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The Cantos
Posthumous Cantos
Ezra Pound’s Posthumous Cantos collects unpublished pages of his great poem, drawn from manuscripts held in the archive at Yale’s Beinecke Library and elsewhere.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.
- GenresPoetry
220 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
About the author
Ezra Pound
563 books1,052 followersEzra 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.
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.
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October 3, 2026
"If you would be God, write poetry". ---Gustave Flaubert
Ezra Pound's standing in world literature is such that his discarded notes and jottings, what Pound called "the scrapings from the bottom of the cracker barrel", have been saved, annotated, and served up for consumption by us Poundians. POSTHUMOUS CANTOS reveal a mind constantly engaged with literature, politics, personalities, and Pound's search for an earthly paradise, PARADISO TERRESTRE, amidst the violent twentieth century. THE CANTOS, to paraphrase what someone said of Pound's bete noire, Winston Churchill, is autobiography disguised as a history of the universe. Pound, who called himself "the last American living out the tragedy of Europe", left these notes, unintentionally, to be sure, to serve as a guide to his own vision of beauty, a history of the rise and fall of the great civilizations from antiquity to the Renaissance, and an instruction manual for keeping one's head amid the storms of politics. Massimo Bacigalupo, an Italian Pound scholar, has woven these at times desultory pieces into a coherent, eloquent whole by tracing major themes in THE CANTOS back to their origins in Ezra's head.
Pound understood that in modern times the poet could not be disassociated from his poetry. Pretension to an objective voice standing outside the text in godlike fashion, as in the muses Dante and Homer, what Pound called "the Attic gaze," was impossible in an age when all convictions about God and Man had been lost. These jottings take us inside Ezra Pound while he composed-his literary friends in London and Paris, memories of a bygone America where he grew up, his love affair with the violinist Olga Rudge, mutterings by fellow loonies at St. Elizabeth mental hospital in Washington, D.C., where Pound was incarcerated from 1946-58, -all made their way into his art. The political turmoil of Europe at war with itself and the putative solution of Italian Fascism adds another layer. The trenches of World War One, bankers capturing political power in the post-war world, a meeting between Mussolini, Olga and Pound at the Palazzo Venezia, the conspirators, such as US Attorney General Francis Biddle, who indicted Pound for treason in 1943, and one canto refers to the "Biddle sky" over Pisa, where Pound was locked up in a POW cage, serve to remind us that no one could escape being political during the downfall of European civilization. Still, there was a way out of the personal and political madness: Beauty, harmony, and "the live tradition" of poetry are the third topping of THE CANTOS. As long as Man could still drink from the moral wisdom of the ancients and render it anew to the modern world, there was hope for building a new humane civilization.
In one note, Pound calls the twentieth century, "a beastly and cantankerous age". A blast from the past might help moderns find a way out. Simultaneity is the way Pound found to tell "the story of the tribe", humanity's search for an earthly paradise freed from strife and oppression. Confucian China, Athens in her glory, Florence in the Age of the Medici, and the America of John Adams and Andrew Jackson coexist and overlap in these pages, sometimes in the same poetic line, to show what the human mind has accomplished. A reverence for nature and filial piety guided Kung (Confucius) and other sages when they remodeled the state around strong families. Pound is like a sketch artist seeing for the first time the wonders of the sacred mountain of Taishan. The ancient Greeks never wavered from defending the purity of language in an age of corrupting commerce and overseas conquest; a significant parallel to Pound's contemporary, Heidegger. The rulers of Renaissance Italy like Lorenzo the Magnificent cultivated artists, for they knew the true magnificence of the state is found in frescoes and basilicas. America at birth was a wild civilization, but politicians knew enough to keep the currency uncorrupted, and statesmen like Adams were first-rate writers. POSTHUMOUS NOTEBOOKS serve as an introduction to history the Pound way: politics, ethics, and aesthetics blended into a beautiful shawl of distilled colors.
