Poetry
The Cantos
Ezra Pound · 1925
Synopsis
A long unfinished poem, written over nearly fifty years, in one hundred and seventeen numbered cantos, the last of which remained in the state of drafts and fragments. It opens with Odysseus's descent among the dead, adapted from a Latin version of the Odyssey published in 1538, then moves without transition between periods and languages: letters of the lord of Rimini Sigismondo Malatesta, Medici bankers, annals of the emperors of China, letters of Jefferson and Adams, a litany against usury, troubadour songs. Greek, Latin, Italian, Provençal and Chinese ideograms often remain there untranslated.
Context
Three first cantos appeared in the Chicago magazine Poetry in 1917; their author abandoned them in the early twenties and redistributed their material, so that the poem begins with the volume of sixteen cantos printed in Paris in 1925, an art book of ninety copies. The sequels were spread over more than forty years. The cantos written at the Pisa camp, almost without books, are regarded as the most admired; the Bollingen Prize, awarded by the Library of Congress in February 1949 while the author was interned, caused a scandal. A pirate edition published in 1967 decided the American publisher, James Laughlin, to publish the last drafts.
Who it is for
A very long book, not to be read in one sitting. An annotated edition helps, and one has to accept not understanding everything: many passages remain untranslated.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the epic of English-language modernism and as its author's major work.
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