a passage bringing together Laurence Binyon's dictum
   slowness is beauty, the San Ku, or three sages, figures from the Chou
   King who are responsible for the balance between heaven and earth,
   Jacques de Molay, the golden section, a room in the church of St.
   Hilaire, Poitiers built to that rule where one can stand without
   throwing a shadow, Mencius on natural phenomena, the 17th century
   English mystic John Heydon (who Pound remembered from his days working
   with Yeats) and other images relating to the worship of light including
   "'MontSegur, sacred to Helios". The canto then closes with more on
   economics.

   The following canto, Canto LXXXVIII, is almost entirely derived from
   Benton's book and focuses mainly on John Randolph of Roanoke and the
   campaign against the establishment of the Bank of the United States.
   Pound viewed the setting up of this bank as a selling out of the
   principles of economic equity on which the U.S. Constitution was based.
   At the centre of the canto there is a passage on monopolies that draws
   on the lives and writings of Thales of Miletus, the emperor Antoninus
   Pius and St. Ambrose, amongst others.

   Canto LXXXIX continues with Benton and also draws on Alexander del
   Mar's A History of Money Systems. The same examples of good rule are
   drawn on, with the addition of the Emperor Aurelian. Possibly in
   defence of his focus on so much "unpoetical" material, Pound quotes
   Rodolphus Agricola to the effect that one writes "to move, to teach or
   to delight" (ut moveat, ut doceat, ut delectet), with the implication
   that the present cantos are designed to teach. The naturalists
   Alexander von Humboldt and Louis Agassiz are mentioned in passing.

   Apart from a passing reference to Randolph of Roanoke, Canto XC moves
   to the world of myth and love, both divine and sexual. The canto opens
   with an epigraph in Latin to the effect that while the human spirit is
   not love, it delights in the love that proceeds from it. The Latin is
   paraphrased in English as the final lines of the canto. Following a
   reference to signatures in nature and Yggdrasil, the poet introduces
   Baucis and Philemon, an aged couple who, in a story from Ovid's
   Metamorphoses, offer hospitality to the gods in their humble house and
   are rewarded. In this context, they may be intended to represent the
   poet and his wife.

   This canto then moves to the fountain of Castalia on Parnassus. This
   fountain was sacred to the Muses and its water was said to inspire
   poetry in those who drank it. The next line, "Templum aedificans not
   yet marble" refers to a period when the gods were worshiped in natural
   settings prior to the rigid codification of religion as represented by
   the erection of marble temples. The "fount in the hills fold" and the
   erect temple (Templum aedificans) also serve as images of sexual love.

   Pound then invokes Amphion, the mythical founder of music, before
   recalling the San Ku/St Hilaire/Jacques de Molay/Eriugena/Sagetrieb
   cluster from Canto LXXXVII. Then the goddess appears in a number of
   guises: the moon, Mother Earth (in the Randolph reference), the Sibyl
   (last encountered in the context of the American Revolution in Canto
   LXIV), Isis and Kuanon. In a litany, she is thanked for raising Pound
   up (m'elevasti, a reference to Dante's praise of his beloved Beatrice
   in the Paradiso) out of hell ( Erebus).

   The canto closes with a number of instances of sexual love between gods
   and humans set in a paradisiacal vision of the natural world. The
   invocation of the goddess and the vision of paradise are sandwiched
   between two citations of Richard of St. Victor's statement ubi amor,
   ibi oculuc est ("where love is, there the eye is"), binding together
   the concepts of love, light and vision in a single image.

   Canto XCI continues the paradisiacal theme, opening with a snatch of
   the "clear song" of Provençe. The central images are the invented
   figure Ra- Set, a composite sun/moon deity whose boat floats on a river
   of crystal. The crystal image, which is to remain important until the
   end of The Cantos, is a composite of frozen light, the emphasis on
   inorganic form found in the writings of the 17th century mystic John
   Heydon, secretary of nature, who Pound first encountered via Yeats, the
   air in Dante's Paradiso, and the mirror of crystal in the Chou King
   amongst other sources. Apollonius of Tyana appears, as do Helen of
   Tyre, partner of Simon Magus and the emperor Justinian and his consort
   Theodora. These couples can be seen as variants on Ra-Set.

