The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Directions Books)

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Stoicheff, P. (1995). The hall of mirrors: Drafts & fragments and the end of Ezra Pound’s cantos. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 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. Wade Giles to Pinyin Conversion Table.” The University of Chicago Library: East Asian Collection. Free online. See also table and commentary at Mandarinportal.com.

Qian, Z. (2003). The modernist response to Chinese art: Pound, Moore. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Le 43 rangées de gradins en calcaire gris ou en conglomérat rougeâtre ont été souvent restaurées depuis la fin du XVIe s. et sont en partie modernes; elles pouvaient contenir 20,000 spectateurs” (Baedeker 66). Alliteration is another common device in poetry, one that involves a very specific type of repetition, the use, and reuse of the same consonant sound at the beginning of multiple words. For example, “stretched sail” in line nine of the first stanza and “bloody bever” in line five of the third stanza. Pound was a major influence on the Objectivist poets, and the effect 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.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. 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. Eliot, T. S. (2014). Ezra Pound: His metric and poetry. In The complete prose of T.S. Eliot: Apprentice years, 1905–1918 (Eds., J. B. Spears & R. Schuchard) (pp. 626–647). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Pound, E. (1984). Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: their letters 1909-1914. In O. Pound and A. W. Litz (Eds.), New York: New Directions. 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. In November 1959, Pound wrote to his publisher James Laughlin (speaking in the third person) that he "has forgotten what or which politics he ever had. Certainly has none now". His crisis of belief, together with the effects of aging, meant that the proposed paradise cantos were slow in coming and turned out to be radically different from anything the poet had envisaged. XLII–LI (Fifth Decad, called also Leopoldine Cantos) [ edit ] Published as The Fifth Decad of the Cantos XLII–LI. London: Faber & Faber, 1937. Cantos CIII and CIV range over a number of examples of the relationships between war, money and government drawn from American and European history, 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. [11] Sir Edward Coke: "the clearest mind ever in England" (Canto CVII). Yeh, M. H. (1987). Metaphor and bi: Western and Chinese poetic. Comparative Literature, 39(3), 237–254.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. Su, K., & Preda, R. (2020). Companion to canto XLIX. The Cantos Project. https://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/canto-xlix. Swartz, W. (2008). Pentasyllabic shi poetry: landscape and farmstead Poetry. In Z. Cai (Ed.), How to read Chinese poetry: a guided anthology (pp. 121–140). New York: Columbia University Press.