The Cantos
The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem, written mostly between 1915 and 1959 in sections, 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, regarded generally as formidable in its difficulties for the reader. Strong claims have been made for it as one of the most significant works of modernist poetry of the twentieth century. It is of a piece with Pound's prose writing, in that his major themes on economics, governance and culture are integral to its content.
The most striking feature of the text, to a casual browser, is the inclusion in the text not only of quotations in European languages other than English, but of Chinese characters. 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.
Controversy
It has always been a controversial work, initally 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 fascism became widely known. No clear line can be drawn in it between the economic thesis on usura and Pound's anti-Semitism, his adulation of Confucian ideals of government and his fascism, and passages of lyrical poetry and the historical scene-setting that he performed with his 'ideographic' technique.
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.
Pound has always had serious if select defenders and disciples. Louis Zukofsky was both, and also Jewish; he defended Pound on the basis of personal knowledge from anti-Semitism on the level of human exchange. What is more, Zukofsky's similarly formidable but distinctive long poem A follows in its ambitious scope the model of The Cantos. More recently, critics including Hugh Kenner and Marjorie Perloff have argued that Pound's politics have to be viewed in a wider social context and balanced against his importance as a modernist poet and innovator.
Structure
As they lack any plot or definite ending, the Cantos can appear to be chaoticly structureless. One contributory factor may be that Pound had in his sights the novel as handled by James Joyce. The issue of incoherence of the work, and his incapacity to hold to a round number (perhaps seen in the small in the writing of cantos in groups of 11) is the equivocal note sounded in the final two cantos as he deliberately left them. Pound and T. S. Eliot had both approached the subject of fragmentation of human experience. While Eliot was writing The Waste Land in the form of a series of monologues by a single, mythic figure (Tiresias who has "shored these fragments against my ruin"), 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 were drawn into the shape of a rose by the presence of a magnet. His Cantos, therefore, strike a ground between Eliot's unifying mythic person and Joyce's flow of consciousness and attempt 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 book The ABC of Reading, Pound spoke of two kinds of poetic form; symmetrical form, the form of a vase, and organic form, the form of a tree. The Cantos can be viewed as developing organically, like a tree. They are a poetic record of a life and send out branches as the need arises. However, in the end the tree can be seen to have 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 quotidien into `divine or permanent world.' Gods, etc.
In the light of cantos written later than this letter, it would be possible to add to this list other reecurring motifs such as periploi ('voyages around'), vegetation rituals such as the Eleusinian Mysteries, banking and credit, and the drive towards clarity in art, such as the 'clear song' of the troubadours and others and the 'clear line' of Renaissance painting.
Initial publication of the Cantos was sequentially numbered sections using Roman numerals. The original publication dates for 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).
I – XVI
- Published in 1924/5 as A Draft of XVI Cantos by the Three Mountains Press in Paris.
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 Poetry (Chicago). 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, again translated from 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 6 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 Malatesta, quattrocento poet, soldier, 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 and Ernest Hemmingway as well as a passage of Fernand Leger's war memories (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 XXVII - XXX published in 1930 in A Draft of XXX Cantos by Nancy Cunard's Hours Press
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 their 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 Malatesta'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 but 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 sorld 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 Hieronymous Soncinus of Fano preparing to print the works of Petrarch.
XXXI – XLI (XI New Cantos)
- 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 Sigismundo 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.
XLII – LI (Fifth Decad, called also Leopoldine Cantos)
- Published as The Fifth Decad of the Cantos XLII-LI. London: Faber & Faber, 1937.
Cantos XLII, XLIII and XLIV move to the Sienese bank the Monte dei Paschi. Under the rule of the Arch Duke Pietro Leopoldo, this became a low-interest, not-for-profit credit institution whose funds were based on local productivity as represented by the natural increase generated by the grazing of sheep on community land (the 'BANK of the grassland' of Canto XlIII) . As such, it represents a Poundian non-capitalist ideal.
Canto XLV is a litany against Usura or usury, which Pound defines as a charge on credit regardless of potential or actual production and the creation of wealth ex nihilo by a bank to the benefit of its shareholders. The canto declares this practice as both contrary to the laws of nature and inimical to the production of good art and culture. Pound later came to see this canto as a key central point in the poem.
Canto XLVI contrasts what has gone before with the practices of institutions such as the Bank of England that are designed to exploit the issuing of credit to make profits, thereby, in Pound's view, contributing to poverty, social deprivation, crime and the production of 'bad' art as exemplified by the baroque.
The poem returns to the island of Circe and Odysseus about to 'sail after knowledge' in Canto XLVII. There follows a long lyrical passage in which a ritual of floating votive candles on the bay at Rapallo near Pound's home every July merges with the cognate myths of Tammuz and Adonis, agricultural activity set in a calendar based on natural cycles, and fertility rituals.
Canto XLVIII presents more instances of what Pound considers to be usury, some of which display signs of his anti-Semitic position. The canto then moves via Montsegur to the village of St-Bertrand-de-Comminges, which stands on the site of the ancient city of Lugdunum Convenarum. The destruction of this city represents, for the poet, the treatment of civilisation by those he considers barbarous.
Canto XIL is a poem of tranquil nature derived from a Chinese picture book the Pound's parents brought with them when they retired to Rapallo. Canto L, which again contains anti-Semitic statements, moves from John Adams to the failure of the Medici bank and more general images of European decay since the time of Napoleon. The final canto in this sequence returns to the usura litany of Canto XLV, followed by detailed instructions on making flies for fishing (man in harmony with nature) and ends with a reference to the anti-Venetian League of Cambrai and the first Chinese written characters to appear in the poem, representing the Rectification of Names from the Analects of Confucius (the ideogram representing honesty at the end of Canto XLI was added when the Cantos were collected in a single volume).
LII – LXI (The China Cantos)
- 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 Pekin 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 reflect 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 Book 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 Tartars and the Tartar Wars, ending about 1200 CE. 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 dynast. 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 0r 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 the first emperor Jimmu, who supposedly ruled in the 7th century BCE to the late 16th century Toyotomi Hideyoshi (anglicised by Pound as Messier Undertree), who issued edicts against Christianity 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 treaty on borders 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)
- 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 form 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. 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 Washinton'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 layer 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.
LXXII – LXXIII
- 1944, in Italian
LXXIV – LXXXIV (The Pisan Cantos)
1945
LXXXV – XCV (Section: Rock-Drill)
- 1955
XCVI – CVI (Thrones)
- 1959
CVII – CIX (The Coke Cantos)
- 1959
CX – CXVII (Final fragments)
- 1970
References
- Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era (1971)
- Terrell, Carroll F. A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1980)
- Cookson, William A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (1985)
Online
- Marjorie Perloff on Pound Captured December 9th, 2004.