   Much of the rest of the canto consists of references to mystic
   doctrines of light, vision and intellection. There is an extract from a
   hymn to Diana from Layamon's 12th century poem Brut. An italicised
   section, claiming that the 1913 foundation of the Federal Reserve Bank,
   which took power over interest rates away from Congress, and the
   teaching of Marx and Freud in American universities ("beaneries") are
   examples of what Julien Benda termed La trahison des clercs, contains
   anti-Semitic language. Towards the close of the canto, the reader is
   returned to the world of Odysseus; a line from Book 5 of the Odyssey
   tells of the winds breaking up the hero's boat and is followed shortly
   by Leucothea, "Kadamon thugater" or Cadmon's daughter) offering him her
   veil to carry him to shore ("my bikini is worth yr raft").

   An image of the distribution of seeds from the sacred mountain opens
   Canto XCII, continuing the concern with the relationship between
   natural process and the divine. The kernel of this canto is the idea
   that the Roman Empire's preference for Christianity over Apollonius and
   its lack respect for its currency resulted in the almost total loss of
   the 'true' religious tradition for 1000 years. A number of neoplatonic
   philosophers, familiar from earlier cantos but with the addition of
   Avicenna, are listed as representing a fine thread of light in these
   dark ages.

   Canto XCIII opens with a quote, "A man's paradise is his good nature",
   taken from The Maxims of King Kati to His Son Merikara. The canto then
   proceeds to look at examples of benevolent action by public figures
   that, for Pound, illustrate this maxim. These include Apollonius making
   his peace with animals, Saint Augustine on the need to feed people
   before attempting to convert them, and Dante and Shakespeare writing on
   distributive justice, an aspect of their work that the poet points out
   is generally overlooked. Central to this aspect is a fragment from
   Dante, non fosse cive, taken from a passage in Paradiso, Canto VIII, in
   which Dante is asked "would it be worse for man on earth if he were not
   a citizen?" and unhesitatingly answers in the affirmative.

   Towards the end of the canto, the Make it new ideograms from Canto LIII
   reappear as the poem moves back towards the world of myth, closing with
   another phrase from the Divine Comedy, this time from Purgatorio, Canto
   XXVIII. The phrase tu mi fai rimembrar translates as "you remind me"
   and comes from a passage in which Dante addresses Matilda, the
   presiding spirit of the Garden of Eden. What she reminds him of is
   Persephone at the moment that she is abducted by Hades and the spring
   flowers fell from her lap. This blending of a pagan sense of the divine
   into a Christian context stands for much of what appealed to Pound in
   medieval mysticism.

   We return to the world of books in Canto XCIV. The canto opens with the
   name of Hendrik van Brederode, a lost leader of the Dutch Revolution,
   forgotten while William I, Prince of Orange is remembered. This name is
   lifted from correspondence between John Adams and Benjamin Rush which
   was finally published in 1898 by Alexander Biddle, a descendant of
   Pound's 'villain' Nicholas. The rest of the canto consists mainly of
   paraphrases and quotations from Philostratus' Life of Apollonius. At
   its conclusion, the poem returns to the world of light via Ra-Set and
   Ocellus.

   Canto XLV opens with the word LOVE in block capitals and recaps many of
   the Rock Drill examples of the relationship between love, light and
   politics. A passage deriving polis from a Greek root word for ploughing
   also returns us to Pound's belief that society and economic activity
   are based on natural productivity. The canto, and sequence, then closes
   with an extended treatment of the passage from the fifth book of the
   Odyssey in which a drowning Odysseus/Pound is rescued by Leucothea.

XCVI – CIX (Thrones)

          First published as Thrones: 96-109 de los cantares. New York:
          New Directions, 1959.

   Sir Edward Coke: "the clearest mind ever in England" (Canto CVII.
   Enlarge
   Sir Edward Coke: "the clearest mind ever in England" (Canto CVII.

