A Draft of XXX Cantos

The Cantos #1-30

by Ezra Pound

The Cantos have been called Ezra Pound's intellectual diary, composed over the course of sixty years. Long out of print as a separate volume―it was originally published in 1933―this epic of nine groupings of poems is available from New Directions. An epic of great vision and complexity, Pound's Cantos addresses the profound human issues in history and in our time. Each of the nine groupings of poems can be seen as a fresh wave that swells out from and falls back upon the earlier cantos, extending them structurally, adding new layers of meaning. "A Draft of XXX Cantos" (1930), which introduces the work, thus anticipates the full Cantos ' essential themes and provides the surest entry into Pound's encyclopedic masterpiece.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1930

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

[Mat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glimpses of searing brilliance, but this is real workout for the brain.

Beat poet Philip Whalen once said that a poem is a graph of the mind as it moves, or something like that. And here, in A Draft of XXX Cantos we witness Pound's mind jump hither and thither, as he ponders certain recurring themes throughout history, and his mind is full of quotations, references and allusions to classical texts such as Homer, Virgil, and Dante, just to name the very few (because there are literally hundreds of references!!!). On top of that, Pound often includes quotations in their original languages - Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Provencal and then later on even Chinese! These are the first 30 poems or cantos (Italian for 'songs', and the word 'canto' was used by many older poets such as Dante and Shelley among others), of a very long epic poem that remained unfinished at his death, but I believe there are about 117 cantos in total.

Like other modernist poets, Pound turns to other art forms such as painting, sculpture and especially collage (as he and Eliot famously mix quotations and original poetry like a collage artist), to create these very difficult, but at times incredibly moving and beautiful poems. Thankfully, there is a book by Terrell called A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound. I highly recommend that book and a few others if you are going to try to wade through the murky texts of The Cantos. Pound is also a teacher, not just a poet. He is giving us the texts that he believes are interesting or stimulating but makes us do all the hard work. He points us to these texts like signs and if we are interetsed, he goes very deep, and like Virgil leading Dante through hell, then purgatory, and finally paradise, he will open our eyes to various themes throughout history, whether it is sexual degeneracy (of the Greek gods or humans) or the economic causes of warfare. Like any great mind though, it is sometimes hard to follow him and Joyce suffers from the same problem; namely, they are basically too smart for their own good. Hence, the small audience of scholars who read them. But reading Pound I have found both as rewarding as it is exhausting.

If you are willing to put in the effort, and wish to read The Cantos, start here. This is a little easier than the more famous sequence The Pisan Cantos, and besides, many of the same themes or stories re-emerge later on, because Pound was also trying to write in fugal form (based on fugue music, which returns to certain themes or melodies - this is another technique of modernism).

But if you want something to read from the comfort of your armchair or (even better) beach-chair, and not have to get up regularly, every few minutes, to find a reference book on the shelf in order to look up something damn obscure that Pound was trying to get across to, then maybe pass on this one, and go for his earlier poetry or his prose, which is relatively straightforward to read.

All in all, a brilliant, and brilliantly radiant sequence of poems but I want to dock one point for its arrogance and presumption - it assumes an erudition on the part of the reader which is far beyond that of the average man or woman. Yea, indeed, not for mere mortals.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

bit mental, too many different languages

[jesse]

Occasionally brilliant, frequently obnoxious (and so, on the whole: frustrating)

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

"And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end."

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nobody:

Literally nobody:

Ezra Pound: I speak 6 languages! I know more literary references than you do! I've read the Iliad! Here, let me write a book that combines ALL THESE THINGS INTO ONE BUNDLE OF EPIC POETRY that will make you feel like an uneducated shellfish to prove that I am smarter than you!

(The English major is not going well.)

[John Fitzgerald · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just no

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

currently using this book

[Michael Sapunor · Rating 3 out of 5]

?