The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Directions Books)

Product Information

Preda, R. (2017). Calendar of composition for three cantos. The Cantos Project. http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/overview/calendar-of-composition. Example: (Bressan, OCCEPIV: n.3). If no name is indicated, the gloss was written by Roxana Preda. In this case, the citation will have this format: ( OCCEPIV: n.13). Arena romana – Arena di Verona, built in the 1 st century AD, the fourth largest Roman theatre in Italy, capable of holding about 30,000 spectators (Bolla 24). It was originally used for shows of gladiators and fighting animals, then later for plays, opera, bullfights, and political events. The theatre originally had three tiers of galleries, but the third tier, the highest, was demolished to provide stone for the city wall in the time of Theodoric (r. Italy 493-526). (Bolla 13.) Public centavos – The one cent coin was money issued by the state as a national service, not a commodity produced by an individual and bearing a price tag. Cornering a public good was both immoral and illegal. Pound shows this, in spite of his obvious sympathy for Bacon. Terrell, C. F. (1980). A companion to the cantos of Ezra Pound. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gildersleeve, B. (2003). “Enigma” at the heart of paradise: Buddhism, Kuanon, and the feminine ideogram in the cantos. In Z. Qian (Ed.), Ezra Pound and China (pp. 193–212). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. The core meaning is summed up in Pound's footnote to the effect that the History Classic contains the essentials of the Confucian view of good government. In the canto, these are summed up in the line "Our dynasty came in because of a great sensibility", where sensibility translates the key character Ling, and in the reference to the four Tuan, or foundations, benevolence, rectitude, manners and knowledge. Rulers who Pound viewed as embodying some or all of these characteristics are adduced: Queen Elizabeth I, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, as are Napoleon III, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Dexter White, who stand for everything Pound opposes in government and finance. Nicholas Castaño – Nicolás Castaño y Capetillo (1836-1926) Spanish businessman and banker, one of the richest persons in Cuba during his lifetime.

PoemTalk #12, discussing Ezra Pound's "Cantico del Sole," November 14, 2008

The Cantos was initially published in the form of separate sections, each containing several cantos that were numbered sequentially using Roman numerals (except cantos 85–109, first published with Arabic numerals). The original publication dates for the groups of cantos are as given below. The complete collection of cantos was published together in 1987 (including a final short coda or fragment, dated 24 August 1966). In 2002 a bilingual edition of “Posthumous Cantos” ( Canti postumi) appeared in Italy. This is a concise selection from the mass of drafts (circa 1915–1965) uncollected or unpublished by Pound, and contains many passages that throw light on The Cantos. [5] I–XVI [ edit ] Published in 1924/5 as A Draft of XVI Cantos by the Three Mountains Press in Paris. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta "built a temple so full of pagan works" (Canto XI). Portrait by Piero della Francesca. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Nolde, J. (1983). Blossoms from the East: The Chinese cantos of Ezra Pound. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation. The canto and section end with a reference to the following lines from the second canto of the Paradiso—

Finally, Pound ends the canto by including a respectful dedication to Aphrodite. He uses the phrase “Cypria munimenta sortita est” which is Latin for “The citadels of Cyprus were her appointed realm,” suggesting that it’s only for love that a journey like this can be made. Without explaining why Pound felt like he needed to make a dedication to Aphrodite, the poem ends with “So that:”. The next five cantos (III–VII), again drawing heavily on Pound's Imagist past for their technique, are essentially based in the Mediterranean, drawing on classical mythology, Renaissance history, the world of the troubadours, Sappho's poetry, a scene from the legend of El Cid that introduces the theme of banking and credit, and Pound's own visits to Venice to create a textual collage saturated with neoplatonist images of clarity and light. Canto I’by Ezra Pound is the start of Pound’s collection of musings, The Cantos. ‘Canto I’is a translation of one part of The Odyssey. Originally, Pound conceived of Cantos XVII–XXVII as a group that would follow the first volume by starting with the Renaissance and ending with the Russian Revolution. He then added a further three cantos and the whole eventually appeared as A Draft of XXX Cantos in an edition of 200 copies. The major locus of these cantos is the city of Venice.In the next lines, Odysseus describes the ritual he and his men performed at the edge of the world, the place that Circe told them to go. He took out his sword and dug a “pitkin,” or a small pit, and everyone poured wine into it to honor the dead. Odysseus muses about the power of sacrifices, especially bulls, in the following lines. He adds a sheep t the pile for the blind prophet Tiresias. Because of all this praying and sacrificing, souls come out of “Erebus,” a part of the underworld. Yip, W. L. (1993). Diffusion of distances: Dialogues between Chinese and Western poetics. Berkeley: University of California Press. With the outbreak of war in 1939, Pound was in Italy, where he remained, despite a request for repatriation he made after Pearl Harbor. During this period, his main source of income was a series of radio broadcasts he made on Rome Radio. He used these broadcasts to express his full range of opinions on culture, politics and economics, including his opposition to American involvement in a European war and his anti-Semitism. In 1943, he was indicted for treason in his absence, and wrote a letter to the indicting judge in which he claimed the right to freedom of speech in his defence. This section of the cantos is, for the most part, made up of fragmentary citations from the writings of John Adams. Pound's intentions appear to be to show Adams as an example of the rational Enlightenment leader, thereby continuing the primary theme of the preceding China Cantos sequence, which these cantos also follow from chronologically. Adams is depicted as a rounded figure; he is a strong leader with interests in political, legal and cultural matters in much the same way that Malatesta and Mussolini are portrayed elsewhere in the poem. The English jurist Sir Edward Coke, who is an important figure in some later cantos, first appears in this section of the poem. Given the fragmentary nature of the citations used, these cantos can be quite difficult to follow for the reader with no knowledge of the history of the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The canto closes with a number of instances of sexual love between gods and humans set in a paradisiacal vision of the natural world. The invocation of the goddess and the vision of paradise are sandwiched between two citations of Richard of St. Victor's statement ubi amor, ibi oculuc est ("where love is, there the eye is"), binding together the concepts of love, light and vision in a single image.