Sadly, Pound permitted his vision to creep over into support for the Mussolini regime and European fascism. A meeting with the man Pound dubbed "the Boss" convinced him Kung and Jefferson had been reborn in Italy. Poetic notes from the late Twenties and Thirties conflate Mussolini with the great artists and statesmen of the Renaissance, with the bonus that "Ole Muss" took up the cause of monetary reform. More arcane jottings refer to medieval lending practices and the decay of pure thought to the benefit of finance. The approach of war in 1939 drove Pound to redouble his efforts to lend THE CANTOS a pacifist strain. Pound reminds himself, and us, that in the Confucian classics "there are no righteous wars". Significantly, in these drafts Pound included Buddha in his pantheon of peaceful saints in tune with nature, yet removed him when revising THE CANTOS for publication. Had he realized that Mussolini wasn't preaching peace dressed in orange robes? The fascist and peacenik Pound are at war with themselves inside Ezra's head. He never did reconcile his wish for the starry city at peace with itself and the gods with his adulation of power and brute force.
The wartime CANTOS (1940-45) are an embarrassment to Pound's memory and his adoring readers. Wisely, he chose to write them in Italian, and that is how his daughter Mary, executor of his literary estate, maintained them for final publication. Bacigalupo provides an English translation of the original drafts, and it is dreadful stuff. Pound writes that the world war is for profits and division of spoils, and puts the blame on his usual subjects-international bankers and their marionettes in London and Paris. The suddenly jingoistic Pound celebrates the fall of France in the summer of 1940 and hails collaborators Pétain and Laval for saving their country; presumably by taking up Germany's generous offer to surrender. Mussolini is now cast in the guise of Napoleon, desperately fighting to keep Europe away from the hands of usurers. An odd note coming from Pound, but in keeping with his allegiance to the Duce, is anti-communism. He is quick to note that for him, unlike the Communists, the enemy is not property but capital, seizing and making profit without work.
The Anglo-American invasion of Italy in 1943, Mussolini's removal from office by the King, and continuous Allied bombardment of northern Italy and his beloved Greece sent Pound into his own hell, along with his wife Dorothy and lover Olga Rudge. The notebooks recount their flight into one haven and then another, while Ezra muses that these are the 100 Days of the fascist regime-the Duce will come back after being betrayed by the King and court. He thanks a neighbor, Bacigalupo's father, for lending him a priceless book on how Napoleon survived to fight once again, but nothing can stop the plunge into Inferno. Locked up by the American Army in a tiny wired cage at Pisa, he records conversations overheard from his fellow prisoners, murderers and thieves from the US Army with whom he now felt kinship. He renews his belief that nature is the only balm for a sick, wounded civilization. He despises his captors for relying on arms to make their case triumph, and gets on with the task of educating the populace. While the birds sing, the men of culture will prevail. Did he have any regrets? Pound recalls Olga chiding Mussolini during their only meeting, but it's unclear whether he is referring to the Duce's politics or wretched violin playing. In THE PISAN CANTOS Pound wrote that Mussolini had been "wrecked for an error". What was it? Trusting the King or listening to Hitler?
Pound's twelve "bughouse years", 1946-58, and return to Italy produced poetry of humility and pride in about equal measure. He had learned the painful lesson that "friends are the treasure" after visits from Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, among other literati. But he was still trying to fix the world. Now that Mussolini is gone, he wonders, in one jotting, who will stand up to the Bolsheviks? The good rulers were all in the past, like Roger of Sicily, who coined his own money and tolerated the Muslims, the Roman Emperor Julian, who laid low taxes, and the Chinese emperors, who legislated based on proportion. Pound insists that he had always championed "citoyen versus dictatorship" by defending the English language, which had been corrupted during the nineteenth century. By whom? The Rothschilds, of course, who had footed the bill for the papacy in return for the Pope abolishing the Vatican ghetto. He was still faithful to cleansing the world of usury and "paideuma", relying on Dante, Confucius, and the Provençal poets to unlock the inner being of a civilization. Why hadn't the masses listened to him? Their heads were stuck on baseball, "Connie Mack and Happy Chandler," or at least that's what he overheard in the asylum corridors. The two sections of THE CANTOS written at St. Elizabeth's, THRONES and ROCK DRILL, dive deep into Chinese history and early America ("ARRIBA ADAMS!") without offering any apology or apologia for his sordid wartime radio broadcasts. Pound was in denial, his head was in trouble, and the America that birthed him had changed beyond recognition.