   Thrones was the second volume of cantos written while Pound was
   incarcerated in St. Elizabeth's. In the same 1962 interview, Pound said
   of this section of the poem: "The thrones in Dante's Paradiso are for
   the spirits of the people who have been responsible for good
   government. The thrones in The Cantos are an attempt to move out from
   egoism and to establish some definition of an order possible or at any
   rate conceivable on earth… Thrones concerns the states of mind of
   people responsible for something more than their personal conduct."

   The opening canto of the sequence, Canto XCVI, begins with a
   fragmentary synopsis of the decline of the Roman Empire and the rise of
   the Byzantine Empire in the east and of the Carolingian Empire,
   Germanic kingdoms and the Lombards in Western Europe. This culminates
   in a detailed passage on the Book of the Prefect (or Eparch), in Greek
   the Eparchikon Biblion, a 9th century edict of the Emperor Leo VI the
   Wise. This document, which was based on Roman law, lays out the rules
   that governed the Byzantine Guild system, including the setting of just
   prices and so on. The original Greek is quoted extensively and an aside
   claiming the right to write for a specialist audience is included. The
   close attention paid to the actual words prefigures the closer focus on
   philology in this section of the poem. This focus on words ties in
   closely with what Pound referred to as the method of "luminous detail",
   in which fragments of language intended to form the most compressed
   expression of an image or idea act as tesserae in the making of these
   late cantos.

   Canto XCVII draws heavily on Alexander del Mar's History of Monetary
   Systems in a survey ranging from Abd al Melik, the first Caliph to
   strike distinctly Islamic coinage, through Athelstan, who helped
   introduce the guild system into England, to the American Revolution.
   The canto closes with a passage that sees the return of the goddess as
   moon and Fortuna together with Greek forms of solar worship and the
   Flamen Dialis that is intended to integrate gold and silver as
   attributes of coin and the divine.

   After an opening passage that draws together many of the main themes of
   the poem through images of Ra-Set, Ocellus on light (echoing Eriugena),
   the tale of Gassire's Lute, Leucothoe' s rescue of Odysseus, Helen of
   Troy, Gemisto, Demeter and Plotinus, Canto XCVIII turns to the Sacred
   Edict of the emperor K'ang Hsi. This is a 17th century set of maxims on
   good government written in a high literary style, but later simplified
   for a broader audience. Pound draws on one such popular version, by
   Wang the Commissioner of the Imperial Salt Works in a translation by
   F.W. Baller. Comparison is drawn between this Chinese text and the Book
   of the Prefect and the canto closes with images of light as divine
   creation drawn from Dante's Paradiso.

   K'ang Hsi's son Iong Cheng published commentaries on his father's
   maxims and these form the basis for Canto XCIX. The main theme of this
   canto is one of harmony between human society and the natural order,
   and a number of passing references are made to related items from
   earlier cantos: Confucius, Kati, Dante on citizenship, the Book of the
   Prefect and Plotinus amongst them. Canto C covers a range of examples
   of European and American statesman who Pound sees as exemplifying the
   maxims of the Sacred Edict to a greater or lesser extent. At the core
   of this canto, the motif of Luecothoe's veil (kredemnon) resurfaces;
   this time, the hero has reached the safety of the shore and returns the
   magic garment to the goddess.

   The main focus of Canto CI is around the Greek phrase kalon kagathon
   (the beautiful and good), which calls to mind Plotinus' attitude to the
   world of things and the more general Greek belief in the moral aspect
   of beauty. This canto introduces the figure of St. Anselm of
   Canterbury, who is to feature over the rest of this section of the long
   poem. Canto CII returns to the island of Calypso and Odysseus' voyage
   to Hades from Book 10 of the Odyssey. There are a number of references
   to vegetation cults and sacrifices and the canto closes by returning to
   the world of Byzantium and the decline of the Western Empire.

   Cantos CIII and CIV range over a number of examples of the
   relationships between war, money and government drawn from American and
   European history and mostly familiar from earlier sections of the work.
   The latter canto is notable for Pound's suggestion that both Honoré
   Mirabeau in his imprisonment and Ovid in his exile "had it worse" than
   Pound in his incarceration.

