Posthumous Cantos

The Cantos

by Ezra Pound, Massimo Bacigalupo (Editor)

Ezra Pound’s Posthumous Cantos collects unpublished pages of his great poem, drawn from manuscripts held in the archive at Yale’s Beinecke Library and elsewhere. They are assembled by Pound’s Italian translator, the critic and scholar Massimo Bacigalupo, into a companion book to the Cantos, running from 1917 to 1972 and including the Cantos he wrote in Italian in 1944-5. This is the first English edition of a crucial part of the Pound canon. Posthumous Cantos is arranged to reflect the eight phases of the Cantos’ composition.

Genres: Poetry

220 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early-to-mid 20th century poetry.

Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."

In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.

Reviews

[Wayne Pounds · Rating 5 out of 5]

To Intrigue and Delight

In 2003, I received the original Italian version of Massimo Bacigalupo’s collection Canti postumi [Posthumous Cantos] (Mondadori, 2002), and I remember my pleasure in having in hand at this very late stage of Pound studies a collection of “new” Cantos. It made my New Year’s holiday new.
Though the editorial introduction and notes were in Italian, the drafts were all given in the original English (with the exception of the drafts for the Italian Cantos of 1944-45). Thus, for the most part (about 240 of the 260 some pages of poetry), the volume offered the reader a bilingual text with the English and the Italian on facing pages. Now we have the whole thing in English, with only the Italian Cantos as a bilingual text.
The inclusion of the early Three Cantos may occasion surprise, but Bacigalupo points out that these Cantos remained forgotten in the back issues of Poetry (and the volumes Lustra, 1917, and Quia Pauper Amavi, 1919) and were reprinted only after Pound’s death. “For this reason they can reasonably form part of a volume called Posthumous Cantos.”
Bacigalupo offers the following rationale for his collection: “It is a curious fact that Pound was a maniacal conservator of his notes, perhaps thinking that sooner or later the unused passages could prove useful (certainly he didn’t think that one day university libraries would vie for them at high prices). The result is that the published text of the Cantos is only the tip of an iceberg of partially published material: notebooks, manuscripts, drafts. And though in general he showed good judgment in choosing what to conserve and what to let perish, at times he indeed forgot precious passages among his daybooks and scribblings.
“The present volume thus offers a selection from this very abundant material, a selection based on criteria of quality, legibility, and documentary interest.” Some examples among many that immediately attract one’s interest: 1. The draft of the discussion between Pound and Eliot at Verona in 1922-- alluded to in Canto 78: “so we sat there by the arena”-- gives us an idea of Pound’s methods, Bacigalupo observes. Whereas Cantos 11, 12, 29, and 78 merely allude to the episode, the rejected draft is informative and diary-like, even commenting on the quality of the wine on the table. 2. For readers attracted to the paradisiacal “dimension of stillness” in The Cantos, the highlight of this gathering may be the three passages which at various stages were part of the famous Chinese Canto of the Seven Lakes (Canto 49). 3. In the same paradisiacal vein, the collection ends with the verses for Olga. Thus, in effect, as Bacigalupo says, Venus, announced in Canto 1, reappears at the end, a smiling and be-jeweled queller of monsters, “bearing the golden bough of Argicida.”
The final paragraph of Bacigalupo’s introduction must be quoted in full for the picture it gives of his family life and of the work here under review. “The Italian edition was dedicated to my parents Giuseppe and Frieda Bacigalupo, who in their roles as doctors and friends were always (I wrote) ‘generous to EP--and to me’. (‘Magnanimity / magnanimity / I know I ask a great deal’, as Pound puts it here.) Early on I contracted a debt with Olga Rudge and Dorothy and Ezra Pound, who put up with my youthful impertinence. In 1962 Pound wrote self-effacingly in my copy of XXX Cantos, the beautiful and accurate Scheiwiller edition translated by his daughter, ‘Hoping Massimo may find some good in it somewhere’. This volume should prove that Pound has not ceased to intrigue and delight over half a century.”
The current English text provides additional proof, if any is wanted--“bearing the bough of Argicida.”

[Louis Cabri]

The one-page poem, "What's poetry?" (24) is, the editor says, "an excerpt from a typescript of seventy-one lines, c. 1915" (184). Read this one.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some lovely lines scattered here and there, but much dross--the problem with The Cantos in general, a work I can't make myself read more than bits of.