Olga Rudge was Pound's mistress and muse for fifty years. She forsook her musical career to be with him and refused friends' calls to abandon Pound and Italy during the war. Olga was Eurydice, "ever willing to resurrect the good, such as it was, in me". In a note to future editors of THE CANTOS, he made it clear that no matter what he wrote in the meantime, the final Canto would be dedicated to her. She stayed resolute by her man and his principles, while the cowards on both sides, Allies and ex-Fascists, ran for the door of safety: "Her name was Olga and is spelled COURAGE". Some critics say THE CANTOS contain no love poems because Pound never learned to love. These rough drafts belie such an assertion. The ugliness around Pound, his life, family, and Europe itself in ruins, forced him at last to embrace love, "gone as lightning, enduring 5,000 years", as the one thing that never deserted a man. Without Olga, Pound would have died in that cage at Pisa, gone insane in the asylum, or fallen into depression. Politics had crushed him, and love saved him.
Pound published no new Cantos after being reunited with his family at Brunnenburg castle, but DRAFTS & FRAGMENTS OF THE CANTOS (1968) is the greatest accomplishment of his entire career. He reached deep inside and twisted his heart to expose himself to the world: "And though my wrecks and errors lie about me, I am not a demigod, I cannot make it cohere". The world remained locked in corruption, "where the dead walked, and the living were made of cardboard"; still, it was "better to choose blindness", than have your mind stopped. Old friends were dying, Eliot, Stravinsky, but their legacy endured even while his lay in the balance. Pound himself died in 1972, Olga by his side, with THE CANTOS his gift to the world. Bacigalupo has meticulously probed every line of the unseen Cantos for clarity and critical analysis, and that is our blessing.
Ezra Pound's standing in world literature is such that his discarded notes and jottings, what Pound called "the scrapings from the bottom of the cracker barrel", have been saved, annotated, and served up for consumption by us Poundians. POSTHUMOUS CANTOS reveal a mind constantly engaged with literature, politics, personalities, and Pound's search for an earthly paradise, PARADISO TERRESTRE, amidst the violent twentieth century. THE CANTOS, to paraphrase what someone said of Pound's bete noire, Winston Churchill, is autobiography disguised as a history of the universe. Pound, who called himself "the last American living out the tragedy of Europe", left these notes, unintentionally, to be sure, to serve as a guide to his own vision of beauty, a history of the rise and fall of the great civilizations from antiquity to the Renaissance, and an instruction manual for keeping one's head amid the storms of politics. Massimo Bacigalupo, an Italian Pound scholar, has woven these at times desultory pieces into a coherent, eloquent whole by tracing major themes in THE CANTOS back to their origins in Ezra's head.
Pound understood that in modern times the poet could not be disassociated from his poetry. Pretension to an objective voice standing outside the text in godlike fashion, as in the muses Dante and Homer, what Pound called "the Attic gaze," was impossible in an age when all convictions about God and Man had been lost. These jottings take us inside Ezra Pound while he composed-his literary friends in London and Paris, memories of a bygone America where he grew up, his love affair with the violinist Olga Rudge, mutterings by fellow loonies at St. Elizabeth mental hospital in Washington, D.C., where Pound was incarcerated from 1946-58, -all made their way into his art. The political turmoil of Europe at war with itself and the putative solution of Italian Fascism adds another layer. The trenches of World War One, bankers capturing political power in the post-war world, a meeting between Mussolini, Olga and Pound at the Palazzo Venezia, the conspirators, such as US Attorney General Francis Biddle, who indicted Pound for treason in 1943, and one canto refers to the "Biddle sky" over Pisa, where Pound was locked up in a POW cage, serve to remind us that no one could escape being political during the downfall of European civilization. Still, there was a way out of the personal and political madness: Beauty, harmony, and "the live tradition" of poetry are the third topping of THE CANTOS. As long as Man could still drink from the moral wisdom of the ancients and render it anew to the modern world, there was hope for building a new humane civilization.