   At the core of Canto CV are a number of citations and quotations from
   the writings of St. Anselm. This 11th century philosopher and inventor
   of the ontological argument for the existence of God who wrote poems in
   rhymed prose appealed to Pound because of his emphasis on the role of
   reason in religion and his envisioning of the divine essence as light.
   In the 1962 interview already quoted, Pound points to Anselm's clash
   with William Rufus over his investiture as part of the history of the
   struggle for individual rights. Pound also claims in this canto that
   Anselm's writings influenced Cavalcanti and Francois Villon.

   Canto CVI turns to visions of the goddess as fertility symbol via
   Demeter and Persephone, in her lunar, love aspect as Selena, Helen and
   Aphrodite Euploia ("of safe voyages") and as hunter Athene (Proneia:
   "of forethought," the form in which she is worshiped at Delphi) and
   Diana (through quotes from Layamon). The sun as Zeus/Helios also
   features. These vision fragments are cross-cut with an invocation of
   the Taoist Kuan Tzu (Book of Master Kuan). This work argues that the
   mind should rule the body as the basis of good living and good
   governance.

   Another such figure, the English jurist and champion of civil liberties
   Sir Edward Coke, dominates the final three cantos of this section.
   These cantos, CVII, CVIII, CIX, consist mainly of 'luminous details'
   lifted from Coke's Institutes, a comprehensive study of English law up
   to his own time. In Canto CVII, Coke is placed in a river of light
   tradition that also includes Confucius, Ocellus and Agassiz. This canto
   also refers to Dante's vision of philosophers that reveal themselves as
   light in the Paradiso. In Canto CVIII, Pound highlights Coke's view
   that minting coin "Pertain(s) to the King onely" and passages on
   sources of state revenue. He also draws a comparison between Coke and
   Iong Cheng. A similar parallel between Coke and the author of the Book
   of the Eparch is highlighted in Canto CIX.

   The canto, and section, ends with a reference to the following lines
   from the second canto of the Paradiso:

          O voi che siete in piccioletta barca,
          desiderosi d’ascoltar, seguiti
          dietro al mio legno che cantando varca,

          tornate a riveder li vostri liti:
          non vi mettete in pelago, ché forse,
          perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti.

   ("O ye, who are in a little bark, desirous to listen, following behind
   my craft which singing passes on, turn to see again Your shores; put
   not out upon the deep; for haply losing me, ye would remain astray."
   Translation by Charles Eliot Norton)

   This reference signalled Pound's intent to close the poem with a final
   volume based on his own paradisiacal vision.

Drafts and fragments of Cantos CX - CXVII

   Voltaire, who said "I hate no one/not even Fréron" (Canto CXIV),
   reflecting the theme of confronting hatred in this section of the poem.
   Enlarge
   Voltaire, who said "I hate no one/not even Fréron" (Canto CXIV),
   reflecting the theme of confronting hatred in this section of the poem.

          First published as Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX - CXVII.
          New York: New Directions, 1969.

   In 1958, Pound was declared incurably insane and permanently incapable
   of standing trial. Consequent on this, he was released from St
   Elizabeth's on condition that he return to Europe, which he promptly
   did. At first, he lived with his daughter Mary in the Tyrol, but soon
   returned to Rapallo. A crisis of belief (In November 1959, Pound wrote
   to his publisher James Laughlin that he "has forgotten what or which
   politics he ever had. Certainly has none now."), together with the
   effects of aging meant that the proposed paradise cantos were slow in
   coming and turned out to be radically different to anything the poet
   had envisaged.

   Pound was reluctant to publish these late cantos, but the appearance in
   1967 of a pirate edition of Cantos 110-116 forced his hand. Laughlin
   pushed Pound to publish an authorised edition, and the poet responded
   by supplying the more-or-less abandoned drafts and fragments he had,
   plus two fragments dating from 1941. The resulting book, therefore, can
   hardly be described as representing Pound's definitive planned ending
   to the poem. This situation has been further complicated by the
   addition of more fragments in editions of the complete poem published
   after the poet's death. One of these was titled Canto CXX at one point,
   on no particular authority. This title was later removed.

   Although some of Pound's intention to "write a paradise" survives in
   the text as we have it, especially in images of light and of the
   natural world, other themes also intruded. These include the poet's
   coming to terms with a sense of artistic failure, and jealousies and
   hatreds that must be faced and expiated.

   Canto CX opens with a pun on the word wake, conflating the wake of the
   little boat from the end of the previous canto and an image of Pound
   waking in his daughter's house in the Tyrol both from sleep and, by
   extension, from the nightmare of his prolonged incarceration. The
   goddess appears as Kuanon, Artemis and Hebe (through her characteristic
   epithet Kallistragalos, "of fair ankles"), the goddess of youth. The
   Buddhist painter Toba Sojo represents directness of artistic handling.

   The Noh figure of Awoi (from AOI NO UE), ravaged by jealousy, reappears
   together with the poet Ono no Komachi, the central character in two
   more Noh plays translated by Pound. She represents a life spent
   meditating on beauty which resulted in vanity and ended in loss and
   solitude. The canto draws to a close with the phrase Lux enim ("light
   indeed") and an image of the oval moon.

   Pound's "nice, quite paradise" is seen, in the Notes for Canto CXI, to
   be based on serenity, pity, intelligence and individual acceptance of
   responsibility as illustrated by Talleyrand. This theme is continued in
   the short extract titled from Canto CXII, which also draws on the wok
   of the anthropologist and explorer Joseph F. Rock in recording legends
   and religious rituals from China and Tibet. Again, this section of the
   poem closes with an image of the moon.

   Canto CXIII opens with an image of the sun moving through the zodiac,
   the first of a number of cycle images that occur through the canto,
   recalling a line from Pound's version of "AOI NO UE; Man’s life is a
   wheel on the axle, there is no turn whereby to escape". A reference to
   Marcella Spann, a young woman whose presence in the Tyrol further
   complicated the already strained relationships between the poet, his
   wife Dorothy and his lover Olga Rudge, casts further light on the
   recurrent jealousy theme. The phrase "Syrian onyx" lifted from his 1919
   Homage to Sextus Propertius, where it occurs in a section that
   paraphrases Propertius' instructions to his lover on how to behave
   after his death, reflects the elderly Pound's sense of his own
   mortality.

   The theme of hatred is addressed directly at the opening of Canto CXIV
   where Voltaire is quoted to the effect that he hates nobody, not even
   his archenemy Elie Freron. The remainder of this canto is primarily
   concerned with recognising indebtedness to the poet's genetic and
   cultural ancestors. The short extract from Canto CXV is a reworking
   from an earlier version first published in the Belfast-based magazine
   Threshold in 1962 and centres around two main ideas. The first of these
   is the hostilities that existed between Pound's modernist friends and
   the negative impact that this had on all their works. The second is the
   image of the poet as a 'blown husk', again a borrowing from the Noh,
   this time the play Kakitsubata.

   Canto CXVI was the last canto completed by Pound. It opens with a
   passage in which we see the Odysseus/Pound figure, homecoming achieved,
   reconciled with the sea-god. However, the home achieved is not the
   place intended when the poem was begun but is the terzo cielo ("third
   heaven") of human love. The canto contains the following well-known
   lines:

          I have brought the great ball of crystal;

                      Who can lift it?

          Can you enter the great acorn of light?
          But the beauty is not the madness
          Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
          And I am not a demigod,
          I cannot make it cohere.

   This passage has often been taken as an admission of failure on Pound's
   part, but the reality may be more complex. The crystal image relates
   back to the Sacred Edict on self-knowledge and the demigod/cohere lines
   relate directly to Pound's translation of the Women of Trachis. In
   this, the demigod Herakles cries out "WHAT SPLENDOUR/IT ALL COHERES" as
   he is dying. These lines read in conjunction with the later "i.e. it
   coheres all right/even if my notes do not cohere" point towards the
   conclusion that towards the end of his effort, Pound was coming to
   accept not only his own "errors" and "madness" but the conclusion that
   it was beyond him, and possibly beyond poetry, to do justice to the
   coherence of the universe. Images of light that saturate this canto,
   culminating in the closing lines: "A little light, like a rushlight /
   to lead back to splendour". These lines again echo the Noh of
   Kakitsubata, the "light that does not lead on to darkness" in Pound's
   version.

