Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX - CXVII

The Cantos #110-117

by Ezra Pound

Association copy. Inscribed and signed by Ezra Pound to Priscilla Morgan." Priscilla's Birthday Best Wishes Ezra Pound" Dated October 10. 1970. The year this book was published.This copy was most likely given to her by Ezra Pound at her birthday party. Priscilla Morgan, New York patron of arts and artists,. The long-standing friendship between Priscilla Morgan and Ezra Pound was a direct outcome of Gian Carlo Menotti and his Spoleto Festival. One day in Rome, he bumped into Priscilla Morgan, one of most most influential patrons of art and culture and true "curator of people", and the longtime mistress of the sculptor and landscape architect, Isamu Noguchi. Menotti invited her to Spoleto and over the years she became highly involved and eventually became an associate director of the festival. Pound, who by now was also a frequent guest at Menotti's Spoleto Festival, became good friends with Priscilla Morgan and Isamu Noguchi. At every dinner, Priscilla would seat Pound next to Noguchi. Pound had sworn to a vow of silence and would often not eat, but Isamu would cut up his meat and she recalls him encouraging Pound, "now Ezra, eat!" and he would pick up his fork and start eating. When Pound died in 1972, it was Priscilla Morgan who asked Noguchi to design his gravestone. It was Buckminster Fuller who wrote, “To Priscilla, whose prescience in respect to creative events and recognition of creative competence, combined with her loveliness, integrity, and dedication, has made her the twentieth century’s last half’s greatest and most effective shepherdess of many of life’s most significant creative regenerations.” Book is about fine. Just the slightest of wear. Spine lettering is as new. The dust wrapper has a couple short closed tears. One tiny chip bottom of front cover.. Covers are slightly darkened. A Very good or better copy. A gift to Ms. Morgan. A member of Pound's inner circle at the very end of his life.

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

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

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful variant of the standard edition of the end of The Cantos and amongst the most lyrical sections of the poem, given over to the Noh moon instead of the divine light planned in 1910 or so. Numbered edition of 310, hand printed by K. K. Marker on Umbria paper at Stone Wall Press in Iowa City, bound in cloth boards with a paper label on the spine, in paper-covered slip case, 200 copies for New Directions, 100 for Faber & Faber, 10 for Stone Wall. All are signed by Pound (not Edmund Dulac's 'chop' EP ordinarily used to 'sign' books) on the limitation page. As is not uncommon with Pound titles the publication date is off. Printing was delayed into 1969. Folio, 12"-15". Gallup A91c.