In one note, Pound calls the twentieth century, "a beastly and cantankerous age". A blast from the past might help moderns find a way out. Simultaneity is the way Pound found to tell "the story of the tribe", humanity's search for an earthly paradise freed from strife and oppression. Confucian China, Athens in her glory, Florence in the Age of the Medici, and the America of John Adams and Andrew Jackson coexist and overlap in these pages, sometimes in the same poetic line, to show what the human mind has accomplished. A reverence for nature and filial piety guided Kung (Confucius) and other sages when they remodeled the state around strong families. Pound is like a sketch artist seeing for the first time the wonders of the sacred mountain of Taishan. The ancient Greeks never wavered from defending the purity of language in an age of corrupting commerce and overseas conquest; a significant parallel to Pound's contemporary, Heidegger. The rulers of Renaissance Italy like Lorenzo the Magnificent cultivated artists, for they knew the true magnificence of the state is found in frescoes and basilicas. America at birth was a wild civilization, but politicians knew enough to keep the currency uncorrupted, and statesmen like Adams were first-rate writers. POSTHUMOUS NOTEBOOKS serve as an introduction to history the Pound way: politics, ethics, and aesthetics blended into a beautiful shawl of distilled colors.
Sadly, Pound permitted his vision to creep over into support for the Mussolini regime and European fascism. A meeting with the man Pound dubbed "the Boss" convinced him Kung and Jefferson had been reborn in Italy. Poetic notes from the late Twenties and Thirties conflate Mussolini with the great artists and statesmen of the Renaissance, with the bonus that "Ole Muss" took up the cause of monetary reform. More arcane jottings refer to medieval lending practices and the decay of pure thought to the benefit of finance. The approach of war in 1939 drove Pound to redouble his efforts to lend THE CANTOS a pacifist strain. Pound reminds himself, and us, that in the Confucian classics "there are no righteous wars". Significantly, in these drafts Pound included Buddha in his pantheon of peaceful saints in tune with nature, yet removed him when revising THE CANTOS for publication. Had he realized that Mussolini wasn't preaching peace dressed in orange robes? The fascist and peacenik Pound are at war with themselves inside Ezra's head. He never did reconcile his wish for the starry city at peace with itself and the gods with his adulation of power and brute force.
The wartime CANTOS (1940-45) are an embarrassment to Pound's memory and his adoring readers. Wisely, he chose to write them in Italian, and that is how his daughter Mary, executor of his literary estate, maintained them for final publication. Bacigalupo provides an English translation of the original drafts, and it is dreadful stuff. Pound writes that the world war is for profits and division of spoils, and puts the blame on his usual subjects-international bankers and their marionettes in London and Paris. The suddenly jingoistic Pound celebrates the fall of France in the summer of 1940 and hails collaborators Pétain and Laval for saving their country; presumably by taking up Germany's generous offer to surrender. Mussolini is now cast in the guise of Napoleon, desperately fighting to keep Europe away from the hands of usurers. An odd note coming from Pound, but in keeping with his allegiance to the Duce, is anti-communism. He is quick to note that for him, unlike the Communists, the enemy is not property but capital, seizing and making profit without work.