   This final complete canto is followed by the two 1940s fragments. The
   first of these, Addendum for C, is a rant against usury that moves a
   bit away from the usual anti-Semitism in the line the defiler, beyond
   race and against race. The second is an untitled fragment that
   prefigures the Pisan sequence in its nature imagery and its reference
   to Jannequin.

   Notes for Canto CXVII et seq. originally consisted of three fragments,
   with a fourth, the sometimes Canto CXX, added after Pound's death. The
   first of these has the poet raising an altar to Bacchus (Zagreus) and
   his mother Semele, whose death was as a result of jealousy. The second
   centres on the lines "that I lost my centre/fighting the world". The
   third fragment is the one that is also known as Canto CXX. It is, in
   fact, some rescued lines from the earlier version of from Canto CXV,
   and has Pound asking forgiveness for his actions from both the gods and
   those he loves. The final fragment returns to beginnings with the name
   of François Bernonad, the French printer of A Draft of XVI Cantos.
   After quoting two phrases from Bernart de Ventadorn's Can vei la
   lauzeta mover, a poem in which the speaker determines to abandon love
   because he has been rejected, the fragment closes with the line "To be
   men, not destroyers." This stood as the close of The Cantos until later
   editions appended the two Italian cantos LXXII and LXXIII and a brief
   dedicatory fragment addressed to Olga Rudge.

Legacy

   Despite all the controversy surrounding both poem and poet, The Cantos
   has been influential in the development of English-language long poems
   since the appearance of the early sections during the 1920s. Amongst
   poets of Pound's own generation, both H.D. and William Carlos Williams
   wrote long poems that show this influence.

   Almost all of H.D.'s poetry from 1940 onwards takes the form of long
   sequences, and her Helen in Egypt, written during the 1950s, covers
   much of the same Homeric ground as The Cantos (but from a feminist
   perspective), and the three sequences that make up Hermetic Definition
   (1972) include direct quotations from Pound's poem. In the case of
   Williams, his Paterson (1963) follows Pound in using incidents and
   documents from the early history of the United States as part of its
   material. As with Pound, Williams includes Alexander Hamilton as the
   villain of the piece.

   Pound was a major influence on the Objectivist poets, and the impact of
   The Cantos on Zukofsky's "A" has already been noted. The other major
   long work by an Objectivist, Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, (1934 –
   1978) follows Pound in the direct use of primary source documents as
   its raw material. In the next generation of American poets, Charles
   Olson also drew on Pound's example in writing his own unfinished
   Modernist epic The Maximus Poems.

   Pound was also an important figure for the poets of the Beat
   generation, especially Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. Snyder's
   interest in things Chinese and Japanese stemmed from his early reading
   of Pound's writings and his long poem Mountains and Rivers Without End
   (1965 – 1996) reflects his reading of The Cantos in many of the formal
   devices used. In Ginsberg's development, reading Pound was influential
   in his move away from the long, Whitmanesque lines of his early poetry,
   including towards the more varied metric and inclusive approach to a
   variety of subjects in the single poem that is to be found especially
   in his book-length sequences Planet News (1968) and The Fall of
   America: Poems of These States (1973).

   More generally, The Cantos, with its wide range of references and
   inclusion of primary sources including prose texts can be seen as
   prefiguring found poetry. Pound's tacit insistence that this material
   becomes poetry because of his action in including it in a text he chose
   to call a poem also prefigures the attitudes and practices that
   underlie 20th-century Conceptual art.

   The poetic response to the Cantos is summed up in Basil Bunting' poem,
   "On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos":

          There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
          They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
          jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
          et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
          Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is
          smoothing?

          There they are, you will have to go a long way round
          if you want to avoid them.
          It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
          fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

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