The Anglo-American invasion of Italy in 1943, Mussolini's removal from office by the King, and continuous Allied bombardment of northern Italy and his beloved Greece sent Pound into his own hell, along with his wife Dorothy and lover Olga Rudge. The notebooks recount their flight into one haven and then another, while Ezra muses that these are the 100 Days of the fascist regime-the Duce will come back after being betrayed by the King and court. He thanks a neighbor, Bacigalupo's father, for lending him a priceless book on how Napoleon survived to fight once again, but nothing can stop the plunge into Inferno. Locked up by the American Army in a tiny wired cage at Pisa, he records conversations overheard from his fellow prisoners, murderers and thieves from the US Army with whom he now felt kinship. He renews his belief that nature is the only balm for a sick, wounded civilization. He despises his captors for relying on arms to make their case triumph, and gets on with the task of educating the populace. While the birds sing, the men of culture will prevail. Did he have any regrets? Pound recalls Olga chiding Mussolini during their only meeting, but it's unclear whether he is referring to the Duce's politics or wretched violin playing. In THE PISAN CANTOS Pound wrote that Mussolini had been "wrecked for an error". What was it? Trusting the King or listening to Hitler?
Pound's twelve "bughouse years", 1946-58, and return to Italy produced poetry of humility and pride in about equal measure. He had learned the painful lesson that "friends are the treasure" after visits from Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, among other literati. But he was still trying to fix the world. Now that Mussolini is gone, he wonders, in one jotting, who will stand up to the Bolsheviks? The good rulers were all in the past, like Roger of Sicily, who coined his own money and tolerated the Muslims, the Roman Emperor Julian, who laid low taxes, and the Chinese emperors, who legislated based on proportion. Pound insists that he had always championed "citoyen versus dictatorship" by defending the English language, which had been corrupted during the nineteenth century. By whom? The Rothschilds, of course, who had footed the bill for the papacy in return for the Pope abolishing the Vatican ghetto. He was still faithful to cleansing the world of usury and "paideuma", relying on Dante, Confucius, and the Provençal poets to unlock the inner being of a civilization. Why hadn't the masses listened to him? Their heads were stuck on baseball, "Connie Mack and Happy Chandler," or at least that's what he overheard in the asylum corridors. The two sections of THE CANTOS written at St. Elizabeth's, THRONES and ROCK DRILL, dive deep into Chinese history and early America ("ARRIBA ADAMS!") without offering any apology or apologia for his sordid wartime radio broadcasts. Pound was in denial, his head was in trouble, and the America that birthed him had changed beyond recognition.
Olga Rudge was Pound's mistress and muse for fifty years. She forsook her musical career to be with him and refused friends' calls to abandon Pound and Italy during the war. Olga was Eurydice, "ever willing to resurrect the good, such as it was, in me". In a note to future editors of THE CANTOS, he made it clear that no matter what he wrote in the meantime, the final Canto would be dedicated to her. She stayed resolute by her man and his principles, while the cowards on both sides, Allies and ex-Fascists, ran for the door of safety: "Her name was Olga and is spelled COURAGE". Some critics say THE CANTOS contain no love poems because Pound never learned to love. These rough drafts belie such an assertion. The ugliness around Pound, his life, family, and Europe itself in ruins, forced him at last to embrace love, "gone as lightning, enduring 5,000 years", as the one thing that never deserted a man. Without Olga, Pound would have died in that cage at Pisa, gone insane in the asylum, or fallen into depression. Politics had crushed him, and love saved him.
Pound published no new Cantos after being reunited with his family at Brunnenburg castle, but DRAFTS & FRAGMENTS OF THE CANTOS (1968) is the greatest accomplishment of his entire career. He reached deep inside and twisted his heart to expose himself to the world: "And though my wrecks and errors lie about me, I am not a demigod, I cannot make it cohere". The world remained locked in corruption, "where the dead walked, and the living were made of cardboard"; still, it was "better to choose blindness", than have your mind stopped. Old friends were dying, Eliot, Stravinsky, but their legacy endured even while his lay in the balance. Pound himself died in 1972, Olga by his side, with THE CANTOS his gift to the world. Bacigalupo has meticulously probed every line of the unseen Cantos for clarity and critical analysis, and that is our blessing.
May 19, 2020
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.”
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.”
Read
May 31, 2016The 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.
September 20, 2016
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.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews