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Contents
Articles
The Cantos 1
Ezra Pound 22

References
Article Sources and Contributors 54
Image Sources, Licenses and Contributors 55

Article Licenses
License 56
The Cantos 1

The Cantos
The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections,
each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and
1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early
cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a
book-length work, widely considered to present formidable difficulties
to the reader. The Cantos is generally considered one of the most
significant works of modernist poetry in the 20th century. As in
Pound's prose writing, the themes of economics, governance and
culture are integral to the work's content.

The most striking feature of the text, to a casual browser, is the

inclusion of Chinese characters as well as quotations in European
languages other than English. Recourse to scholarly commentaries is
almost inevitable for a close reader. The range of allusion to historical
events is very broad, and abrupt changes occur with little transition.
There is also wide geographical reference; Pound added to his earlier
interests in the classical Mediterranean culture and East Asia selective
1913 photograph of Ezra Pound by Alvin
topics from medieval and early modern Italy and Provence, the Langdon Coburn
beginnings of the United States, England of the 17th century, and
details from Africa he had obtained from Leo Frobenius. References without explanation abound. Pound initially
believed that he possessed poetic and rhetorical techniques which would themselves generate significance, but as
time passed he became more concerned with the messages he wished to convey.

The section he wrote at the end of World War II, begun while he was interned in American-occupied Italy, has
become known as The Pisan Cantos, is often considered to be self-contained. It was awarded the first Bollingen
Prize in 1948. There were many repercussions, since this in effect honoured a poet who had been condemned as a
traitor in his native country, and who had been diagnosed with a serious mental illness.

Background

Publication history
The earliest part of The Cantos to be published were released by Three Mountains Press in 1925 under the title A
Draft of XVI Cantos. The first complete edition was New Direction's The Cantos (1-109)

Controversy
The Cantos has always been a controversial work, initially so because of the experimental nature of the writing. The
controversy has intensified since 1940 when Pound's very public stance on the war in Europe and his support for
Benito Mussolini's fascism became widely known. Much critical discussion of the poem has focused on the
relationship between, on the one hand, the economic thesis on usura, Pound's antisemitism, his adulation of
Confucian ideals of government and his attitude towards fascism, and, on the other, passages of lyrical poetry and
the historical scene-setting that he performed with his 'ideographic' technique. At one end of the spectrum George P.
ElliotWikipedia:Avoid weasel words has drawn a parallel between Pound and Adolph Eichmann based on their
antisemitism,[1] while at the other Marjorie Perloff places Pound's antisemitism in a wider context by examining the
political views of many of his contemporaries, arguing that "We have to try to understand why" antisemitism was
widespread in the early twentieth century, "and not say let's get rid of Ezra Pound, who also happens to be one of the
The Cantos 2

greatest poets of the 20th C." [2]

However, all of this is complicated by the fact that The Cantos themselves contain very little evidence of Pound's
otherwise blatant antisemitism: in fact, in a close study of the poem, Wendy Stallard Flory concluded that it
contained only seven passages of antisemitic sentiment in the 803 pages she read.[3] Further, when Allen Ginsberg
visited him in Rapallo in October 1967, Pound described his previous work to Ginsberg as: "A mess ... stupidity and
ignorance all the way through." And later (as they dined in the Pensione Alle Salute da Cici restaurant in Venice) he
even admitted to Ginsberg, Peter Russell, and Michael Reck that: "... my worst mistake was the stupid suburban
anti-Semitic prejudice, all along that spoiled everything ... I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a
moron ... I should have been able to do better ..."[4] Even his views on usury shifted in his later years: two weeks
before his 87th birthday he read for a gathering of friends at a café: "re USURY / I was out of focus, taking a
symptom for a cause. / The cause is AVARICE."[5] However, even despite his earlier views, Pound still had
defenders: Louis Zukofsky (who was Jewish) defended Pound on the basis of his personal knowledge of
antisemitism on the level of human exchange — even though (according to William Cookson[6]) their
correspondence contained some of Pound's offensive views. Thus, although Pound indeed distrusted the masses,
"foreigners," and so forth, The Cantos themselves (with their references to Confucius, the agrarian populism of
Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democracy, and even the "enlightened despotism" of Leopold II) reflect the underlying
conservative sentiment behind his more well-known social and economic views (including his antisemitism.)[citation
needed]

Structure
The Cantos can appear on first reading to be chaotic or structureless because it lacks plot or a definite ending. R.P.
Blackmur, an early critic, wrote,
The Cantos are not complex, they are complicated; they are not arrayed by logic or driven by pursuing
emotion, they are connected because they follow one another, are set side by side, and because an
anecdote, an allusion or a sentence begun in one Canto may be continued in another and may never be
completed at all; and as for a theme to be realized, they seem to have only, like Mauberley, the general
sense of continuity — not unity — which may arise in the mind when read seriatim. The Cantos are
what Mr Pound himself called them in a passage now excised from the canon, a rag-bag.[7]
The issue of incoherence of the work is reflected by the equivocal note sounded in the final two more-or-less
completed cantos; according to William Cookson, the final two cantos show that Pound has been unable to make his
materials cohere, while they insist that the world itself still does cohere.[8] Pound and T. S. Eliot had previously
approached the subject of fragmentation of human experience: while Eliot was writing, and Pound editing, The
Waste Land, Pound had said that he looked upon experience as similar to a series of iron filings on a mirror.[9] Each
filing is disconnected, but they are drawn into the shape of a rose by the presence of a magnet. The Cantos takes a
position between the mythic unity of Eliot's poem and Joyce's flow of consciousness and attempting to work out how
history (as fragment) and personality (as shattered by modern existence) can cohere in the "field" of poetry.[citation
needed]

Nevertheless, there are indications in Pound's other writings that there may have been some formal plan underlying
the work. In his 1918 essay A Retrospect, Pound wrote "I think there is a 'fluid' as well as a 'solid' content, that some
poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical forms have
certain uses. That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical
forms". Critics like Hugh Kenner who take a more positive view of The Cantos have tended to follow this hint,
seeing the poem as a poetic record of Pound's life and reading that sends out new branches as new needs arise with
the final poem, like a tree, displaying a kind of unpredictable inevitability.[citation needed]
Another approach to the structure of the work is based on a letter Pound wrote to his father in the 1920s, in which he
stated that his plan was:
The Cantos 3

A. A. Live man goes down into world of dead.

C. B. 'The repeat in history.'
B. C. The 'magic moment' or moment of metamorphosis, bust through from quotidian into 'divine or
permanent world.' Gods, etc.
[The letter columns ACB/ABC may indicate the sequences in which the concepts could be presented.] In the light of
cantos written later than this letter, it would be possible to add other recurring motifs to this list, such as: periploi
('voyages around'); vegetation rituals such as the Eleusinian Mysteries; usura, banking and credit; and the drive
towards clarity in art, such as the 'clear line' of Renaissance painting and the 'clear song' of the troubadours.[citation
needed]

The poem's symbolic structure also makes use of an opposition between darkness and light. Images of light are used
variously, and may represent Neoplatonic ideas of divinity, the artistic impulse, love (both sacred and physical) and
good governance, amongst other things. The moon is frequently associated in the poem with creativity, while the sun
is more often found in relation to the sphere of political and social activity, although there is frequent overlap
between the two. From the Rock Drill sequence on, the poem's effort is to merge these two aspects of light into a
unified whole.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]

I–XVI
Published in 1924/5 as A Draft of XVI Cantos by the Three Mountains Press in Paris.
Pound had been considering writing a long poem since around 1905, but work did not begin until sometime between
1912 and 1917, when the initial versions of the first three cantos of the proposed "poem of some length" were
published in the journal Poetry. In this version, the poem began as an address by the poet to the ghost of Robert
Browning. Pound came to believe that this narrative voice compromised the revolutionary intent of his poetic vision,
and these first three ur-cantos were soon abandoned and a new starting point sought. The answer was a Latin version
of Homer's Odyssey by the Renaissance scholar Andreas Divus that Pound had bought in Paris sometime between
1906 and 1910.
Using the metre and syntax of his 1911 version of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer, Pound made an English
version of Divus' rendering of the nekuia episode in which Odysseus and his companions sail to Hades in order to
find out what their future holds. In using this passage to open the poem, Pound introduces a major theme: the
excavating of the "dead" past to illuminate the present and future. He also echoes Dante's opening to The Divine
Comedy in which the poet also descends into hell to interrogate the dead. The canto concludes with some fragments
from the Second Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, in a Latin version by Georgius Dartona which Pound found in the
Divus volume, followed by "So that:"—an invitation to read on.
Canto II opens with some lines rescued from the ur-cantos in which Pound reflects on the indeterminacy of identity
by setting side by side four different versions of the troubadour poet Sordello:[10] Browning's poem of that name, the
actual Sordello of flesh and blood, Pound's own version of the poet, and the Sordello of the brief life appended to
manuscripts of his poems. These lines are followed by a sequence of identity shifts involving a seal, the daughter of
Lir, and other figures associated with the sea: Eleanor of Aquitaine who, through a pair of Homeric epithets that echo
her name, shifts into Helen of Troy, Homer with his ear for the "sea surge", the old men of Troy who want to send
Helen back over the sea, and an extended, Imagistic retelling of the story of the abduction of Dionysus by sailors and
his transformation of his abductors into dolphins. Although this last story is found in the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus,
also contained in the Divus volume, Pound draws on the version in Ovid's poem Metamorphoses, thus introducing
the world of ancient Rome into the poem.
The Cantos 4

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
Neoplatonic images of clarity and light.

Cantos VIII–XI draw on the story of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta,

15th-century poet, condottiere, lord of Rimini and patron of the arts.
Quoting extensively from primary sources, including Malatesta's
letters, Pound especially focuses on the building of the church of San
Francesco, also known as the Tempio Malatestiano. Designed by Leon
Battista Alberti and decorated by artists including Piero della
Francesca and Agostino di Duccio, this was a landmark Renaissance
building, being the first church to use the Roman triumphal arch as part Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta "built a temple so
of its structure. For Pound, who spent a good deal of time seeking full of pagane works" (Canto XI). Portrait by
patrons for himself, Joyce, Eliot and a string of little magazines and Piero della Francesca.

small presses, the role of the patron was a crucial cultural question, and
Malatesta is the first in a line of ruler-patrons to appear in The Cantos.

Canto XII consists of three moral tales on the subject of profit.[11] The first and third of these treat of the creation of
profit ex nihilo by exploiting the money supply, comparing this activity with "unnatural" fertility. The central parable
contrasts this with wealth-creation based on the creation of useful goods. Canto XIII then introduces Confucius, or
Kung, who is presented as the embodiment of the ideal of social order based on ethics.
This section of The Cantos concludes with a vision of Hell. Cantos XIV and XV use the convention of the Divine
Comedy to present Pound/Dante moving through a hell populated by bankers, newspaper editors, hack writers and
other 'perverters of language' and the social order. In Canto XV, Plotinus takes the role of guide played by Virgil in
Dante's poem. In Canto XVI, Pound emerges from Hell and into an earthly paradise where he sees some of the
personages encountered in earlier cantos. The poem then moves to recollections of World War I, and of Pound's
writer and artist friends who fought in it. These include Richard Aldington, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham
Lewis, Ernest Hemingway and Fernand Léger, whose war memories the poem includes a passage from (in French).
Finally, there is a transcript of Lincoln Steffens' account of the Russian Revolution. These two events, the war and
revolution, mark a decisive break with the historic past, including the early modernist period when these writers and
artists formed a more-or-less coherent movement.

XVII–XXX
XVII–XXVII published in 1924/5 as A Draft of XVI Cantos by the Three Mountains Press in Paris. Cantos
I–XXX published in 1930 in A Draft of XXX Cantos by Nancy Cunard's Hours Press.
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.
Canto XVII opens with the words "So that", echoing the end of Canto I, and then moves on to another
Dionysus-related metamorphosis story. The rest of the canto is concerned with Venice, which is portrayed as a stone
forest growing out of the water. Cantos XVIII and XIX return to the theme of financial exploitation, beginning with
the Venetian explorer Marco Polo's account of Kublai Khan's paper money. Canto XIX deals mainly with those who
The Cantos 5

profit from war, returning briefly to the Russian Revolution, and ends on the stupidity of wars and those who
promote them.
Canto XX opens with a grouping of phrases, words and images from Mediterranean poetry, ranging from Homer
through Ovid, Propertius and Catullus to the Song of Roland and Arnaut Daniel. These fragments constellate to form
an exemplum of what Pound calls "clear song". There follows another exemplum, this time of the linguistic
scholarship that enables us to read these old poetries and the specific attention to words this study requires. Finally,
this "clear song" and intellectual activity is implicitly contrasted with the inertia and indolence of the lotus eaters,
whose song completes the canto. There are references to the Malatesta family and to Borso d'Este, who tried to keep
the peace between the warring Italian city states.
Canto XXI deals with the machinations of the Medici bank, especially with the Medicis' effect on Venice. These are
contrasted with the actions of Thomas Jefferson, who is shown as a cultured leader with an interest in the arts. A
phrase from one of Sigismondo Pandolfo's letters inserted into the Jefferson passage draws an explicit parallel
between the two men, a theme that is to recur later in the poem. The next canto continues the focus on finance by
introducing the Social Credit theories of C.H. Douglas for the first time.
Canto XXIII returns to the world of the troubadours via Homer and Renaissance Neoplatonism. Pound saw
Provençal culture as a nexus of survival of the old pagan beliefs, and the destruction of the Cathar stronghold at
Montségur at the end of the Albigensian Crusade is held up as an example of the tendency of authority to crush all
such alternative cultures. The destruction of Montségur is implicitly compared with the destruction of Troy in the
closing lines of the canto. Canto XXIV then returns to 15th-century Italy and the d'Este family,[12] again focusing on
their Venetian activities and Niccolo d'Este's voyage to the Holy Land.
Cantos XXV and XXVI draw on the Book of the Council Major in Venice and Pound's personal memories of the
city. Anecdotes on Titian and Mozart deal with the relationship between artist and patron. Canto XXVII returns to
the Russian Revolution, which is seen as being destructive, not constructive, and echoes the ruin of Eblis from Canto
VI. XXVIII returns to the contemporary scene, with a passage on transatlantic flight. The last two cantos in the series
return to the world of "clear song". In Canto XXIX, a story from their visit to the Provençal site at Excideuil
contrasts Pound and Eliot on the subject of Christianity, with Pound implicitly rejecting that religion. Finally, the
series closes with a glimpse of the printer Hieronymus Soncinus of Fano preparing to print the works of Petrarch.

XXXI–XLI (XI New Cantos)

Published as Eleven New Cantos XXXI–XLI. New York: Farrar & Rinehart Inc., 1934.
The first four cantos of this volume (Cantos XXXI–XXXIV) quote extensively from the letters and other writings of
Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren and others to deal with
the emergence of the fledgling United States and, particularly, the American banking system. Canto XXXI opens
with the Malatesta family motto Tempus loquendi, tempus tacendi ("a time to speak, a time to be silent") to link
again Jefferson and Sigismondo as individuals and the Italian and American "rebirths" as historical movements.
Canto XXXV contrasts the dynamism of Revolutionary America with the "general indefinite wobble" of the
decaying aristocratic society of Mitteleuropa. This canto contains some distinctly unpleasant expressions of
antisemitic opinions. Canto XXXVI opens with a translation of Cavalcanti's canzone Donna mi pregha ("A lady asks
me"). This poem, a lyric meditation of the nature and philosophy of love, was a touchstone text for Pound. He saw it
as an example of the post-Montsegur survival of the Provençal tradition of "clear song", precision of thought and
language, and nonconformity of belief. The canto then closes with the figure of the 9th-century Irish philosopher and
poet John Scotus Eriugena, who was an influence on the Cathars and whose writings were condemned as heretical in
both the 11th and 13th centuries. Canto XXXVII then turns to Jackson, Van Buren, Nicholas Biddle, Alexander
Hamilton and the Bank War and also contains a reference to the Peggy Eaton affair.
The Cantos 6

Canto XXXVIII opens with a quotation from Dante in which he accuses Albert of Germany of falsifying the
coinage. The canto then turns to modern commerce and the arms trade and introduces Frobenius as "the man who
made the tempest". There is also a passage on Douglas' account of the problem of purchasing power. Canto XXXIX
returns to the island of Circe and the events before the voyage undertaken in the first canto unfolds as a hymn to
natural fertility and ritual sex. Canto XL opens with Adam Smith on trade as a conspiracy against the general public,
followed by another periplus, a condensed version of Hanno the Navigator's account of his voyage along the west
coast of Africa. The book closes with an account of Benito Mussolini as a man of action and another lament on the
waste of war.

XLII–LI (Fifth Decad, called also Leopoldine Cantos)

Published as The Fifth Decad of the Cantos XLII–LI. London: Faber & Faber, 1937.
Cantos XLII, XLIII and XLIV move to the Sienese bank, the Monte dei Paschi di Siena, and to the 18th-century
reforms of Pietro Leopoldo, Habsburg Arch Duke of Tuscany. Founded in 1624, the Monte dei Paschi was a
low-interest, not-for-profit credit institution whose funds were based on local productivity as represented by the
natural increase generated by the grazing of sheep on community land (the "BANK of the grassland" of Canto
XLIII). As such, it represents a Poundian non-capitalist ideal.
Canto XLV is a litany against Usura or usury, which Pound later
defined as a charge on credit regardless of potential or actual
production and the creation of wealth ex nihilo by a bank to the benefit
of its shareholders. The canto declares this practice as both contrary to
the laws of nature and inimical to the production of good art and
culture. Pound later came to see this canto as a key central point in the
poem.

Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo, who sought to end
state debt and protected agricultural implements
from sequestration for personal debt. (Portrait by
Stefano Gaetano Neri.)
Canto XLVI contrasts what has gone before with the practices of
institutions such as the Bank of England that are designed to exploit
the issuing of credit to make profits, thereby, in Pound's view,
contributing to poverty, social deprivation, crime and the production of
"bad" art as exemplified by the baroque.
In Canto XLVII, the poem returns to the island of Circe and Odysseus
about to "sail after knowledge". There follows a long lyrical passage in
which a ritual of floating votive candles on the bay at Rapallo near
Pound's home every July merges with the cognate myths of Tammuz
and Adonis, agricultural activity set in a calendar based on natural
cycles, and fertility rituals.

Canto XLVIII presents more instances of what Pound considers to be usury, some of which display signs of his
antisemitic position. The canto then moves via Montsegur to the village of St-Bertrand-de-Comminges, which stands
on the site of the ancient city of Lugdunum Convenarum. The destruction of this city represents, for the poet, the
treatment of civilisation by those he considers barbarous.
Canto XLIX is a poem of tranquil nature derived from a Chinese picture book that Pound's parents brought with
them when they retired to Rapallo. Canto L, which again contains antisemitic statements, moves from John Adams
to the failure of the Medici bank and more general images of European decay since the time of Napoleon I. The final
canto in this sequence returns to the usura litany of Canto XLV, followed by detailed instructions on making flies for
fishing (man in harmony with nature) and ends with a reference to the anti-Venetian League of Cambrai and the first
Chinese written characters to appear in the poem, representing the Rectification of Names from the Analects of
Confucius (the ideogram representing honesty at the end of Canto XLI was added when The Cantos was published
The Cantos 7

as a single volume).

LII–LXI (The China Cantos)

First published in Cantos LII–LXXI. Norfolk Conn.: New
Directions, 1940.
These eleven cantos are based on the first eleven volumes of the
twelve-volume Histoire generale de la Chine by Joseph-Anna-Marie
de Moyriac de Mailla. De Mailla was a French Jesuit who spent 37
years in Peking and wrote his history there. The work was completed
in 1730 but not published until 1777–1783. De Mailla was very much
an Enlightenment figure and his view of Chinese history reflects this;
he found Confucian political philosophy, with its emphasis on rational
order, much to his liking. He also disliked what he saw as the
superstitious pseudo-mysticism promulgated by both Buddhists and
Taoists, to the detriment of rational politics. Pound, in turn, fitted de
Mailla's take on China into his own views on Christianity, the need for
strong leadership to address 20th-century fiscal and cultural problems,
and his support of Mussolini. In an introductory note to the section,
Pound is at pains to point out that the ideograms and other fragments of
foreign-language text incorporated in The Cantos should not put the
reader off, as they serve to underline things that are in the English text.

Canto LII opens with references to Duke Leopoldo, John Adams and
Gertrude Bell, before sliding into a particularly virulent antisemitic
passage, directed mainly at the Rothschild family. The remainder of
the canto is concerned with the classic Chinese text known as the Li Ki
Confucius "cut 3000 odes to 300".
or Classic of Rites, especially those parts that deal with agriculture and
natural increase. The diction is the same as that used in earlier cantos
on similar subjects.

Canto LIII covers the period from the founding of the Hai dynasty to the life of Confucius and up to circa 225 BCE.
Special mention is made of emperors that Confucius approved of and the sage's interest in cultural matters is
stressed. For example, we are told that he edited the Book of Odes, cutting it from 3000 to 300 poems. The canto also
ascribes the Poundian motto (and title of a 1934 collection of essays) Make it New to the emperor Tching Tang.
Canto LIV moves the story on to around 805 CE. The line "Some cook, some do not cook, / some things can not be
changed" refers to Pound's domestic situation and recurs, in part, in Canto LXXXI.

Canto LV is mainly concerned with the rise of the Tatars and the Tartar Wars, ending about 1200. There is a lot on
money policy in this canto and Pound quotes approvingly the Tartar ruler Oulo who noted that the people "cannot eat
jewels". This is echoed in Canto LVI when KinKwa remarks that both gold and jade are inedible. This canto is
mainly concerned with Ghengis and Kublai Khan and the rise of their Yuan dynasty. The canto closes with the
overthrow of the Yeun and the establishment of the Ming dynasty, bringing us to around 1400.
Canto LVII opens with the story of the flight of the emperor Kien Ouen Ti in 1402 or 1403 and continues with the
history of the Ming up to the middle of the 16th century. Canto LVIII opens with a condensed history of Japan from
the legendary first emperor, Emperor Jimmu, who supposedly ruled in the 7th century BCE, to the late-16th-century
Toyotomi Hideyoshi (anglicised by Pound as Messier Undertree), who issued edicts against Christianity and raided
Korea, thus putting pressure on China's eastern borders. The canto then goes on to outline the concurrent pressure
placed on the western borders by activities associated with the great Tartar horse fairs, leading to the rise of the
The Cantos 8

Manchu dynasty.
The translation of the Confucian classics into Manchu opens the following canto, Canto LIX. The canto is then
concerned with the increasing European interest in China, as evidenced by a Sino-Russian border treaty and the
founding of the Jesuit mission in 1685 under Jean-François Gerbillon. Canto LX deals with the activities of the
Jesuits, who, we are told, introduced astronomy, western music, physics and the use of quinine. The canto ends with
limitations being placed on Christians, who had come to be seen as enemies of the state.
The final canto in the sequence, Canto LXI, covers the reigns of Yong Tching and Kien Long, bringing the story up
to the end of de Mailla's account. Yong Tching is shown banning Christianity as "immoral" and "seeking to uproot
Kung's laws". He also established just prices for foodstuffs, bringing us back to the ideas of Social Credit. There are
also references to the Italian Risorgimento, John Adams, and Dom Metello de Souza, who gained some measure of
relief for the Jesuit mission.

LXII–LXXI (The Adams Cantos)

First published in Cantos LII–LXXI. Norfolk Conn.: New
Directions, 1940.
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 well-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 John Adams: "the man who at certain points
/made us / at certain points / saved us" (Canto
the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
LXII).

Canto LXII opens with a brief history of the Adams family in America
from 1628. The rest of the canto is concerned with events leading up to the revolution, Adams' time in France, and
the formation of Washington's administration. Alexander Hamilton reappears, again cast as the villain of the piece.
The appearance of the single Greek word "THUMON", meaning heart, returns us to the world of Homer's Odyssey
and Pound's use of Odysseus as a model for all his heroes, including Adams. The word is used of Odysseus in the
fourth line of the Odyssey: "he suffered woes in his heart on the seas".

The next canto, Canto LXIII, is concerned with Adams' career as a lawyer and especially his reports of the legal
arguments presented by James Otis in the Writs of Assistance case and their importance in the build-up to the
revolution. The Latin phrase Eripuit caelo fulmen ("He snatched the thunderbolt from heaven") is taken from an
inscription on a bust of Benjamin Franklin. Cavalcanti's canzone, Pound's touchstone text of clear intellection and
precision of language, reappears with the insertion of the lines "In quella parte / dove sta memoria" into the text.
Canto LXIV covers the Stamp Act and other resistance to British taxation of the American colonies. It also shows
Adams defending the accused in the Boston Massacre and engaging in agricultural experiments to ascertain the
suitability of Old-World crops for American conditions. The phrases Cumis ego oculis meis, tu theleis, respondebat
illa and apothanein are from the passage (taken from Petronius' Satyricon) that T.S. Eliot used as epigraph to The
Waste Land at Pound's suggestion. The passage translates as "For with my own eyes I saw the Sibyl hanging in a jar
at Cumae, and when the boys said to her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'I want to die.'"
The Cantos 9

The nomination of Washington as president dominates the opening pages of Canto LXV. The canto shows Adams
concerned with the practicalities of waging war, particularly of establishing a navy. Following a passage on the
drafting of the Declaration of Independence, the canto returns to Adams' mission to France, focusing on his dealings
with the American legation in that country, consisting of Franklin, Silas Deane and Edward Bancroft and with the
French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes. Intertwined with this is the fight to save the rights of Americans to
fish the Atlantic coastline. A passage on Adams' opposition to American involvement in European wars is
highlighted, echoing Pound's position on his own times. In Canto LXVI, we see Adams in London serving as
minister to the Court of St. James's. The body of the canto consists of quotations from Adams' writings on the legal
basis for the Revolution, including citations from Magna Carta and Coke and on the importance of trial by jury (per
pares et legem terrae).
Canto LXVII opens with a passage on the limits on the powers of the British monarch drawn from Adams' writings
under the pseudonym Novanglus. The rest of the canto is concerned with the study of government and with the
requirements of the franchise. The following canto, LXVIII, begins with a meditation on the tripartite division of
society into the one, the few and the many. A parallel is drawn between Adams and Lycurgus, the just king of
Sparta. Then the canto returns to Adams' notes on the practicalities of funding the war and the negotiation of a loan
from the Dutch.
Canto LXIX continues the subject of the Dutch loan and then turns to Adams' fear of the emergence of a native
aristocracy in America, as noted in his remark that Jefferson feared rule by "the one" (monarch or dictator), while he,
Adams, feared "the few". The remainder of the canto is concerned with Hamilton, James Madison and the affair of
the assumption of debt certificates by Congress which resulted in a significant shift of economic power to the federal
government from the individual states.
Canto LXX deals mainly with Adams' time as vice-president and president, focusing on his statement "I am for
balance", highlighted in the text by the addition of the ideogram for balance. The section ends with Canto LXXI,
which summarises many of the themes of the foregoing cantos and adds material on Adams' relationship with Native
Americans and their treatment by the British during the Indian Wars. The canto closes with the opening lines of
Epictetus' Hymn of Cleanthus, which Pound tells us formed part of Adams' paideuma. These lines invoke Zeus as
one "who rules by law", a clear parallel to the Adams presented by Pound.

LXXII–LXXIII (The Italian Cantos)

Written between 1944 and 1945.
These two cantos, written in Italian, were not collected until their posthumous inclusion in the 1987 revision of the
complete text of the poem. Pound reverts to the model of Dante's Divine Comedy and casts himself as conversing
with ghosts from Italy's remote and recent past.[13]
In Canto LXXII, imitative of Dante's tercets (terza rima), Pound meets the recently dead Futurist writer Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti, and they discuss the current war and the dangers of excessive love of the past (Pound's librarian
friend, Manlio Torquato Dazzi) or of the future (Marinetti). Then the violent ghost of Dante's Ezzelino III da
Romano, brother of Cunizza of Cantos VI and XXIX, explains to Pound that he has been misrepresented as an evil
tyrant only because he was against the Pope's party, and goes on to attack the present Pope Pius XII and "traitors"
(like King Victor Emmanuel III) who "betrayed" Mussolini, and to promise that the Italian troops will eventually
"return" to El Alamein.
Canto LXXIII is subtitled "Cavalcanti – Republican Correspondence" and is written in the style of Cavalcanti's
"Donna mi prega" of Canto XXXVI. Guido Cavalcanti appears on horseback to tell Pound about a heroic deed of a
girl from Rimini who led a troop of Canadian soldiers to a mined field and died with the "enemy". (This was a
propaganda story featured in Italian newspapers in October 1944; Pound was interested in it because of the
connection with Sigismondo Malatesta's Rimini.)
The Cantos 10

Both cantos end on a positive and optimistic note,[14] typical of Pound, and are unusually straightforward. Except for
a scathing reference (by Cavalcanti's ghost) to "Roosevelt, Churchill and Eden / bastards and small Jews", and for a
denial (by Ezzelino) that "the world was created by a Jew", they are notably free of antisemitic content, although it
must be said that there are several positive references to Italian fascism and some racist expressions (e.g., "pieno di
marocchini ed altra immondizia"—"full of Moroccans and other crap", Canto LXXII). Italian scholars have been
intrigued by Pound's idiosyncratic recreation of the poetry of Dante and Cavalcanti. For example, Furio Brugnolo of
the University of Padua claims that these cantos are "the only notable example of epic poetry in 20th-century Italian
literature".[15]

LXXIV–LXXXIV (The Pisan Cantos)

First published as The Pisan Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1948.
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 antisemitism. In 1943, he was indicted for
treason in absence, and wrote a letter to the indicting judge in which he claimed the right to freedom of speech in his
defence.
Pound was arrested in Rapallo by Italian partisans on May 3, 1945, was detained in Genoa, and was eventually
transferred to the American Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) north of Pisa on May 22. Here he was held in a
specially reinforced cage, initially sleeping on the ground in the open air. After three weeks, he had a breakdown that
resulted in his being given a cot and pup tent in the medical compound. Here he gained access to a typewriter. For
reading matter, he had a regulation-issue Bible along with three books he was allowed to bring in as his own
"religious" texts: a Chinese text of Confucius, James Legge's translation of the same, and a Chinese dictionary. He
later found a copy of the Pocket Book of Verse, edited by Morris Edmund Speare, in the latrine. The only other thing
he brought with him was a eucalyptus pip. Throughout the Pisan sequence, Pound repeatedly likens the camp to
Francesco del Cossa's March fresco depicting men working at a grape arbour.
With his political certainties collapsing around him and his library inaccessible, Pound turned inward for his
materials and much of the Pisan sequence is concerned with memory, especially of his years in London and Paris
and of the writers and artists he knew in those cities. There is also a deepening of the ecological concerns of the
poem. The awarding of the Bollingen Prize to the book caused considerable controversy, with many people objecting
to the honoring of someone they saw as a madman and/or traitor. However, The Pisan Cantos is generally the most
admired and read section of the work. It is also among the most influential, having affected poets as different as H.D.
and Gary Snyder.
Canto LXXIV immediately introduces the reader to the method used in the Pisan Cantos, which is one of
interweaving themes somewhat in the manner of a fugue. These themes pick up on many of the concerns of the
earlier cantos and frequently run across sections of the Pisan sequence. This canto begins with Pound looking out of
the DTC at peasants working in the fields nearby and reflecting on the news of the death of Mussolini, "hung by the
heels".
In the first thread, the figure of Pound/Odysseus reappears in the guise of "OY TIS", or No Man, the name the hero
uses in the Cyclops episode of the Odyssey. This figure blends into the Australian rain god Wuluwaid, who had his
mouth closed up by his father (was deprived of freedom of speech) because he "created too many things". He, in
turn, becomes the Chinese Ouan Jin, or "man with an education". This theme recurs in the line "a man on whom the
sun has gone down", a reference to the nekuia from canto I, which is then explicitly referred to. This recalls The
Seafarer, and Pound quotes a line from his translation, "Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven", lamenting the loss of the
exiled poet's companions. This is then applied to a number of Pound's dead friends from the London/Paris years,
including W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Victor Plarr and Maurice Hewlett. Finally, Pound/Odysseus
The Cantos 11

is seen "on a raft blown by the wind".

Another major theme running through this canto is that of the vision of a goddess in the poet's tent. This starts from
the identification of a nearby mountain with the Chinese holy mountain Taishan and the naming of the moon as
sorella la luna (sister moon). This thread then runs through the appearance of Kuanon, the Buddhist goddess of
mercy, the moon spirit from Hagaromo (a Noh play translated by Pound some 40 years earlier), Sigismondo's lover
Ixotta (linked in the text with Aphrodite via a reference to the goddess' birthplace Cythera), a girl painted by Manet
and finally Aphrodite herself, rising from the sea on her shell and rescuing Pound/Odysseus from his raft. The two
threads are further linked by the placement of the Greek word brododactylos ("rosy-fingered") applied by Homer to
the dawn but given here in the dialect of Sappho and used by her in a poem of unrequited love. These images are
often intimately associated with the poet's close observation of the natural world as it imposes itself on the camp;
birds, a lizard, clouds, the weather and other images of nature run through the canto.
Images of light and brightness associated with these goddesses come to focus in the phrase "all things that are, are
lights" quoted from John Scotus Eriugena. He, in turn, brings us back to the Albigensian Crusade and the troubadour
world of Bernard de Ventadorn. Another theme sees Ecbatana, the seven-walled "city of Dioce", blend with the city
of Wagadu, from the African tale of Gassire's Lute that Pound derived from Frobenius. This city, four times rebuilt,
with its four walls, four gates and four towers at the corners is a symbol for spiritual endurance. It, in turn, blends
with the DTC in which the poet is imprisoned.
The question of banking and money also recurs, with an antisemitic passage aimed at the banker Mayer Amschel
Rothschild. Pound brings in biblical injunctions on usury and a reference to the issuing of a stamp scrip currency in
the Austrian town of Wörgl. The canto then moves on to a longish passage of memories of the moribund literary
scene Pound encountered in London when he first arrived, with the phrase "beauty is difficult", quoted from Aubrey
Beardsley, acting as a refrain. After more memories of America and Venice, the canto ends in a passage that brings
together Dante's celestial rose, the rose formed by the effect of a magnet on iron filings, an image from Paul Verlaine
of a fountain playing in the moonlight, and a reference to a poem by Ben Jonson in a composite image of hope for
"those who have passed over Lethe".
Canto LXXV is mainly a facsimile of the German pianist Gerhart Münch's violin setting of the 16th-century Italian
Francesco Da Milano's transcription for lute of French composer Clément Janequin's choral work Le Chant des
oiseaux, an ancient song recalled to Pound's mind by the singing of birds on the fence of the DTC, and a symbol for
him of an indestructible form preserved and transmitted through many versions, times, nations and artists. (Compare
the nekuia of canto I.) Münch was a friend and collaborator of Pound in Rapallo, and the short prose section at the
beginning of the canto celebrates his work on other early music figures.
Canto LXXVI opens with a vision of a group of goddesses in Pound's room on the Rapallo hillside and then moves,
via Mont Segur, to memories of Paris and Jean Cocteau. There follows a passage in which the poet recognises the
Jewish authorship of the prohibition on usury found in Leviticus. Conversations in the camp are then cross-cut into
memories of Provence and Venice, details of the American Revolution and further visions. These memories lead to a
consideration of what has or may have been destroyed in the war. Pound remembers the moment in Venice when he
decided not to destroy his first book of verse, A Lume Spento, an affirmation of his decision to become a poet and a
decision that ultimately led to his incarceration in the DTC. The canto ends with the goddess, in the form of a
butterfly, leaving the poet's tent amid further references to Sappho and Homer.
The main focus of Canto LXXVII is accurate use of language, and at its centre is the moment when Pound hears that
the war is over. Pound draws on examples of language use from Confucius, the Japanese dancer Michio Itô, who
worked with Pound and Yeats in London, a Dublin cab driver, Aristotle, Basil Bunting, Yeats, Joyce and the
vocabulary of the U.S. Army. The goddess in her various guises appears again, as does Awoi's hennia, the spirit of
jealousy from Aoi No Ue, a Noh play translated by Pound. The canto closes with an invocation of Dionysus
(Zagreus).
The Cantos 12

After opening with a glimpse of Mount Ida, an important locus for the history of the Trojan War, Canto LXXVIII
moves through much that is familiar from the earlier cantos in the sequence: del Cossa, the economic basis of war,
Pound's writer and artist friends in London, "virtuous" rulers (Lorenzo de Medici, the emperors Justinian, Titus and
Antoninus, Mussolini), usury and stamp scripts culminating in the Nausicaa episode from the Odyssey and a
reference to the Confucian classic Annals of Spring and Autumn in which "there are no righteous wars".
The moon and clouds appear at the opening of Canto LXXIX, which then moves on through a passage in which birds
on the wire fence recall musical notation and the sounds of the camp and thoughts of Wolfgang Mozart, del Cossa
and Marshal Philippe Pétain meld to form musical counterpoint. After references to politics, economics, and the
nobility of the world of the Noh and the ritual dance of the moon-nymph in Hagaromo that dispels mortal doubt, the
canto closes with an extended fertility hymn to Dionysus in the guise of his sacred lynx.
Canto LXXX opens in the camp in the shadow of death and soon turns to memories of London, Paris and Spain,
including a recollection of Walter Rummel, who worked with Pound on troubadour music before World War I and of
Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Laurence Binyon and others. The canto is concerned with the aftermath of war, drawing on
Yeats' experiences after the Irish Civil War as well as the contemporary situation. Hagoromo appears again before
the poem returns to Beardsley, also in the shadow of death, declaring the difficulty of beauty with a phrase from
Symons and Sappho/Homer's rosy-fingered dawn woven through the passage.
Pound writes of the decline of the sense of the spirit in painting from a high-point in Sandro Botticelli to the
fleshiness of Rubens and its recovery in the 20th century as evidenced in the works of Marie Laurencin and others.
This is set between two further references to Mont Segur. Pound/Odysseus is then saved from his sinking raft by
Walt Whitman and Richard Lovelace as discovered in the anthology of poetry found in the camp toilet and the other
prisoners are compared with Odysseus' crew, "men of no fortune". The canto then closes with two passages, one a
pastiche of Browning, the other of Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, lamenting the lost London of
Pound's youth and an image of nature as designer.
Canto LXXXI opens with a complex image that illustrates well Pound's technical approach. The opening line, "Zeus
lies in Ceres' bosom", merges the conception of Demeter, passages in previous cantos on ritual copulation as a means
of ensuring fertility, and the direct experience of the sun (Zeus) still hidden at dawn by two hills resembling breasts
in the Pisan landscape. This is followed by an image of the other mountain that reminded the poet of Taishan
surrounded by vapors and surmounted by the planet Venus ("Taishan is attended of loves / under Cythera, before
sunrise").
The canto then moves through memories of Spain, a story told by Basil Bunting, and anecdotes of a number of
familiar personages and of George Santayana. At the core of this passage is the line "(to break the pentameter, that
was the first heave)", Pound's comment on the "revolution of the word" that led to the emergence of Modernist
poetry in the early years of the century.
The goddess of love then returns after a lyric passage situating Pound's work in the great tradition of English lyric, in
the sense of words intended to be sung. This heralds perhaps the most widely quoted passages in The Cantos, in
which Pound expresses his realisation that "What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross" and an acceptance of
the need for human humility in the face of the natural world that prefigures some of the ideas associated with the
deep ecology movement.
The opening of Canto LXXXII marks a return to the camp and its inmates. This is followed by a passage that draws
on Pound's London memories and his reading of the Pocket Book of Verse. Pound laments his failure to recognise the
Greek qualities of Swinburne's work and celebrates Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Rudyard Kipling, Ford Madox Ford,
Walt Whitman, Yeats and others. After an expanded clarification of the Annals of Spring and Autumn / "there are no
righteous wars" passage from Canto LXXVIII, this canto culminates in images of the poet drowning in earth (in a
quasi-sexual embrace) and a recurrence of the Greek word for weeping, ending with more bird-notes seen as a
periplum.
The Cantos 13

After a number of cantos in which the elements of earth and air feature so strongly, Canto LXXXIII opens with
images of water and light, drawn from Pindar, George Gemistos Plethon, John Scotus Eriugena, the mermaid
carvings of Pietro Lombardo and Heraclitus' phrase panta rei ("everything flows"). A passage addressed to a Dryad
speaks out against the death sentence and cages for wild animals and is followed by lines on equity in government
and natural processes based on the writings of Mencius. The tone of placid acceptance is underscored by three
Chinese characters that translate as "don't help to grow that which will grow of itself" followed by another
appearance of the Greek word for weeping in the context of remembered places.
Close observation of a wasp building a mud nest returns the canto to earth and to the figure of Tiresias, last
encountered in Cantos I and XLVII. The canto moves on through a long passage remembering Pound's time as
Yeats' secretary in 1914 and a shorter meditation on the decline in standards in public life deriving from a
remembered visit to the senate in the company of Pound's mother while that house was in session. The closing lines,
"Down derry-down / Oh let an old man rest", return the poem from the world of memory to the poet's present plight.
Canto LXXXIV opens with the delivery of Dorothy Pound's first letter to the DTC on October 8. This letter
contained news of the death in the war of J.P. Angold, a young English poet whom Pound admired. This news is
woven through phrases from a lament by the troubadour Bertran de Born (which Pound had once translated as
"Planh for the Young English King") and a double occurrence of the Greek word tethneke ("died") remembered from
the story of the death of Pan in Canto XXIII.
This death, reviving memories of the poet's dead friends from World War I, is followed by a passage on Pound's
1939 visit to Washington, D.C. to try to avert American involvement in the forthcoming European war. Much of the
rest of the canto is concerned with the economic basis of war and the general lack of interest in this subject on the
part of historians and politicians; John Adams is again held up as an ideal. The canto also contains a reproduction, in
Italian, of a conversation between the poet and a "swineherd's sister" through the DTC fence. He asks her if the
American troops behave well and she replies OK. He then asks how they compare to the Germans and she replies
that they are the same.
The moon/goddess reappears at the core of the canto as "pin-up" and "chronometer" close to the line "out of all this
beauty something must come". The closing lines of the canto, and of the sequence, "If the hoar frost grip thy tent /
Thou wilt give thanks when night is spent", sound a final note of acceptance and resignation, despite the return to the
sphere of action, prompted by the death of Angold, that marks most of the canto.

LXXXV–XCV (Section: Rock-Drill)

Published in 1956 as Section: Rock-Drill, 85–95 de los cantares by New Directions, New York.
Pound was flown from Pisa to Washington to face trial on a charge of treason on the 16th of November 1945. Found
unfit to stand trial because of the state of his mental health, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital, where he
was to remain until 1958. Here he began to entertain writers and academics with an interest in his work and to write,
working on translations of the Confucian Book of Odes and of Sophocles' play Women of Trachis as well as two new
sections of the cantos; the first of these was Rock Drill.
The Cantos 14

The two main written sources for the Rock Drill cantos are the
Confucian Classic of History, in an edition by the French Jesuit
Séraphin Couvreur, which contained the Chinese text and translations
into Latin and French under the title Chou King (which Pound uses in
the poem), and Senator Thomas Hart Benton's Thirty Years View: Or A
History of the American Government for Thirty Years From
1820–1850, which covers the period of the bank wars. In an interview
given in 1962, and reprinted by J. P. Sullivan (see References), Pound
said that the title Rock Drill "was intended to imply the necessary
resistance in getting a main thesis across — hammering." It was
suggested by the heading ("The Rock Drill") of Wyndham Lewis's
1951 review of The Letters of Ezra Pound.[16]

Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who opposed the
establishment of the Bank of the United States.
His Thirty Years View is a key source for this
section of The Cantos.
The first canto in the sequence, Canto LXXXV, contains 104 Chinese
characters from the Chou King, in addition to a number of Latin
phrases, mostly taken from Couvreur's translation. There are also a
small number of Greek words. The overall effect for the
English-speaking reader is one of unreadability, and the canto is hard
to elucidate unless read alongside a copy of Couvreur's text.

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.

The world of nature, Pound's source of wealth and spiritual nourishment, also features strongly; images of roots,
grass and surviving traces of fertility rites in Catholic Italy cluster around the sacred tree Yggdrasil. The natural
world and the world of government are related to tekhne or art. Richard of St. Victor, with his emphasis on modes of
thinking, makes an appearance, in close company with Eriugena, the philosopher of light.
Canto LXXXVI opens with a passage on the Congress of Vienna and continues to hold up examples of good and bad
rulers as defined by the poet with Latin and Chinese phrases from Couvreur woven through them. The word
Sagetrieb, meaning something like the transmission of tradition, apparently coined by Pound, is repeated after its
first use in the previous canto, underlining Pound's belief that he is transmitting a tradition of political ethics that
unites China, Revolutionary America and his own beliefs.
Canto LXXXVII opens on usury and moves through a number of references to "good" and "bad" leaders and
lawgivers interwoven with Neoplatonic philosophers and images of the power of natural process. This culminates in
a passage bringing together Laurence Binyon's dictum slowness is beauty, the San Ku, or three sages, figures from
the Chou King who are responsible for the balance between heaven and earth, Jacques de Molay, the golden section,
a room in the church of St. Hilaire, Poitiers built to that rule where one can stand without throwing a shadow,
Mencius on natural phenomena, the 17th-century English mystic John Heydon (who Pound remembered from his
days working with Yeats) and other images relating to the worship of light including "'MontSegur, sacred to Helios".
The canto then closes with more on economics.
The following canto, Canto LXXXVIII, is almost entirely derived from Benton's book and focuses mainly on John
Randolph of Roanoke and the campaign against the establishment of the Bank of the United States. Pound viewed
the setting up of this bank as a selling out of the principles of economic equity on which the U.S. Constitution was
based. At the centre of the canto there is a passage on monopolies that draws on the lives and writings of Thales of
The Cantos 15

Miletus, the emperor Antoninus Pius and St. Ambrose, amongst others.
Canto LXXXIX continues with Benton and also draws on Alexander del Mar's A History of Money Systems. The
same examples of good rule are drawn on, with the addition of the Emperor Aurelian. Possibly in defence of his
focus on so much "unpoetical" material, Pound quotes Rodolphus Agricola to the effect that one writes "to move, to
teach or to delight" (ut moveat, ut doceat, ut delectet), with the implication that the present cantos are designed to
teach. The naturalists Alexander von Humboldt and Louis Agassiz are mentioned in passing.
Apart from a passing reference to Randolph of Roanoke, Canto XC moves to the world of myth and love, both
divine and sexual. The canto opens with an epigraph in Latin to the effect that while the human spirit is not love, it
delights in the love that proceeds from it. The Latin is paraphrased in English as the final lines of the canto.
Following a reference to signatures in nature and Yggdrasil, the poet introduces Baucis and Philemon, an aged
couple who, in a story from Ovid's Metamorphoses, offer hospitality to the gods in their humble house and are
rewarded. In this context, they may be intended to represent the poet and his wife.
This canto then moves to the fountain of Castalia on Parnassus. This fountain was sacred to the Muses and its water
was said to inspire poetry in those who drank it. The next line, "Templum aedificans not yet marble", refers to a
period when the gods were worshiped in natural settings prior to the rigid codification of religion as represented by
the erection of marble temples. The "fount in the hills fold" and the erect temple (Templum aedificans) also serve as
images of sexual love.
Pound then invokes Amphion, the mythical founder of music, before recalling the San Ku/St Hilaire/Jacques de
Molay/Eriugena/Sagetrieb cluster from Canto LXXXVII. Then the goddess appears in a number of guises: the moon,
Mother Earth (in the Randolph reference), the Sibyl (last encountered in the context of the American Revolution in
Canto LXIV), Isis and Kuanon. In a litany, she is thanked for raising Pound up (m'elevasti, a reference to Dante's
praise of his beloved Beatrice in the Paradiso) out of hell (Erebus).
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.
Canto XCI continues the paradisiacal theme, opening with a snatch of the "clear song" of Provençe. The central
images are the invented figure Ra-Set, a composite sun/moon deity whose boat floats on a river of crystal. The
crystal image, which is to remain important until the end of The Cantos, is a composite of frozen light, the emphasis
on inorganic form found in the writings of the mystic Heydon, the air in Dante's Paradiso, and the mirror of crystal
in the Chou King amongst other sources. Apollonius of Tyana appears, as do Helen of Tyre, partner of Simon Magus
and the emperor Justinian and his consort Theodora. These couples can be seen as variants on Ra-Set.
Much of the rest of the canto consists of references to mystic doctrines of light, vision and intellection. There is an
extract from a hymn to Diana from Layamon's 12th-century poem Brut. An italicised section, claiming that the 1913
foundation of the Federal Reserve Bank, which took power over interest rates away from Congress, and the teaching
of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud in American universities ("beaneries") are examples of what Julien Benda termed
La trahison des clercs, contains antisemitic language. Towards the close of the canto, the reader is returned to the
world of Odysseus; a line from Book Five of the Odyssey tells of the winds breaking up the hero's boat and is
followed shortly by Leucothea, "Kadamon thugater" or Cadmon's daughter) offering him her veil to carry him to
shore ("my bikini is worth yr raft").
An image of the distribution of seeds from the sacred mountain opens Canto XCII, continuing the concern with the
relationship between natural process and the divine. The kernel of this canto is the idea that the Roman Empire's
preference for Christianity over Apollonius and its lack respect for its currency resulted in the almost total loss of the
"true" religious tradition for a thousand years. A number of Neoplatonic philosophers, familiar from earlier cantos
but with the addition of Avicenna, are listed as representing a fine thread of light in these Dark Ages.
The Cantos 16

Canto XCIII opens with a quote, "A man's paradise is his good nature", taken from The Maxims of King Kati to His
Son Merikara.[17] The canto then proceeds to look at examples of benevolent action by public figures that, for
Pound, illustrate this maxim. These include Apollonius making his peace with animals, Saint Augustine on the need
to feed people before attempting to convert them, and Dante and William Shakespeare writing on distributive justice,
an aspect of their work that the poet points out is generally overlooked. Central to this aspect is a fragment from
Dante, non fosse cive, taken from a passage in Paradiso, Canto VIII, in which Dante is asked "would it be worse for
man on earth if he were not a citizen?" and unhesitatingly answers in the affirmative.
Towards the end of the canto, the Make it new ideograms from Canto LIII reappear as the poem moves back towards
the world of myth, closing with another phrase from the Divine Comedy, this time from Purgatorio, Canto XXVIII.
The phrase tu mi fai rimembrar translates as "you remind me" and comes from a passage in which Dante addresses
Matilda, the presiding spirit of the Garden of Eden. What she reminds him of is Persephone at the moment that she is
abducted by Hades and the spring flowers fell from her lap. This blending of a pagan sense of the divine into a
Christian context stands for much of what appealed to Pound in medieval mysticism.
We return to the world of books in Canto XCIV. The canto opens with the name of Hendrik van Brederode, a lost
leader of the Dutch Revolution, forgotten while William I, Prince of Orange is remembered. This name is lifted from
correspondence between John Adams and Benjamin Rush which was finally published in 1898 by Alexander Biddle,
a descendant of Pound's "villain" Nicholas. The rest of the canto consists mainly of paraphrases and quotations from
Philostratus' Life of Apollonius. At its conclusion, the poem returns to the world of light via Ra-Set and Ocellus.
Canto XCV opens with the word "LOVE" in block capitals and recaps many of the Rock Drill examples of the
relationship between love, light and politics. A passage deriving polis from a Greek root word for ploughing also
returns us to Pound's belief that society and economic activity are based on natural productivity. The canto, and
sequence, then closes with an extended treatment of the passage from the fifth book of the Odyssey in which a
drowning Odysseus/Pound is rescued by Leucothea.

XCVI–CIX (Thrones)
First published as Thrones: 96–109 de los cantares. New York: New Directions, 1959.
Thrones was the second volume of cantos written while Pound was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth's. In the same 1962
interview, Pound said of this section of the poem: "The thrones in Dante's Paradiso are for the spirits of the people
who have been responsible for good government. The thrones in The Cantos are an attempt to move out from egoism
and to establish some definition of an order possible or at any rate conceivable on earth … Thrones concerns the
states of mind of people responsible for something more than their personal conduct."
The opening canto of the sequence, Canto XCVI, begins with a fragmentary synopsis of the decline of the Roman
Empire and the rise of the Byzantine Empire in the east and of the Carolingian Empire, Germanic kingdoms and the
Lombards in Western Europe. This culminates in a detailed passage on the Book of the Prefect (or Eparch; in Greek
the Eparchikon Biblion), a 9th-century edict of the Emperor Leo VI the Wise. This document, which was based on
Roman law, lays out the rules that governed the Byzantine Guild system, including the setting of just prices and so
on. The original Greek is quoted extensively and an aside claiming the right to write for a specialist audience is
included. The close attention paid to the actual words prefigures the closer focus on philology in this section of the
poem. This focus on words ties in closely with what Pound referred to as the method of "luminous detail", in which
fragments of language intended to form the most compressed expression of an image or idea act as tesserae in the
making of these late cantos.
Canto XCVII draws heavily on Alexander del Mar's History of Monetary Systems in a survey ranging from Abd al
Melik, the first Caliph to strike distinctly Islamic coinage, through Athelstan, who helped introduce the guild system
into England, to the American Revolution. The canto closes with a passage that sees the return of the goddess as
moon and Fortuna together with Greek forms of solar worship and the Flamen Dialis that is intended to integrate
gold and silver as attributes of coin and the divine.
The Cantos 17

After an opening passage that draws together many of the main themes of the poem through images of Ra-Set,
Ocellus on light (echoing Eriugena), the tale of Gassire's Lute, Leucothoe's rescue of Odysseus, Helen of Troy,
Gemisto, Demeter, and Plotinus, Canto XCVIII turns to the Sacred Edict of the emperor K'ang Hsi. This is a
17th-century set of maxims on good government written in a high literary style, but later simplified for a broader
audience. Pound draws on one such popular version, by Wang the Commissioner of the Imperial Salt Works in a
translation by F.W. Baller. Comparison is drawn between this Chinese text and the Book of the Prefect, and the canto
closes with images of light as divine creation drawn from Dante's Paradiso.
K'ang Hsi's son Iong Cheng published commentaries on his father's maxims and these form the basis for Canto
XCIX. The main theme of this canto is one of harmony between human society and the natural order, and a number
of passing references are made to related items from earlier cantos: Confucius, Kati, Dante on citizenship, the Book
of the Prefect and Plotinus amongst them. Canto C covers a range of examples of European and American statesman
who Pound sees as exemplifying the maxims of the Sacred Edict to a greater or lesser extent. At the core of this
canto, the motif of Luecothoe's veil (kredemnon) resurfaces; this time, the hero has reached the safety of the shore
and returns the magic garment to the goddess.
The focus of Canto CI is around the Greek phrase kalon kagathon ("the beautiful and good"), which calls to mind
Plotinus' attitude to the world of things and the more general Greek belief in the moral aspect of beauty. This canto
introduces the figure of St. Anselm of Canterbury, who is to feature over the rest of this section of the long poem.
Canto CII returns to the island of Calypso and Odysseus' voyage to Hades from Book Ten of the Odyssey. There are
a number of references to vegetation cults and sacrifices, and the canto closes by returning to the world of
Byzantium and the decline of the Western Empire.
Cantos CIII and CIV range over a number of examples of the relationships between war, money and government
drawn from American and European history, mostly familiar from earlier sections of the work. The latter canto is
notable for Pound's suggestion that both Honoré Mirabeau in his imprisonment and Ovid in his exile "had it worse"
than Pound in his incarceration.[18]
At the core of Canto CV are a number of citations and quotations from
the writings of St. Anselm. This 11th-century philosopher and inventor
of the ontological argument for the existence of God who wrote poems
in rhymed prose appealed to Pound because of his emphasis on the role
of reason in religion and his envisioning of the divine essence as light.
In the 1962 interview already quoted, Pound points to Anselm's clash
with William Rufus over his investiture as part of the history of the
struggle for individual rights. Pound also claims in this canto that
Anselm's writings influenced Cavalcanti and François Villon.

Canto CVI turns to visions of the goddess as fertility symbol via

Demeter and Persephone, in her lunar, love aspect as Selena, Helen
and Aphrodite Euploia ("of safe voyages") and as hunter Athene
(Proneia: "of forethought", the form in which she is worshiped at
Delphi) and Diana (through quotes from Layamon). The sun as Sir Edward Coke: "the clearest mind ever in
England" (Canto CVII).
Zeus/Helios also features. These vision fragments are cross-cut with an
invocation of the Taoist Kuan Tzu (Book of Master Kuan). This work
argues that the mind should rule the body as the basis of good living and good governance.

Another such figure, the English jurist and champion of civil liberties Sir Edward Coke, dominates the final three
cantos of this section. These cantos, CVII, CVIII, CIX, consist mainly of "luminous details" lifted from Coke's
Institutes, a comprehensive study of English law up to his own time. In Canto CVII, Coke is placed in a river of light
tradition that also includes Confucius, Ocellus and Agassiz. This canto also refers to Dante's vision of philosophers
that reveal themselves as light in the Paradiso. In Canto CVIII, Pound highlights Coke's view that minting coin
The Cantos 18

"Pertain(s) to the King onely" and has passages on sources of state revenue. He also draws a comparison between
Coke and Iong Cheng. A similar parallel between Coke and the author of the Book of the Eparch is highlighted in
Canto CIX.
The canto and section end with a reference to the following lines from the second canto of the Paradiso—
O voi che siete in piccioletta barca,
desiderosi d’ascoltar, seguiti
dietro al mio legno che cantando varca,
tornate a riveder li vostri liti:
non vi mettete in pelago, ché forse,
perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti.
—which read, in the translation by Charles Eliot Norton, "O ye, who are in a little bark, desirous to listen, following
behind my craft which singing passes on, turn to see again Your shores; put not out upon the deep; for haply losing
me, ye would remain astray." This reference signalled Pound's intent to close the poem with a final volume based on
his own paradisiacal vision.

Drafts and fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII

First published as Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII. New York: New Directions, 1969.
In 1958, Pound was declared incurably insane and permanently incapable of standing trial. Consequent on this, he
was released from St Elizabeth's on condition that he return to Europe, which he promptly did. At first, he lived with
his daughter Mary in Tyrol, but soon returned to Rapallo. In November 1959, Pound wrote to his publisher James
Laughlin (speaking in the third person) that he "has forgotten what or which politics he ever had. Certainly has none
now". His crisis of belief, together with the effects of aging, meant that the proposed paradise cantos were slow in
coming and turned out to be radically different from anything the poet had envisaged.
Pound was reluctant to publish these late cantos, but the appearance in
1967 of a pirate edition of Cantos 110–116 forced his hand. Laughlin
pushed Pound to publish an authorised edition, and the poet responded
by supplying the more-or-less abandoned drafts and fragments he had,
plus two fragments dating from 1941. The resulting book, therefore,
can hardly be described as representing Pound's definitive planned
ending to the poem. This situation has been further complicated by the
addition of more fragments in editions of the complete poem published
after the poet's death. One of these was labelled "Canto CXX" at one
point, on no particular authority. This title was later removed.

Although some of Pound's intention to "write a paradise" survives in

the text as we have it, especially in images of light and of the natural
world, other themes also intrude. These include the poet's coming to
terms with a sense of artistic failure, and jealousies and hatreds that
Voltaire, who said "I hate no one / not even must be faced and expiated.
Fréron" (Canto CXIV), reflecting the theme of Canto CX opens with a pun on the word wake, conflating the wake of
confronting hatred in this section of the poem.
the little boat from the end of the previous canto and an image of
Pound waking in his daughter's house in Tyrol, both from sleep and, by
extension, from the nightmare of his prolonged incarceration. The goddess appears as Kuanon, Artemis and Hebe
(through her characteristic epithet Kallistragalos, "of fair ankles"), the goddess of youth. The Buddhist painter Toba
Sojo represents directness of artistic handling.
The Cantos 19

The Noh figure of Awoi (from AOI NO UE), ravaged by jealousy, reappears together with the poet Ono no Komachi,
the central character in two more Noh plays translated by Pound. She represents a life spent meditating on beauty
which resulted in vanity and ended in loss and solitude. The canto draws to a close with the phrase Lux enim ("light
indeed") and an image of the oval moon.
Pound's "nice, quiet paradise" is seen, in the notes for Canto CXI, to be based on serenity, pity, intelligence and
individual acceptance of responsibility as illustrated by the French diplomat Talleyrand. This theme is continued in
the short extract titled from Canto CXII, which also draws on the work of the anthropologist and explorer Joseph F.
Rock in recording legends and religious rituals from China and Tibet. Again, this section of the poem closes with an
image of the moon.
Canto CXIII opens with an image of the sun moving through the zodiac, the first of a number of cycle images that
occur through the canto, recalling a line from Pound's version of AOI NO UE: "Man's life is a wheel on the axle,
there is no turn whereby to escape". A reference to Marcella Spann, a young woman whose presence in Tyrol further
complicated the already strained relationships between the poet, his wife Dorothy and his lover Olga Rudge, casts
further light on the recurrent jealousy theme. The phrase "Syrian onyx" lifted from his 1919 Homage to Sextus
Propertius, where it occurs in a section that paraphrases Propertius' instructions to his lover on how to behave after
his death, reflects the elderly Pound's sense of his own mortality.
The theme of hatred is addressed directly at the opening of Canto CXIV, where Voltaire is quoted to the effect that
he hates nobody, not even his archenemy Elie Fréron. The remainder of this canto is primarily concerned with
recognising indebtedness to the poet's genetic and cultural ancestors. The short extract from Canto CXV is a
reworking from an earlier version first published in the Belfast-based magazine Threshold in 1962 and centres
around two main ideas. The first of these is the hostilities that existed amongst Pound's modernist friends and the
negative impact that it had on all their works. The second is the image of the poet as a "blown husk", again a
borrowing from the Noh, this time the play Kakitsubata.
Canto CXVI was the last canto completed by Pound. It opens with a passage in which we see the Odysseus/Pound
figure, homecoming achieved, reconciled with the sea-god. However, the home achieved is not the place intended
when the poem was begun but is the terzo cielo ("third heaven") of human love. The canto contains the following
well-known lines:
I have brought the great ball of crystal;
Who can lift it?
Can you enter the great acorn of light?
But the beauty is not the madness
Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.
This passage has often been taken as an admission of failure on Pound's part, but the reality may be more complex.
The crystal image relates back to the Sacred Edict on self-knowledge and the demigod/cohere lines relate directly to
Pound's translation of the Women of Trachis. In this, the demigod Herakles cries out "WHAT SPLENDOUR / IT
ALL COHERES" as he is dying. These lines, read in conjunction with the later "i.e. it coheres all right / even if my
notes do not cohere", point toward the conclusion that towards the end of his effort, Pound was coming to accept not
only his own "errors" and "madness" but the conclusion that it was beyond him, and possibly beyond poetry, to do
justice to the coherence of the universe. Images of light saturate this canto, culminating in the closing lines: "A little
light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour". These lines again echo the Noh of Kakitsubata, the "light that does
not lead on to darkness" in Pound's version.
This final complete canto is followed by the two fragments of the 1940s. The first of these, "Addendum for C", is a
rant against usury that moves a bit away from the usual antisemitism in the line "the defiler, beyond race and against
The Cantos 20

race". The second is an untitled fragment that prefigures the Pisan sequence in its nature imagery and its reference to
Jannequin.
Notes for Canto CXVII et seq. originally consisted of three fragments, with a fourth, sometimes titled Canto CXX,
added after Pound's death. The first of these has the poet raising an altar to Bacchus (Zagreus) and his mother
Semele, whose death was as a result of jealousy. The second centres on the lines "that I lost my center / fighting the
world", which were intended as an admission of mistakes made as a younger man.[19] The third fragment is the one
that is also known as Canto CXX. It is, in fact, some rescued lines from the earlier version of Canto CXV, and has
Pound asking forgiveness for his actions from both the gods and those he loves. The final fragment returns to
beginnings with the name of François Bernonad, the French printer of A Draft of XVI Cantos. After quoting two
phrases from Bernart de Ventadorn's Can vei la lauzeta mover, a poem in which the speaker contemplates a lark's
flight as a token of the coming of spring, the fragment closes with the line "To be men not destroyers." This stood as
the close of The Cantos until later editions appended a brief dedicatory fragment addressed to Olga Rudge.

Legacy
Despite all the controversy surrounding both poem and poet, The Cantos has been influential in the development of
English-language long poems since the appearance of the early sections in the 1920s. Amongst poets of Pound's own
generation, both H.D. and William Carlos Williams wrote long poems that show this influence. Almost all of H.D.'s
poetry from 1940 onwards takes the form of long sequences, and her Helen in Egypt, written during the 1950s,
covers much of the same Homeric ground as The Cantos (but from a feminist perspective), and the three sequences
that make up Hermetic Definition (1972) include direct quotations from Pound's poem. In the case of Williams, his
Paterson (1963) follows Pound in using incidents and documents from the early history of the United States as part
of its material. As with Pound, Williams includes Alexander Hamilton as the villain of the piece.
Pound was a major influence on the Objectivist poets, and the effect of The Cantos on Zukofsky's "A" has already
been noted. The other major long work by an Objectivist, Charles Reznikoff's Testimony (1934–1978), follows
Pound in the direct use of primary source documents as its raw material. In the next generation of American poets,
Charles Olson also drew on Pound's example in writing his own unfinished Modernist epic, The Maximus Poems.
Pound was also an important figure for the poets of the Beat generation, especially Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg.
Snyder's interest in things Chinese and Japanese stemmed from his early reading of Pound's writings. and his long
poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965–1996) reflects his reading of The Cantos in many of the formal
devices used. In Ginsberg's development, reading Pound was influential in his move away from the long,
Whitmanesque lines of his early poetry, and towards the more varied metric and inclusive approach to a variety of
subjects in the single poem that is to be found especially in his book-length sequences Planet News (1968) and The
Fall of America: Poems of These States (1973). More generally, The Cantos, with its wide range of references and
inclusion of primary sources, including prose texts, can be seen as prefiguring found poetry. Pound's tacit insistence
that this material becomes poetry because of his action in including it in a text he chose to call a poem also
prefigures the attitudes and practices that underlie 20th-century Conceptual art.
The poetic response to The Cantos is summed up in Basil Bunting's poem, "On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos":
There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?
There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
The Cantos 21

It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,

fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

Notes
[1] In an essay called Poet of Many Voices reprinted in Sullivan.
[2] Marjorie Perloff, "Discussing Pound." (http:/ / epc. buffalo. edu/ authors/ perloff/ perloffpound. html) Accessed 11.05.2011.
[3] Flory, Wendy Stallard. "Pound and Antisemitism," in Ira B. Nadel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge University
Press, 1999.
• Also see Flory, Wendy Stallard. "The Return to Italy: 'To Confess Wrong…'". In The American Ezra Pound. Yale University Press, 1989.
[4] Morgan, Bill. The Letters of Allen Ginsberg (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=yzfV6DvwBk8C& pg=PA70), De Capo Press, 2008, p.
340.
• For the meeting in the restaurant, see Reck, Michael; Weiss, Theodore; Kazin, Afred; and Taplin, Oliver. "An Exchange on Ezra Pound"
(http:/ / www. nybooks. com/ articles/ archives/ 1986/ oct/ 09/ an-exchange-on-ezra-pound/ ), The New York Review of Books, 9 October
1986.
• The above exchange was in response to Kazin, Alfred. "The Fascination and Terror of Ezra Pound" (http:/ / www. nybooks. com/ articles/
archives/ 1986/ mar/ 13/ the-fascination-and-terror-of-ezra-pound/ ), The New York Review of Books, 13 March 1986.
[5] Tytell 1987, pp. 337–339.
[6] Pound, Ezra & Zukofsky Louis & Ahearn Barry (ed). Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. New York: New
Directions, 1987. xxi-xxii
[7] Blackmur, Richard P. The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation. 1962
[8] Cookson p. 264
[9] Schneidau, Herbert N. "Vorticism and the Career of Ezra Pound". Modern Philology, Volume 65, No. 3, February 1968. 214-227.
[10] Liebregts, 97.
[11] Hartnett, Stephen. "The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism: Analyzing Pound's Cantos 12-15". boundary 2, Volume 20, No. 1, Spring,
1993. 65-93.
[12] Peterson, Leland D. "Ezra Pound: The Use and Abuse of History". American Quarterly, Volume 17, No. 1, Spring, 1965. 33-47.
[13] They also demonstrate Pound's enthusiasic support of Italian Fascism in general and Mussolini in particular. Canto LXXII indicts Italians for
not supporting Mussolini and predicts victory for Italian Fascism over the Allies. In Canto LXXIII he enshrines an otherwise ridiculous
Fascist propaganda story of a fascist maiden, raped by Allied troops, (suicidally) revenging herself by guiding hapless Canadian troops to their
death in a minefield. Her act is portrayed as the selfless act of a true patriot. The inclusion of the Italian Cantos in the cycle caused significant
controversy. Pound scholar Richard Sieburth describes the Italian Cantos as marking "the moral nadir of the poem". Pound, Ezra and Sieburth,
Richard (ed). The Pisan Cantos. New York: New Directions, 2003. xvi
[14] Optimistic for the victory of Italian Fascism.
[15] Brugnolo, Furio. La lingua di cui si vanta Amore: Scrittori stranieri in lingua italiana dal Medioevo al Novecento. Rome: Carocci editore,
2009. 95-111. ISBN 978-88-430-5069-7.
[17] Liebregts, 316.
[18] Kenner, Hugh. "The Pound Era". University of California Press, 1992. 536. ISBN 0-520-02427-3
[19] Reck, Michael & Weiss, Theodore. " An Exchange on Ezra Pound (http:/ / www. nybooks. com/ articles/ 5012)". New York Review of
Books, Volume 33, No 15, October 9, 1986. Retrieved on July 18, 2008.

Sources
Print
• Ackroyd, Peter. Ezra Pound and His World (Thames and Hudson, 1980). ISBN 0-500-13069-8
• Bacigalupo, Massimo. "America in Ezra Pound's Posthumous Cantos." Journal of Modern Literature 27.1–2
(2003–2004): 90–98. ISSN  0022-281X (http://www.worldcat.org/search?fq=x0:jrnl&q=n2:0022-281X)
• Bacigalupo, Massimo. "Ezra Pound's Cantos 72 and 73: An Annotated Translation." Paideuma 20.1–2 (1991):
9–41. ISSN  0090-5674 (http://www.worldcat.org/search?fq=x0:jrnl&q=n2:0090-5674)
• Cookson, William. A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Anvil, 1985). ISBN 0-89255-246-8
• Flory, Wendy Stallard. "The Return to Italy: 'To Confess Wrong…'". In The American Ezra Pound. (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989).
• Flory, Wendy Stallard. "Pound and Antisemitism." The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Ed. Ira B. Nadel
(Cambridge University Press, 1999) ISBN 0-521-64920-X, ISBN 0-521-43117-4
The Cantos 22

• Gibson, Mary Ellis (1995). Epic reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians (http://books.google.com/
books?id=uD-id3vcwqoC&pg=PA39). Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-3133-3. Retrieved 12 May
2011.
• Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era (Faber and Faber, 1975 edition). ISBN 0-571-10668-4
• Liebregts, P. Th. M. G. Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. ISBN
0-8386-4011-7
• Sullivan, J.P. (ed). Ezra Pound (Penguin critical anthologies series, 1970). ISBN 0-14-080033-6
• Terrell, Carroll F. A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (University of California Press, 1980). ISBN
0-520-08287-7
Online
• Modernism, Fascism, and the Pisan Cantos by Ronald Bush (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/
modernism-modernity/v002/2.3bush.html)

Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1
November 1972) was an American expatriate poet and critic
of the early modernist movement. His contribution to poetry
began with his promotion of Imagism, a movement that called
for a return to more Classical values, stressing clarity,
precision and economy of language, and had an interest in
verse forms such as the Japanese Haikus. His best-known
works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
(1920) and his unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos
(1917–1969).[1]

Working in London and Paris in the early 20th century as

foreign editor of several American literary magazines, Pound
helped to discover and shape the work of contemporaries such
as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost and Ernest
Hemingway. He was responsible for the publication in 1915
of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and for the
serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote
Ezra Pound photographed on 22 October 1913 in
of him in 1925: "He defends [his friends] when they are
Kensington, London, by Alvin Langdon Coburn
attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. ... He
writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy
women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying ... he
advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide."[2]

Outraged by the loss of life during the First World War, he lost faith in England, blaming the war on usury and
international capitalism. He moved to Italy in 1924, where throughout the 1930s and 1940s, to his friends' dismay, he
embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler and wrote for publications owned by
Oswald Mosley. The Italian government paid him during the Second World War to make hundreds of radio
broadcasts criticizing the United States, as a result of which he was arrested for treason by American forces in Italy
in 1945. He spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including 25 days in a six-by-six-foot outdoor
Ezra Pound 23

steel cage that he said triggered a mental breakdown, "when the raft broke and the waters went over me." Deemed
unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12
years.[3]
While in custody in Italy, he had begun work on sections of The Cantos that became known as The Pisan Cantos
(1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress, triggering enormous
controversy. He was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958 and returned to live in Italy until his death. His political
views ensure that his work remains controversial; in 1933 Time magazine called him "a cat that walks by himself,
tenaciously unhousebroken and very unsafe for children." Hemingway nevertheless wrote: "The best of Pound's
writing – and it is in the Cantos – will last as long as there is any literature."[4]

Early life (1885–1908)

Background

Thaddeus Pound, Pound's grandfather, in the late 1880s

With his mother in 1898

Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho Territory, the only child of Homer Loomis Pound (1858–1942) and Isabel Weston
(1860–1948). Both parents' ancestors had emigrated from England in the 17th century. On his father's side, John
Pound, a Quaker, sailed from England around 1650. His grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound (1832–1914), was a
retired Republican Congressman for north-west Wisconsin who had made and lost a fortune in the lumber business.
His son Homer, Pound's father, had worked for Thaddeus until Thaddeus secured him an appointment as Register of
the Government Land Office in Hailey.[5]
On his mother's side, Pound was descended from William Wadsworth, a Puritan who emigrated from England to
Boston on the Lyon in 1632.[6] The Wadsworths married into the Westons of New York, and Harding Weston and
Mary Parker had Isabel Weston, Pound's mother.[5] Harding apparently spent most of his life without work, so his
brother, Ezra Weston and his wife, Frances, looked after Mary and Isabel's needs.[7]
Isabel was unhappy living in Hailey, and when her son was 18 months old she left with him to go back East.[7]
Homer followed them, and in 1889 took a job as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint. The family moved to 417
Walnut Street in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, then in July 1893 bought a six-bedroom house at 166 Fernbrook Avenue
in the town of Wyncote, Pennsylvania.[5]
Ezra Pound 24

Education
Pound's early education took place in a series of so-called dame schools, some of them run by Quakers: Miss Elliott's
school in Jenkintown in 1892; the Misses Heacock's Chelten Hills school in Wyncote in 1893; and the Florence
Ridpath school from 1894, which became the Wyncote Public School a year later. From 1898 until 1900 he attended
the Cheltenham Military Academy, where the boys wore Civil War-style uniforms and were taught military drilling,
how to shoot, and the importance of submitting to authority. Pound was clever, independent-minded, conceited, and
unpopular. He knew early on that he wanted to be a poet. His first publication was on 7 November 1896 in the
Jenkintown Times-Chronicle, a limerick about American politician William Jennings Bryan, who had just lost the
presidential election: By E.L. Pound, Wyncote, Aged 11 years: "There was a young man from the West, / He did
what he could for what he thought best."[8]
Pound's first trip overseas came two years later when he was 13, a three-month tour of Europe with his mother and
Aunt Frances, who took him to England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. He was admitted to the
University of Pennsylvania's College of Liberal Arts in 1901 at the age of 15:[5]
I resolved that at 30 I would know more about poetry than any man living, that I would know what was
accounted poetry everywhere, what part of poetry was "indestructible," what part could not be lost by
translation and – scarcely less important – what effects were obtainable in one language only and were utterly
incapable of being translated.
In this search I learned more or less of nine foreign languages, I read Oriental stuff in translations, I fought
every University regulation and every professor who tried to make me learn anything except this, or who
bothered me with "requirements for degrees."[9]
He met Hilda Doolittle at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the daughter of the professor of astronomy, and
later became known as the poet H.D. Doolittle wrote that she felt her life was irrevocably intertwined with Pound's;
she followed him to Europe in 1908, leaving her family, friends, and country for little benefit to herself, and became
involved with Pound in developing the Imagism movement in London. He asked her to marry him in the summer of
1907, though her father refused permission, and wrote several poems for her between 1905 and 1907, twenty five of
which he hand-bound and called Hilda's Book.[10] He was seeing two other women at the same time – Viola Baxter
and Mary Moore – later dedicating a book of poetry, Personae (1909), to the latter. He asked Mary to marry him that
summer too, but she turned him down.[11]
With his parents and Frances Weston, Pound took another three-month European tour in 1902, after which he
transferred to Hamilton College – possibly because of poor grades – where he studied the Provençal dialect with
William Pierce Shephard, and Old English with Joseph D. Ibbotson. David Moody writes that it was at Hamilton
with Shephard that he read Dante, and out of the discussions emerged the idea for a long poem in three parts –
dealing with emotion, instruction, and contemplation – which planted the seed for The Cantos.[12]
He graduated with a BPhil in 1905, then studied Romance languages under Hugo A. Rennert at the University of
Pennsylvania, obtaining his M.A. in the spring of 1906. He registered as a PhD student to write a thesis on the jesters
in Lope de Vega's plays, and was awarded a Harrison fellowship and a travel grant of $500, which he used to visit
Europe again. He spent three weeks in Madrid in various libraries, including one in the royal palace; he was actually
standing outside the palace during the attempted assassination on 31 May 1906 by anarchists of King Alfonso, and
left the country for fear he would be identified with them. He moved on to Paris, spending two weeks in lectures at
the Sorbonne, followed by a week in London.[13]
He returned to the U.S. in July, and his first essay, "Raphaelite Latin", was published in Book News Monthly in
September. In 1907, at the university, he apparently annoyed Felix Schelling, the head of English, with silly remarks
during lectures – which included insisting that George Bernard Shaw was better than Shakespeare, and taking out an
enormous tin watch and winding it with slow precision – and his fellowship was not renewed at the end of the year.
Moreover, Schelling told Pound he was wasting his own time and that of the institution; Pound abandoned his
dissertation and left without finishing his doctorate.[13]
Ezra Pound 25

Teaching
In the fall of 1907 he took a job as a teacher of Romance languages at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, a
conservative town that he called the sixth circle of hell, with an equally conservative college from which he was
dismissed after deliberately provoking the college authorities. Smoking was forbidden, so he would smoke cigarillos
in his office down the corridor from the President's. He annoyed his landlords by entertaining friends, including
women, and was forced to move from one house after "[t]wo stewdents found me sharing my meagre repast with a
lady gent impersonator in my privut apartments," as he told a friend. He was eventually caught in flagrante, although
the details remain unclear and he denied any wrongdoing. The incident involved a stranded chorus girl to whom he
offered tea and his bed for the night when she was caught in a snowstorm; discovered the next morning by the
landladies, Misses Ida and Belle Hall, his insistence that he had slept on the floor was met with disbelief, and he was
asked to leave the college. Glad to be free of the place, he left for Europe soon after.[14]

London (1908–20)

Introduction to literary scene

Pound returned to Europe in the spring, arriving in Gibraltar in
April with $80 in his pocket, but during the next few months
earned money as a guide to American tourists. He sent poems to
Harper's Magazine and began writing fiction that he hoped he
could sell, and by the summer was in Venice, living over a bakery
near the San Vio bridge. In July he self-published his first book of
poetry, the 72-page A Lume Spento (With Tapers Spent), which
sold 100 copies at six cents each. The London Evening Standard
called it "wild and haunting stuff, absolutely poetic, original,
imaginative." The title was from the third canto of Dante's
Purgatorio, alluding to both the excommunicate Manfred's death,
and to that of his friend, the Philadelphia artist William Brooke
Smith, who died of consumption in his 20s.[15]

In August he moved to London, where he ended up staying almost

continuously for 12 years. He wanted to meet W.B. Yeats, the
greatest living poet in Pound's view, and they became close
friends, although Yeats was older by 20 years. He had sent Yeats a
copy of A Lume Spento, and Yeats had replied that he found it
charming. Pound told William Carlos Williams, a friend from Pound's landlady at 48 Langham Street (pictured) and
[11] the pub across the road were given a mention in The
university: "London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy."
Pisan Cantos (1948).
English poets such as Maurice Hewlett, Rudyard Kipling, and
Alfred Lord Tennyson had made a particular kind of Victorian
verse – stirring, pompous, and propagandistic – popular with the public. James Knapp writes that Pound wanted to
focus on the individual experience, the particular, the concrete, and rejected the idea of poetry as versified moral
essay.[16] Arriving in the city with ₤3, he first rented a room at 8 Duchess Street in the West End, then later at 48
Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street, just a penny bus-ride from the British Museum. The house (see right)
sat across an alley from the Yorkshire Grey pub, which made an appearance decades later in the Pisan Cantos,
"concerning the landlady's doings / with a lodger unnamed / az waz near Gt Titchfield St. next door to the pub".[17]

Pound persuaded the bookseller Elkin Mathews – publisher of Yeats's Wind Among the Reeds and the Book of the
Rhymer's Club – to display A Lume Spento, and by October 1908 he was being discussed around town. In December
Ezra Pound 26

he published a second collection, A Quinzaine for This Yule, and after the death of a lecturer at the Regent Street
Polytechnic he managed to acquire a position lecturing in the evenings from January to February 1909 on "The
Development of Literature in Southern Europe". He would spend his mornings in the British Museum Reading
Room, followed by lunch at the Vienna Café on Oxford Street.[18] Ford Madox Ford described him, apparently
tongue-in-cheek, as "approach[ing] with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent.
He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese
friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue earring."[19]

Meeting Dorothy Shakespear, Personae

In January 1909, Pound met the novelist Olivia Shakespear – Yeats's former lover and the subject of his The Lover
Mourns for the Loss of Love – at a literary salon, and was invited to attend her Tuesday salons where he was
introduced to Dorothy, Olivia's daughter, who became his wife in 1914. Through Olivia Shakespear he was
introduced to Yeats, the artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, and the rest of London's literary circle.
Another patron was the American heiress Margaret Lanier Cravens (1881–1912), who after knowing him a short
time offered him a large annual sum to allow him to focus on his work. Cravens killed herself in 1912, probably
because the pianist Walter Rummel, long the object of her affection, married someone else, but possibly also because
she learned of Pound's engagement to Dorothy.[20]
In June 1909 another collection, Personae, was published by Mathews, Pound's first publication to have any
commercial success. It was reviewed by The Daily Telegraph and the Times Literary Supplement among others; they
said it was full of passion and magic. Rupert Brooke gave a negative review in The Cambridge Review, complaining
that Pound had fallen under the influence of Walt Whitman by writing in "unmetrical sprawling lengths". In
September another 27 poems appeared as Exultations, dedicated to Carlos Tracey Chester who had published his
essay in Book News Monthly in 1906. Around the same time he moved into new rooms at Church Walk, off
Kensington High Street, where he lived most of the time until 1914.[21] His first book of literary criticism, The Spirit
of Romance, was published in 1910, based on his lectures at the polytechnic; others included Instigations (1920),
Indiscretions (1923), "How to Read" (1931), ABC of Reading (1934), Make It New (1934), Polite Essays (1937), and
Guide to Kulchur (1938).[22]
In June 1910 Pound returned to the United States for eight months, in part to persuade the New York Public Library,
then being built, to change its design. The New York Times wrote that he almost daily visited the architects' offices to
shout at them.[23] His essays on America were written during this period, and were compiled as Patria Mia,
published in 1950. He loved New York but no longer felt at home there. He felt the city was threatened by
commercialism and vulgarity. He suffered jaundice but nevertheless persuaded his parents to finance his passage
back to Europe. It was nearly 30 years before he visited the United States again. On 22 February 1911 he sailed from
New York on the R.M.S. Mauretania, arriving in Southampton six days later. After a few days in London, he visited
Paris again, where he worked on a new collection of poetry, Canzoni (1911), panned by the Westminster Gazette as a
"medley of pretension", and spent time with Margaret Cravens. When he returned to London in August 1911, A.R.
Orage, editor of the socialist journal The New Age, hired him to write a weekly column, giving him a steadier
income.[24]

Imagism
Ezra Pound 27

Church Walk, Kensington; Pound rented rooms there between 1909 and 1914.

Blue plaque on 10 Church Walk, where Pound said Imagisme was born.
Hilda Doolittle arrived in London from Philadelphia in May 1911 with the poet Frances Gregg and Gregg's mother,
and when they returned in September she decided to stay on. Pound introduced her to his friends, including the poet
Richard Aldington, whom she married in 1913. Before then, the three of them lived in Church Walk – Pound at no.
10, Doolittle at no. 6, and Aldington at no. 8 – and worked daily in the British Museum Reading Room.[25]
At the museum he also met regularly with the curator and poet Laurence Binyon, who introduced him to the East
Asian artistic and literary concepts that would become so vital to the imagery and technique of his later poetry. The
museum's visitors' books show that Pound was often to be found during 1912 and 1913 in the Print Room examining
Japanese Nishiki-e inscribed with traditional Japanese waka verse, a 10th-century genre of poetry whose economy
and strict conventions undoubtedly contributed to Imagist techniques of composition.[26][27] Pound was at that time
working on the poems that became Ripostes (1912), trying to move away from his earlier work, which he wrote later
had reduced Ford Madox Ford in 1911 to rolling on the floor laughing at Pound's stilted language. He realized with
his translation work that the problem lay not in his knowledge of the other languages, but in his use of English:
What obfuscated me was not the Italian but the crust of dead English, the sediment present in my own
available vocabulary ... You can't go round this sort of thing. It takes six or eight years to get educated in one's
art, and another ten to get rid of that education.
Neither can anyone learn English, one can only learn a series of Englishes. Rossetti made his own language. I
hadn't in 1910 made a language, I don't mean a language to use, but even a language to think in.[28] He
understood that to change the structure of your language is to change the way you think and see the world.
While living at Church Walk in 1912, Pound, Aldington, and Doolittle started working on ideas about
language that became the Imagism movement. The aim was clarity: a fight against abstraction, romanticism,
rhetoric, inversion of word order, and over-use of adjectives. Pound later said they agreed in the spring or early
summer of 1912 on three principles:
1. Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a
metronome.[29]
In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Superfluous words, particularly adjectives, were to be avoided, as were expressions like "dim lands of peace,"
which he said dulled the image by mixing the abstract with the concrete. He wrote that the natural object was
always the "adequate symbol." Poets should "go in fear of abstractions," and should not re-tell in mediocre
verse what has already been told in good prose.[29] A classic example of the style is Pound's "In a Station of
the Metro" (1913), inspired by an experience on the Paris Underground. "I got out of a train at, I think, La
Concorde, and in the jostle I saw a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and another, and then a
beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful face. All that day I tried to find words for what this made me
Ezra Pound 28

feel." He worked on the poem for a year, reducing it to its essence in the style of a Japanese haiku.[30]

Ripostes, translation work

It was in Ripostes, submitted to Swift & Co in February 1912 and published by
them that October, that Pound moved toward more minimalist language, though
Knapp writes that it is an uncertain volume, published when Pound had only
begun his move toward Imagism; his first use of the word Imagiste was,
however, in his prefatory note to the volume.[31] Michael Alexander writes that
the poems show a greater concentration of meaning and economy of rhythm
than his earlier work. The collection includes five poems by the British poet
T.E. Hulme, killed in Flanders in 1917 during the First World War to Pound's
great distress. It also includes his translation of the 8th-century Old English
poem The Seafarer, not a literal translation, but a personal interpretation and a
poem in its own right. It upset scholars, as did his other translations from Latin,
Italian, French, and Chinese, either because of errors or because he lacked
familiarity with the cultural context. Alexander writes that in some circles his
translations made him more unpopular than the treason charge, and the reaction
In 1913 Pound was given Ernest
to The Seafarer was a rehearsal for the response to Homage to Sextus
Fenollosa's unpublished notes, which
Propertius in 1919.[32] His translation from the Italian of Sonnets and ballate of led to Cathay (1915).
Guido Cavalcanti was also published in 1912.

Of great importance too was his work on the papers of Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), an American professor who
had taught in Japan, and who had started translations of Japanese poetry and Noh plays, with which Pound became
fascinated. Pound used Fenollosa's work as a starting point for what he called the ideogrammic method.[33] Fenollosa
had studied Chinese poetry under a Japanese scholar, and in 1913 his widow, Mary McNeil Fenollosa, decided to
give his unpublished notes to Pound after seeing his work; she said she was looking for someone who cared about
the poetry, rather than the philology.[34]

Pound knew no Chinese himself, and was working from the posthumous notes of an American who had studied
Chinese under a Japanese teacher. Nevertheless, Michael Alexander writes that there are competent judges of
Chinese and English poetry who see Pound's work as the best translations of Chinese to English poetry ever made,
though scholars have complained that it contains many mistakes, even more than The Seafarer. The result, the
collection Cathay (1915), is in Alexander's view the most attractive volume of Pound's work. Wai-lim Yip of the
Chinese University of Hong Kong writes: "One can easily excommunicate Pound from the Forbidden City of
Chinese studies, but it seems clear that in his dealings with Cathay, even when he is given only the barest details, he
is able to get into the central concerns of the original author by what we may perhaps call a kind of clairvoyance."[35]

Marriage, BLAST
In August 1912 Harriet Monroe hired Pound as a regular contributor to Poetry, and he started submitting poems by
himself, James Joyce, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, Yeats, H.D., and Aldington, as well as collecting material for a
64-page anthology, Des Imagistes (1914), which included Joyce's "I Hear an Army Charging". The Imagist
movement began to attract attention from critics.[36] In November 1913 Yeats took Pound to stay with him in rooms
he rented in Stone Cottage in Coleman's Hatch, Sussex, to act as his secretary – Yeats's eyesight was failing – and
they stayed there for 10 weeks, reading and writing, walking in the woods, and fencing for exercise. It was the first
of three winters they spent there together, including two with Dorothy after she and Pound were married on 20 April
1914.[37]
Ezra Pound 29

The marriage proceeded despite initial opposition from her parents, who were concerned about Pound's lack of
income. He had only his earnings from literary magazines, particularly Poetry, The New Freewoman, and The
Egoist, and was probably earning considerably less than £300 a year. Dorothy's income was £50 of her own and
£150 from her family. Her parents eventually consented, perhaps out of fear that she was getting older and no other
suitor was in sight. Pound's concession to marry in church helped. Afterwards he and Dorothy moved into a large –
famously triangular – room with no bathroom at 5 Holland Place Chambers, near Church Walk, with the newly wed
Hilda and Richard Aldington living next door.[38]
Pound began writing for Wyndham Lewis's literary magazine BLAST; only two issues ever appeared, the first in June
1914 and the second a year later. An advertisement in The Egoist said it would discuss "Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme
and all Vital Forms of Modern Art." Pound took the opportunity to extend the definition of Imagisme to art, naming
it Vorticism: "The image is a radiant node or cluster; it is ... a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into
which, ideas are constantly rushing."[39] When in reaction to the magazine, Lascelles Abercrombie called for the
rejection of Imagism and a return to the traditionalism of William Wordsworth, Pound challenged him to a duel on
the basis that, "Stupidity carried beyond a certain point becomes a public menace." Abercrombie suggested as their
choice of weapon unsold copies of their own books.[40] The publication of BLAST was celebrated at a dinner
attended by New England poet Amy Lowell, who came to London to meet the Imagists, but Hilda and Richard were
already moving away from Pound's understanding of the movement, as he moved closer to Wyndham Lewis's ideas.
When Lowell agreed to finance an anthology of Imagist poets, Pound's work was not included. He began to call
Imagisme "Amygism," and in July 1914 declared it dead, asking only that the term be preserved, although Lowell
eventually Anglicized it.[41]

First World War, disillusionment

Between 1914 and 1916 he helped to have James Joyce's A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man serialized in The Egoist then published in book
form, and he persuaded Poetry to publish T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock" in June 1915. Conrad Aiken writes that he had shown
"Prufrock" to every conceivable editor in England, but it was dismissed as
crazy. He eventually sent it to Pound who, Aiken writes, instantly saw that
it was a work of genius and sent it to Poetry.[42] "[Eliot] has actually trained
himself AND modernized himself ON HIS OWN," Pound wrote to Monroe
in October 1914. "The rest of the promising young have done one or the
other but never both. Most of the swine have done neither."[43]

After the publication in 1915 of Cathay, Pound began to speak of working

on his long poem. He told a friend in August: "It is a huge, I was going to
say, gamble, but shan't," and in September told another that it was a Conrad Aiken showed T. S. Eliot's Prufrock
to practically every editor in England; it was
"cryselephantine poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for
Pound who recognized it as a work of
the next four decades unless it becomes a bore." About a year later, he had [42]
genius.
the form of the first three attempts at Canto I, published in Poetry in
January 1917.[44] He was now a regular contributor to three literary magazines. From 1917 he wrote music reviews
for The New Age under the pen name William Atheling, and weekly pieces for The Little Review and The Egoist. The
volume of writing exhausted him, and he began to believe he was wasting his time with prose.[45]

In 1919 he collected and published his essays for The Little Review into a volume called Instigations, and published
"Homage to Sextus Propertius" in Poetry. "Homage" is not a strict translation; Moody describes it as "the refraction
of an ancient poet through a modern intelligence". Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, published a letter from a
Ezra Pound 30

professor of Latin, W.G. Hale, saying that Pound was "incredibly ignorant" of the language, and alluded to "about
three-score errors" in Homage. Harriet did not publish Pound's response, which began "Cat-piss and porcupines!!"
and continued, "The thing is no more a translation than my 'Altaforte' is a translation, or than Fitzgerald's Omar is a
translation ..." But she interpreted his silence after that as his resignation as foreign editor.[46]

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Beneath the sagging roof

The stylist has taken shelter,

Unpaid, uncelebrated,

At last from the world's welter

Nature receives him;

With a placid and uneducated mistress

He exercises his talents

And the soil meets his distress.

The haven from sophistications and contentions

Leaks through its thatch;

He offers succelent cooking;

The door has a creaking latch.

from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Section X (1920)

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley – about a poet whose life, like Pound's, has become sterile and meaningless – was
published in June 1920, marking his farewell to London. He was disgusted by the lives lost during the war and could
not reconcile himself with it. Stephen Adams writes that, just as T. S. Eliot denied he was Prufrock, so Pound denied
he was Mauberley, but the poem, made up of 18 short poems, is nevertheless read as autobiographical. It begins with
a satirical analysis of the London literary scene, then turns to social criticism and economics, and an attack on the
causes of the war, the word "usury" appearing in his work for the first time. The critic F. R. Leavis saw it as Pound's
major achievement.[47]
The war had shattered Pound's belief in modern western civilization. He saw the Vorticist movement as finished and
doubted his own future as a poet. He had only the New Age to write for, with other magazines ignoring his
submissions or not reviewing his work. Toward the end of 1920 he and Dorothy decided their time in London was
over, and resolved to move to Paris.[48] A. R. Orage wrote in the January 1921 issue of The New Age:
Mr. Pound has shaken the dust of London from his feet with not too emphatic a gesture of disgust, but,
at least, without gratitude to this country .... Mr. Pound has been an exhilarating influence for culture in
England ... however, Mr. Pound ... has made more enemies than friends. Much of the Press has been
deliberately closed by cabal to him; his books have for some time been ignored or written down; and he
himself has been compelled to live on much less than would support a navvy.[49]

Paris (1921–24)
The Pounds settled in Paris in January 1921 in an inexpensive apartment at 70 bis, rue Notre Dame des Champs. He
became friendly with Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Fernand Léger and others of the Dada and Surrealist
movements, as well as Basil Bunting, Ernest Hemingway, and his wife Hadley. He spent most of his time building
furniture for his apartment and bookshelves for the bookstore Shakespeare and Company, and in 1921 his Poems
1918–1921 was published. In 1922 Eliot sent him the manuscript of "The Waste Land"; he had arrived in Paris to
edit it with Pound who blue-inked the manuscript with comments like "make up yr. mind ..." and "georgian."[50]
Ezra Pound 31

Eliot wrote: "I should like to think that the manuscript, with the suppressed passages, had disappeared irrecoverably;
yet, on the other hand, I should wish the blue pencilling on it to be preserved as irrefutable evidence of Pound's
critical genius."[23]
In 1924 Pound secured funding for Ford Madox Ford's transatlantic
review from American attorney John Quinn. The review published
works by Pound, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, as well as extracts
from Joyce's Finnegans Wake, before the money ran out in 1925. The
review published a number of Pound music reviews, later collected
into Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony.[51]

Hemingway asked Pound, who had gained a reputation as "an

unofficial minister of culture who acted as mid-wife for new literary
talent", to blue-ink his short stories. Although Hemingway was
14 years younger, the two forged a relationship of mutual respect and
friendship, living on the same street for a time, and touring Italy
together in 1923; as Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes,
"They liked each other personally, shared the same aesthetic aims, and
admired each other's work", with Hemingway assuming the status of
pupil to Pound's teaching. Pound introduced Hemingway to Lewis, Pound met Olga Rudge in 1922.
Ford, and Joyce, while Hemingway in turn tried to teach Pound to box,
but as he told Sherwood Anderson, "[Ezra] habitually leads with his chin and has the general grace of a crayfish or
crawfish".[52]

Pound was 36 when he met the American violinist Olga Rudge in Paris in the fall of 1922, beginning a love affair
that lasted 50 years. John Tytell writes that Pound had always felt there was a link between his creativity and his
ability to seduce women, something Dorothy had turned a blind eye to over the years. He complained shortly after
arriving in Paris that he had been there for three months without having managed to find a mistress. He was
introduced to Olga, then 26, at a musical salon hosted by American heiress Natalie Barney in her home at 20 rue
Jacob, near the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The two moved in different social circles: she was the daughter of a
wealthy Youngstown, Ohio steel family, living in her mother's Parisian apartment on the Right Bank, socializing
with aristocrats, while his friends were mostly impoverished writers of the Left Bank.[53] The two spent the
following summer in the south of France, where he worked with George Antheil to apply the concept of Vorticism to
music, and managed to write two operas, including Le Testament de Villon. He also wrote pieces for solo violin,
which Olga performed.[54]
Ezra Pound 32

Italy (1924–45)

Birth of the children

The Pounds were unhappy in Paris. Dorothy
was complaining about the winters, and
Pound's health was poor. At a dinner
someone had randomly tried to stab him,
and it underlined that their time in France
was over.[55] Hemingway wrote that Pound
"indulged in a small nervous breakdown
necessitating spending two days in the Am.
Hospital (American Hospital)."[56] They
decided to move to a quieter place, and Dorothy and Pound moved to Rapallo in 1924. "Italy is my place for starting
[55]
things," he said.
chose Rapallo, Italy, a town with a
population of 15,000. "Italy is my place for
starting things," he told a friend.[55] During this period they lived on Dorothy's income which in the 1920s was
supplemented by stock dividends generated by her investments in companies such as Colgate Palmolive.[57]

Olga Rudge followed them there, carrying Pound's child. She apparently had no interest in raising a child, but Tytell
writes that she felt having one would keep her connected to him. She gave birth to a daughter, Mary, on 9 July 1925
in Brixen, and the baby was handed over to a German-speaking peasant woman whose own child had died, and who
agreed to raise Mary (later de Rachewiltz) for 200 lire a month.[58]
When Pound told Dorothy about the birth she separated from him for much of that year and the next, and in March
1926 – after returning from a three-month visit to Egypt – she announced that she too was pregnant. She and Pound
left Rapallo for Paris for the premiere of Le Testament de Villon, without mentioning the pregnancy to Pound's
friends or parents, and on 10 September 1926 Hemingway drove Dorothy to the American Hospital of Paris for the
birth of a son, Omar. In a letter to his parents in October Pound wrote, "next generation (male) arrived. Both D & it
appear to be doing well." Dorothy handed the baby over to her mother, Olivia, who raised him in London until he
was old enough to go to boarding school. When Dorothy went to England each summer to see Omar, Pound would
spend the time with Olga, whose father had bought her a house in Venice. The arrangement meant his children were
raised very differently. Mary had one pair of shoes and books about Jesus and the saints, while Omar was raised as
an English gentleman in Kensington by his sophisticated grandmother.[58][59]
In 1925 the literary magazine This Quarter dedicated its first issue to Pound, including tributes from Hemingway
and Joyce. Pound published Cantos 17–19 in the winter editions. In March 1927 he launched his own literary
magazine, The Exile, but only four issues were published. It did well in the first year, with contributions from
Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, Basil Bunting, Yeats, William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon. J. J. Wilhelm
argues that some of the worst work came from Pound himself in the form of rambling editorials about Confucianism
and praise of Lenin.[60] He continued to work on Fenollosa's manuscripts, and in 1928 won The Dial's poetry award
for his translation of the Confucian classic Great Learning (Dà Xué, which Pound transliterated as Ta Hio).[61] That
year Homer and Isabel visited him in Rapallo. They had not seen him since 1914, and by then Homer had retired so
they decided to move to Rapallo themselves, taking a small house, Villa Raggio, on a hill above the town.[58]
Ezra Pound 33

The Cantos
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 til day's end.

from The Cantos, Canto I (1917)

The bulk of Pound's work on The Cantos began after his move to Italy. Like all the other great epics, it is the story of
good and evil, a descent into hell and progress to paradise. Its hundreds of characters fall into three groups: those
who enjoy hell and stay there; those who experience a metamorphosis and want to leave; and a few who lead the rest
to paradiso terrestre. He began work on it in 1915, but there were several false starts and he abandoned most of his
earlier drafts, beginning again in 1922.[62] The subject matter ranges from Odysseus, Troy, Dionysus, Malatesta,
Confucius, and Napoleon, to Jefferson and Mussolini, Chinese history, Pisa, and usury, relying on memories, diaries,
jokes, hymns, anecdotes, and ideogrammic translation in up to 15 different languages. Allen Tate, who supported
Pound for the Bollingen Prize for the sections of The Cantos known as the Pisan Cantos, writes that the poem is not
about anything, and has no beginning, middle, or end. He argues that Pound was incapable of sustained thought and
was "at the mercy of random flights of 'angelic insight,' Icarian self-indulgences of prejudices."[63]
The first three cantos, now known as the ur-Cantos, appeared in Poetry in June–August 1917. The Malatesta Cantos
(Cantos VIII, IX, X, and XI of a Long Poem) appeared in The Criterion in July 1923, and two further cantos were
published in the transatlantic review in January 1924. Pound published 90 copies in Paris in 1925 A Draft of XVI.
Cantos of Ezra Pound for the Beginning of a Poem of some Length now first made into a Book.[64] It was followed
by A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), Eleven New Cantos XXI–XLI (1934), The Fifth Decade of Cantos (1937), Cantos
LII–LXXI (1940), The Pisan Cantos (1948), written while in custody in Pisa, and Seventy Cantos (1950).[65] The first
complete edition was published in 1964 as The Cantos (1–109),[66] followed by Drafts and Fragments: Cantos
CX-CXVII (1968).[65]
Ezra Pound 34

Turn to fascism, Second World War

Pound came to believe during the 1920s that the cause of
the First World War was finance capitalism, which he
called "usury", and that the solution was C.H. Douglas's
idea of social credit, with fascism as the vehicle for reform;
he had met Douglas in The New Age offices and had been
impressed by his ideas.[67] He presented a series of lectures
on economics, and made contact with politicians in the
United States about education, interstate commerce and
international affairs. Although Hemingway advised against
it, on 30 January 1933 Pound met Mussolini himself. Olga
Rudge had played for Mussolini and had told him about
Pound; Pound had already sent him a copy of Cantos XXX.
During the meeting he tried to present Mussolini with a
digest of his economic ideas, but Tytell writes that
Mussolini brushed them aside, though he called the Cantos Pound on the cover of Pavannes and Divisions (1918)
"divertente" (entertaining). The meeting was recorded in
Canto 41: "'Ma questo' / said the boss, 'è divertente.'". Pound told Douglas that he had "never met anyone who
seemed to GET my ideas so quickly as the boss."[68]

A number of Pound's books were published in the 1930s, including ABC of Economics (1933), ABC of Reading
(1934), Social Credit: An Impact (1935), Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1936), and A Guide to Kulchur (1938). In 1936
James Laughlin – who had visited him in Rapallo in 1933 as a 20-year-old student – set up New Directions
Publishing, and acted as Pound's agent, finding publications to accept his work and writing reviews.[69]
When Dorothy's mother died in October 1938 in London, Dorothy asked Pound to organize the funeral, where he
met their 12-year-old son Omar for the first time in eight years. He visited T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, who
produced a now-famous portrait of Pound reclining. In April 1939 he sailed for New York, believing he could stop
America from involvement in the Second World War, happy to answer reporters' questions about Mussolini while he
lounged on the deck of the ship in a tweed jacket. He traveled to Washington, D.C. where he met senators and
congressmen. Mary said he did it out of a sense of responsibility, rather than megalomania; he was offered no
encouragement, and left depressed and frustrated.[70]
While in America, Pound received an honorary doctorate from Hamilton College on 12 June 1939, and a week later
he returned to Italy, where he began writing antisemitic material for Italian newspapers, including one entitled "The
Jews, Disease Incarnate." He wrote to James Laughlin that Roosevelt represented Jewry, and signed the letter "Heil
Hitler." He started writing for Action, a newspaper owned by the British fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley, arguing that the
Third Reich was the "natural civilizer of Russia." After war broke out in September that year, he began a furious
letter-writing campaign to the politicians he had petitioned six months earlier, arguing that the war was the result of
an international banking conspiracy, and that the United States should keep out of it.[71]
Ezra Pound 35

Radio broadcasts
You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-jewed the Jew ... And the big Jew has rotted EVERY
nation he has wormed into.
[72]
—from one of Pound's radio broadcasts, 15 March 1942

Tytell writes that by the 1940s no American or English poet had been so active politically since William Blake.
Pound had written over a thousand letters a year during the previous decade, and had presented his ideas in hundreds
of articles, as well as in The Cantos. According to Tytell, Pound's fear was an economic structure that depended on
the armaments industry, where the profit motive alone would govern war and peace. He started reading George
Santayana, and The Law of Civilization and Decay by Brooks Adams, finding confirmation of the danger of the
capitalist and usurer becoming dominant. He wrote in The Japan Times that "Democracy is now currently defined in
Europe as a 'country run by Jews,'" and told Oswald Mosley's newspaper the English were a slave race governed by
the Rothschilds since Waterloo.[71]
Pound broadcast over Rome Radio, though the Italian government was at first reluctant, concerned he might be a
double agent. He told a friend: "It took me, I think it was, TWO years, insistence and wrangling etc., to GET HOLD
of their microphone." He recorded just over a hundred broadcasts, and traveled to Rome one week a month to
pre-record the 10-minute broadcasts, for which he was paid around $17. The broadcasts required the Italian
government's approval in advance, though he often changed the text in the studio. The politics apart, he needed the
money. Tytell writes that his voice had assumed a "rasping, buzzing quality like the sound of a hornet stuck in a jar."
He continued to occasionally broadcast, and writing under pseudonyms until about April 1945, shortly before his
arrest.[73]

Arrest for treason

A few weeks later he returned south via Milan to Olga and Dorothy. They had been living in Isabel's apartment, but
it was small so they decided to move in with Olga at Sant' Ambrogio. His daughter Mary, then 19, was sent to Gais
in Switzerland, leaving Pound, as she wrote, "pent up with two women who loved him, whom he loved, and who
coldly hated each other." He was in Rome when the Allies landed in Sicily in July 1943. Pound borrowed a pair of
hiking boots and a knapsack and left the city, having finally decided to tell Mary about his wife and son. He walked
450 miles north, spending a night in an air raid shelter in Bologna, and taking a train part of the way to Verona. She
almost failed to recognize him when he arrived, he was so dirty and tired. He told her everything about his other
family; she later said she felt more pity than anger.[74]

Taken at the Army Disciplinary Training Center

The "death cells" in Pisa
He returned to Rapallo, where on 2 May 1945, four days after Mussolini was shot, armed partisans arrived at the
house while Pound was there alone. He stuffed a copy of Confucius and a Chinese dictionary in his pocket, and was
taken to their headquarters in Chiavari, although he was released shortly afterwards. He and Olga then gave
themselves up to an American military post in the nearby town of Lavagna.[75]
Ezra Pound 36

It was decided that Pound should be transported to U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps headquarters in Genoa, where he
was interrogated by Frank L. Amprin, the FBI agent assigned by J. Edgar Hoover to gather evidence following the
1943 indictment. Pound asked permission to send a cable to President Truman to offer to help negotiate peace with
Japan. He also asked to deliver a final broadcast from a script called "Ashes of Europe Calling", in which he
recommended peace with Japan, American management of Italy, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and
leniency toward Germany. His requests were denied and the script forwarded to Hoover.[75]
On 8 May, the day Germany surrendered, he told a reporter from the Philadelphia Record who had managed to get
into the compound for an interview that Hitler was "a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint," and that Mussolini was an "imperfect
character who lost his head." On 24 May he was transferred to the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center
north of Pisa, used to house military personnel awaiting court martial. The temporary commander placed him in one
of the camp's "death cells", a series of six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cages lit up all night by floodlights. He was left
for three weeks in isolation in the heat, denied exercise, eyes inflamed by dust, no bed, no belt, no shoelaces, and no
communication with the guards, except for the chaplain. After two and a half weeks he began to break down under
the strain. Richard Sieburth writes that he recorded it in Canto 80, where Odysseus is saved from drowning by
Leucothea: "hast'ou swum in a sea of air strip / through an aeon of nothingness, / when the raft broke and the waters
went over me." Medical staff moved him out of the cage the following week. On 14 and 15 June he was examined by
psychiatrists, one of whom found symptoms of a mental breakdown, and he was transferred to his own officer's tent
and allowed reading material. He began to write, and drafted what became known as The Pisan Cantos;[75] the
existence of a few sheets of toilet paper showing the beginning of Canto LXXXIV suggests he started it while in the
cage.[76]

United States (1945–58)

St Elizabeths Hospital
On 15 November 1945, Pound was transferred to the United States. An escorting officer's impression was that "he is
an intellectual 'crackpot' who imagined that he could correct all the economic ills of the world and who resented the
fact that ordinary mortals were not sufficiently intelligent to understand his aims and motives."[76] On 25 November
he was arraigned in Washington D.C. on charges of treason. The charges included broadcasting for the enemy,
attempting to persuade American citizens to undermine government support of the war, and strengthening morale in
Italy against the United States.[77]
He was admitted to St. Elizabeths Hospital – where in June
1946 Dorothy was declared his legal guardian – and held for a
time in the hospital's prison ward, Howard's Hall, known as the
"hell-hole," a building without windows in a room with a thick
steel door and nine peepholes, which allowed the psychiatrists to
observe him while they tried to agree on a diagnosis. Visitors
were allowed only for 15 minutes at a time, while other patients
wandered around outside the room screaming and frothing at the
mouth, according to T. S. Eliot.[77] A panel of psychiatrists
eventually settled on a diagnosis of schizophrenia.[78]
The main building of St Elizabeths Hospital, shown in a
Pound's lawyer, Julien Cornell, whose efforts to have him
2006 photograph, now boarded up and abandoned.
declared insane are credited with having saved him from life
imprisonment, requested his release at a bail hearing in January
1947.[79] The hospital's superintendent, Winfred Overholser, agreed instead to move him to the more pleasant
surroundings of Chestnut Ward, close to Overholser's private quarters, which is where he spent the next 12 years.[77]
The historian Stanley Kutler was given access in the 1980s to military intelligence and other government documents
Ezra Pound 37

about Pound, including his hospital records, and wrote that the psychiatrists believed Pound had a narcissistic
personality, but they considered him sane. Kutler said that Overholser protected Pound from the criminal justice
system because he was fascinated by him.[80]
Tytell argues that Pound was in his element in Chestnut Ward. He was at last provided for, and was allowed to read,
write, and receive visitors, including Dorothy for several hours a day. He took over a small alcove with wicker chairs
just outside his room, and turned it into his private living room, where he entertained his friends and important
literary figures. He began work on his translation of Sophocles's Women of Trachis and Electra, and continued work
on The Cantos. It reached the point where he refused to discuss any attempt to have him released. Olga Rudge
visited him twice, once in 1952 and again in 1955, and was unable to convince him to be more assertive about his
release. She wrote to a friend: "E.P. has ... bats in the belfry but it strikes me that he has fewer not more than before
his incarceration."[77]

The Pisan Cantos, Bollingen Prize

James Laughlin had Cantos 74–84 ready for publication in 1946 under the title The Pisan Cantos, and even gave
Pound an advance copy, but he had held it back, waiting for an appropriate time to publish. Tytell writes that in June
1948 a group of Pound's friends – Eliot, Cummings, W. H. Auden, Allen Tate, and Julien Cornell – met Laughlin to
discuss how to get him released. According to the poet Archibald MacLeish, the men conceived a plan to have
Pound awarded the first Bollingen Prize, a new national poetry award just announced by the Library of Congress,
with $1,000 prize money donated by the Mellon family. The awards committee consisted of 15 fellows of the
Library of Congress, including several of Pound's supporters, such as Eliot, Tate, Conrad Aiken, Amy Lowell,
Katherine Anne Porter, and Theodore Spencer. The idea was that the Justice Department would be placed in an
untenable position if Pound won a major award and was not released.[81]
Laughlin published The Pisan Cantos on 30 July 1948, and the following year the prize went to Pound. There were
two dissenting voices, Katherine Garrison Chapin, the wife of Francis Biddle, the Attorney General who had indicted
Pound for treason, and Karl Shapiro, who said that he could not vote for an antisemite because he was Jewish
himself. Pound's response to the news of the award was, "No comment from the bughouse."[81]
There was uproar. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette quoted critics who said "poetry [cannot] convert words into maggots
that eat at human dignity and still be good poetry." Robert Hillyer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and president of the
Poetry Society of America, attacked the committee in The Saturday Review of Literature, telling journalists that he
"never saw anything to admire in Pound, not one line."[82] Congressman Jacob K. Javits demanded an investigation
into the awards committee, and as a result it was the last time the prize was administered by the Library of
Congress.[81]

Controversial friendships, release

Although Pound repudiated his antisemitism in public, Tytell writes that in private it continued. He often refused to
talk to psychiatrists with Jewish-sounding names, would refer to people he disliked as Jews, and urged his visitors to
read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), a forgery claiming to represent a Jewish plan for world
domination.[77] He struck up a friendship during the 1950s with the writer Eustace Mullins, believed to be associated
with the Aryan League of America, who wrote a biography of Pound, This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound
(1961).[83]
Even more damaging was his friendship with a far-right activist and member of the Ku Klux Klan, John Kasper.
Kasper had come to admire Pound during some literature classes at university, and after he wrote to Pound in 1950
the two became friends. Kasper opened a bookstore in Greenwich Village in 1953 called "Make it New," reflecting
his commitment to Pound's ideas; it specialized in far-right material, including Nazi literature, and Pound's poetry
and translations were displayed in the window.[84] Kasper and another follower of Pound's, David Horton, set up a
publishing imprint, Square Dollar Series, which Pound used as a vehicle for his tracts about economic reform.[85]
Ezra Pound 38

Wilhelm writes that there were a lot of perfectly respectable people visiting Pound too, such as the classicist J.P.
Sullivan and the writer Guy Davenport, but it was the association with Mullins and Kasper that stood out.[83] The
relationships delayed his release from St Elizabeths.[85] In an interview for the Paris Review in 1954, when asked by
interviewer George Plimpton about Pound's relationship with Kasper, Hemingway replied that Pound should be
released and Kasper jailed.[86] Kasper was eventually jailed for the 1957 bombing of the Hattie Cotton School in
Nashville, targeted because a black girl had registered as a student.[85]
Pound's friends continued to try to get him out. Shortly after Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954,
he told Time magazine that "this would be a good year to release poets." MacLeish asked him in June 1957 to write a
letter on Pound's behalf; Hemingway believed Pound was unable to abstain from awkward political statements or
from friendships with people like Kasper, but he signed a letter of support anyway, and pledged $1,500 to be given
to Pound when he was released.[87] In 1957 several publications began campaigning for his release. Le Figaro
published an appeal entitled "The Lunatic at St Elizabeths." The New Republic, Esquire and The Nation followed
suit; The Nation argued that Pound was a sick and vicious old man, but that he had rights too. In 1958 MacLeish
hired Thurman Arnold, a prestigious lawyer who ended up charging no fee, to file a motion to dismiss the 1945
indictment. Overholser, the hospital's superintendent, supported the application with an affidavit saying Pound was
permanently and incurably insane, and that confinement served no therapeutic purpose.[88] The motion was heard on
18 April that year by the same judge who had committed him to St Elizabeths. The Department of Justice did not
oppose the motion, and Pound was free.[89]

Italy (1958–72)
Pound arrived in Naples in July, where he was photographed giving a fascist salute by the waiting press. When asked
by the press when he had been released from the mental hospital, he replied: "I never was. When I left the hospital I
was still in America, and all America is an insane asylum."[90]
He and Dorothy went to live with Mary at Castle Brunnenburg near Merano in the Province of South Tyrol – where
he met his grandson, Walter, and his granddaughter, Patrizia, for the first time – then returned to Rapallo, where
Olga Rudge was waiting to join them. They were accompanied by a teacher Pound had met in hospital, Marcella
Spann, 40 years younger than him, who was ostensibly acting as his secretary, collecting poems for an anthology.
The four women soon fell out, vying for control over him; Canto 113 alluded to it: "Pride, jealousy and
possessiveness / 3 pains of hell." Pound was in love with Marcella, seeing in her his last chance for love and youth.
He wrote about her in Canto CXIII: "The long flank, the firm breast / and to know beauty and death and despair /
And to think that what has been shall be, / flowing, ever unstill." Dorothy had usually ignored his affairs, but she
used her legal power over his royalties to make sure Marcella was seen off, sent back to America. Pound wrote to
Hemingway: "Old man him tired."[91]
By December 1959 he had fallen into a depression, insisting his work was worthless and The Cantos were botched.
In a 1960 interview given in Rome to Donald Hall for Paris Review, he said: "You—find me—in fragments." Hall
wrote that he seemed in an "abject despair, accidie, meaninglessness, abulia, waste." He paced up and down during
the three days it took to complete the interview, never finishing a sentence, bursting with energy one minute, then
suddenly sagging, and at one point seemed about to collapse. Hall said it was clear that he "doubted the value of
everything he had done in his life." Those close to him thought he was suffering from dementia, and in the summer
of 1960 Mary placed him in a clinic near Merano when his weight dropped. He picked up again, but by the spring of
1961 he had a urinary infection. Dorothy felt unable to look after him, so he went that summer to live with Olga in
Rapallo, then Venice; Dorothy mostly stayed in London after that with Omar. Pound attended a neo-Fascist May
Day parade in 1962, but his health continued to decline. The next year he told an interviewer, Grazia Levi, "I spoil
everything I touch. I have always blundered .... All my life I believed I knew nothing, yes, knew nothing. And so
words became devoid of meaning."[92]
Ezra Pound 39

William Carlos Williams died in 1963, followed two years later by T. S. Eliot. Pound attended Eliot's funeral in
London and traveled to Dublin to visit Yeats's widow.
Two years later Pound went to New York for the opening of
an exhibition that featured his blue-inked version of Eliot's
The Waste Land,[93] and received a standing ovation at
Hamilton College when he accompanied Laughlin who was
receiving an honorary doctorate. Shortly before his death in
1972 it was proposed he be awarded the Emerson-Thoreau
Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, but
after a storm of protest the academy's council opposed it by 13
to 9. The sociologist Daniel Bell, who was on the committee,
argued that it was important to distinguish between those who
explore hate and those who approve it. Two weeks before his
Pound's grave on the Isola di San Michele
87th birthday, Pound read for a gathering of friends at a café:
"re USURY / I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a
cause. / The cause is AVARICE."[94]

On his birthday he was too weak to leave his bedroom at his home on the Piazza San Marco, and the following night
he was admitted to the Civil Hospital of Venice, where he died in his sleep of an intestinal blockage on 1 November,
aged 87, with Olga at his side. Dorothy was unable to travel to the funeral. Four gondoliers dressed in black rowed
the body to the island cemetery, Isola di San Michele, where he was buried near Diaghilev and Stravinsky.[95]
Dorothy died in England the following year. Olga died in 1996 and was buried next to Pound.[93]

Reception
Do not move

 Let the wind speak

 that is paradise.

Let the Gods forgive what I

 have made

Let those I love try to forgive

 what I have made.

[96]
—from Canto 120

Opinion varies about the nature of Pound's writing style. Critics generally agree that he was a strong lyricist,
particularly in his early work. Scholars such as Ira Nadel see evidence of modernism in his poetry before he began
the Cantos, and Witmeyer argues that as early as Ripostes a modern style is evident. His style drew on literature
from a variety of disciplines. Nadel writes that he wanted his poetry to represent an "objective presentation of
material which he believed could stand on its own," without use of symbolism or romanticism. The Chinese writing
system most closely met his ideals. He used Chinese ideograms to represent "the thing in pictures," and from Noh
theater learned that plot could be replaced by a single image.[97]
Nadel argues that imagism was to change Pound's poetry. He explains, "Imagism evolved as a reaction against
abstraction ... replacing Victorian generalities with the clarity in Japanese haiku and ancient Greek lyrics."[97] Pound
scholar Daniel Albright writes that Pound tried to condense and eliminate "all but the hardest kernel" from a poem
such as the two-line poem "In a Station of the Metro". This, however, was a technique that did not lend itself well to
the writing of an epic such as the Cantos, and so Pound turned to the more dynamic structure of what he considered
Vorticism for the Cantos.[98]
Ezra Pound 40

Translations
In Pound's Fenollosa translations, unlike previous American translators of Chinese poetry, who tended to work with
strict metrical and stanzaic patterns, Pound created free verse translations. Whether the poems are valuable as
translations continues to be a source of controversy. Pound scholar Ming Xie explains that the use of language in
Pound's translation of the Old English poem "The Seafarer" is deliberate, avoiding merely "trying to assimilate the
original into contemporary language". After his work with The Seafarer, it was in the Japanese Noh plays that he
found an answer to his search for anti-naturalist minimalism which occurred just prior to his initial work with
Fenellosa's papers, leading to the translation of 14 Chinese poems in Cathay, published in 1915.[99]
Neither Pound nor Fenollosa spoke or read Chinese proficiently, and Pound has been criticized for omitting or
adding sections to his poems which have no basis in the original texts, though critics argue that the fidelity of Cathay
to the original Chinese is beside the point.[99] Hugh Kenner, in a chapter "The Invention of China" from The Pound
Era, contends that Cathay should be read primarily as a work about World War I, not as an attempt at accurately
translating ancient Eastern poems. The real achievement of the book, Kenner argues, is in how it combines
meditations on violence and friendship with an effort to "rethink the nature of an English poem". These ostensible
translations of ancient Eastern texts, Kenner argues, are actually experiments in English poetics and compelling
elegies for a warring West.[100]
Michael Alexander writes that, as a translator, Pound was a pioneer with a great gift of language and an incisive
intelligence. He helped popularize major poets such as Guido Cavalcanti and Du Fu and brought Provençal and
Chinese poetry to English-speaking audiences. He revived interest in the Confucian classics and introduced the west
to classical Japanese poetry and drama. He translated and championed Greek, Latin and Anglo-Saxon classics, and
helped keep them alive at a time when classical education was in decline, and poets no longer considered translations
central to their craft.[101]

Legacy
His own work apart, Pound was responsible for advancing the careers of some of the best-known modernist writers
of the early 20th century. In addition to Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, Frost, Williams, Hemingway, and Conrad Aiken, he
befriended and helped Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Jacob Epstein, Basil Bunting, E.E. Cummings, Margaret
Anderson, George Oppen, and Charles Olson.[102] In addition, Pound had a critical influence on the two major
modernising poets in the Irish Language in the mid-twentieth century, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máirtín Ó Direáin. Hugh
Witemeyer argues that the Imagist movement was the most important in 20th-century English language poetry
because hardly any prominent poet of Pound's generation and the two generations after him was untouched by it. As
early as 1917 Carl Sandburg wrote in Poetry: "All talk on modern poetry, by people who know, ends with dragging
in Ezra Pound somewhere.[103] He may be named only to be cursed as wanton and mocker, poseur, trifler and
vagrant. Or he may be classed as filling a niche today like that of Keats in a preceding epoch. The point is, he will be
mentioned."[104]
Beyond this, Pound's legacy is mixed. In 1922, the literary critic Edmund Wilson reviewed Pound's latest published
volume of poetry, Poems 1918–21, and took the opportunity to provide an overview of his estimation of Pound as
poet. In his essay on Pound, titled "Ezra Pound’s Patchwork", Wilson wrote:
Ezra Pound is really at heart a very boyish fellow and an incurable provincial. It is true that he was
driven to Europe by a thirst for romance and color that he could scarcely have satisfied in America, but
he took to Europe the simple faith and pure enthusiasm of his native Idaho. ... His sophistication is still
juvenile, his ironies are still clumsy and obvious, he ridicules Americans in Europe not very much
simpler than himself ...[105]
According to Wilson, the lines in Pound's poems stood isolated, with fragmentary wording contributing to poems
that "do not hang together". Specifically citing Pound's first seven cantos, Wilson dubbed his writing
"unsatisfactory". Wilson found the Cantos to be a disjointed compilation, its contents reflecting a too obvious
Ezra Pound 41

reliance on the literary works of other authors whom Pound had read and an awkward use of Latin and Chinese
translations as a device inserted among reminiscences of Pound's own life.[106]
Hugh Kenner wrote in 1951 that there was no great contemporary writer less read than Pound, though he added that
there was also no one who could appeal more through "sheer beauty of language" to people who would rather talk
about poets than read them.[107] The British poet Philip Larkin criticized him "for being literary, which to me is the
foundation of his feebleness, thinking that poetry is made out of poetry and not out of being alive".[108] His
antisemitism became central to an evaluation of his poetry, including whether it was read at all. Wendy Stallard
Flory argues that the best approach to The Cantos – separating the poetry from the antisemitism – is perceived as
apologetic. Her view is that the establishment of Pound as "National Monster" and "designated fascist intellectual"
made him a stand-in for the silent majority in Germany, occupied France and Belgium, as well as Britain and the
United States, who, she argues, made the Holocaust possible by aiding or standing by.[109]
The outrage after the treason charge was so deep that the imagined method of his execution dominated the
discussion. Arthur Miller considered him worse than Hitler: "In his wildest moments of human vilification Hitler
never approached our Ezra  ... he knew all America's weaknesses and he played them as expertly as Goebbels ever
did." The response went so far as to denounce all modernists as fascists, and it was only in the 1980s that critics
began a re-evaluation. The critic Macha Rosenthal wrote that it was "as if all the beautiful vitality and all the brilliant
rottenness of our heritage in its luxuriant variety were both at once made manifest" in Ezra Pound.[110]
Pound in later life was able to incisively analyze what he judged to be his own failings as a writer attributable to his
obstinate adherence to ideological fallacies. Meeting with poet Allen Ginsberg in Venice in 1967, Pound provided a
self-professed coda to his body of work:
My own work does not make sense. A mess ... my writing, stupidity and ignorance all the way through
... the intention was bad, anything I’ve done has been an accident, in spite of my spoiled intentions the
preoccupation with stupid and irrelevant matters ... but my worst mistake was the stupid suburban
anti-Semitic prejudice, all along that spoiled everything .... I found after 70 years that I was not a lunatic
but a moron. I should have been able to do better .... It’s all doubletalk ... it’s all tags and patches ... a
mess.[111]

Works
Books published in his lifetime[65]
• 1908 A Lume Spento. Privately printed by A. Antonini, Venice, (poems).
• 1908 A Quinzaine for This Yule. Pollock, London; and Elkin Mathews, London, (poems).
• 1909 Personae. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems).
• 1909 Exultations. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems).
• 1910 The Spirit of Romance. Dent, London, (prose).
• 1910 Provenca. Small, Maynard, Boston, (poems).
• 1911 Canzoni. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems)
• 1912 The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti Small, Maynard, Boston, (cheaper edition destroyed by fire,
Swift & Co, London; translations)
• 1912 Ripostes. S. Swift, London, (poems; first announcement of Imagism)
• 1915 Cathay. Elkin Mathews, (poems; translations)
• 1916 Gaudier-Brzeska. A Memoir. John Lane, London, (prose).
• 1916 Certain Noble Plays of Japan: From the Manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, chosen and finished by Ezra
Pound, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats.
• 1916 Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound: "Noh", or, Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan.
Macmillan, London,
• 1916 Lustra. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems).
Ezra Pound 42

• 1917 Twelve Dialogues of Fontenelle, (translations)

• 1917 Lustra Knopf, New York. (poems). With a version of the first Three Cantos (Poetry, vol. 10, nos. 3, June
1917, 4, July 1917, 5, August 1917).
• 1918: Pavannes and Divisions. Knopf, New York. prose
• 1918 Quia Pauper Amavi. Egoist Press, London. poems
• 1919 The Fourth Canto. Ovid Press, London
• 1920 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Ovid Press, London.
• 1920 Umbra. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems and translations)
• 1920 Instigations of Ezra Pound: Together with an Essay on the Chinese Written Character as a Medium for
Poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa. Boni & Liveright, (prose).
• 1921 Poems, 1918–1921. Boni & Liveright, New York
• 1922 Remy de Gourmount: The Natural Philosophy of Love. Boni & Liveright, New York, (translation)
• 1923 Indiscretions, or, Und Revue des deux mondes. Three Mountains Press, Paris.
• 1924 Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony. Paris, (essays). As: William Atheling.
• 1925 A Draft of XVI Cantos. Three Mountains Press, Paris. The first collection of The Cantos.
• 1926 Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound. Boni & Liveright, New York
• 1928 A Draft of the Cantos 17–27. John Rodker, London.
• 1928 Selected Poems, edited and with an introduction by T. S. Eliot. Faber & Gwyer, London
• 1928 Confucius: Ta Hio: The Great Learning, newly rendered into the American language. University of
Washington Bookstore (Glenn Hughes), (translation)
• 1930 A Draft of XXX Cantos. Nancy Cunard's Hours Press, Paris.
• 1930 Imaginary Letters. Black Sun Press, Paris. Eight essays from the Little Review, 1917–18.
• 1931 How to Read. Harmsworth, (essays)
• 1933 ABC of Economics. Faber, London, (essays)
• 1934 Eleven New Cantos: XXXI-XLI. Farrer & Rinehart, New York, (poems)
• 1934 Homage to Sextus Propertius. Faber, London (poems)
• 1934 ABC of Reading. Yale University Press, (essays)
• 1935 Alfred Venison's Poems: Social Credit Themes by the Poet of Titchfield Street. Stanley Nott, Pamphlets on
the New Economics, No. 9, London, (essays)
• 1935 Jefferson and/or Mussolini. Stanley Nott, London, Liveright, 1936 (essays)
• 1935 Make It New. London, (essays)
• 1935 Social Credit. An Impact. London, (essays). Repr.: Peter Russell, Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 5,
London 1951.
• 1936 Ernest Fenollosa: The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Stanley Nott, London 1936. An
Ars Poetica With Foreword and Notes by Ezra Pound.
• 1937 The Fifth Decade of Cantos. Farrer & Rinehart, New York, poems
• 1937 Polite Essays. Faber, London, (essays)
• 1937 Confucius: Digest of the Analects, edited and published by Giovanni Scheiwiller, (translations)
• 1938 Culture. New Directions. New edition: Guide to Kulchur, New Directions, 1952
• 1939 What Is Money For?. Greater Britain Publications, (essays). Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 3, Peter
Russell, London
• 1940 Cantos LXII-LXXI. New Directions, New York, (John Adams Cantos 62–71).
• 1942 Carta da Visita di Ezra Pound. Edizioni di lettere d'oggi. Rome. English translation, by John Drummond: A
Visiting Card, Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 4, Peter Russell, London 1952, (essays).
• 1944 L'America, Roosevelt e le cause della guerra presente. Casa editrice della edizioni popolari, Venice. English
translation, by John Drummond: America, Roosevelt and the Causes of the Present War, Money Pamphlets by
Pound, no. 6, Peter Russell, London 1951
Ezra Pound 43

• 1944 Introduzione alla Natura Economica degli S.U.A.. Casa editrice della edizioni popolari. Venice. English
translation An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States, by Carmine Amore. Repr.: Peter Russell,
Money Pamphlets by Pound, London 1950 (essay)
• 1944 Orientamini. Casa editrice dalla edizioni popolari. Venice (prose)
• 1944 Oro et lavoro: alla memoria di Aurelio Baisi. Moderna, Rapallo. English translation: Gold and Work,
Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 2, Peter Russell, London 1952 (essays)
• 1948 If This Be Treason. Siena: privately printed for Olga Rudge by Tip Nuova (original drafts of six of Pound's
Rome radio broadcasts)
• 1948 The Pisan Cantos. New Directions, (Cantos 74–84)
• 1948 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (includes The Pisan Contos). New Directions, poems
• 1949 Elektra (started in 1949, first performed 1987), a play by Ezra Pound and Rudd Fleming
• 1948 The Pisan Cantos. New Directions, New York.
• 1950 Seventy Cantos. Faber, London.
• 1950 Patria Mia. R. F. Seymour, Chicago [Reworked New Age articles, 1912, '13 (Orage)
• 1951 Confucius: The Great Digest; The Unwobbling Pivot. New Directions (translation)
• 1951 Confucius: Analects (John) Kaspar & (David) Horton, Square $ Series, New York, (translation)
• 1953 Hugh Kenner (ed.): The Translations of Ezra Pound, New Directions, (translations)
• 1954 The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius. Harvard University Press (translations)
• 1954 Lavoro ed Usura. All'insegna del pesce d'oro. Milan (essays)
• 1955 Section: Rock-Drill, 85–95 de los Cantares. All'insegna del pesce d'oro, Milan, (poems)
• 1956 Sophocles: The Women of Trachis. A Version by Ezra Pound. Neville Spearman, London, (translation)
• 1957 Brancusi. Milan (essay)
• 1959 Thrones: 96–109 de los Cantares. New Directions, (poems)
• 1960 Noel Stock (ed.): Impact: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilization. Henri Regnery,
Chicago
• 1968 Drafts and Fragments: Cantos CX-CXVII. New Directions, (poems)
Selected posthumous publications[65]
• 1975 William Levy (ed.): Certain Radio Speeches of Ezra Pound. Cold Turkey Press, Rotterdam
• 1976 Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound. New Directions.
• 1977 R. Murray Schafer (ed.): Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism. New Directions, (essays).
• 1978 Leonard W. Doob (ed.): 'Ezra Pound Speaking': Radio Speeches of World War II. Greenwood Press
(speeches)
• 1980 Harriet Zinnes (ed.): Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts. New Directions (essays)
• 1991 Charlotte Ward (ed.): Pound's Translations of Arnaut Daniel. Garland, New York 1991 (translations)
• 1992 Richard Sieburth (ed.): A Walking Tour of Southern France: Ezra Pound Among the Troubadours. New
Directions, New York.
• 1996 Maria Luisa Ardizzone (ed.): Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years. Duke
University Press. (essays)
• 1997 Jack Ross: Ezra Pound' s Fascist Cantos (72 & 73) together with Rimbaud's 'Poets at Seven Years Old' .
Perdrix Press, Auckland (the two Salo Cantos were first published in the newspaper: Marina Repubblicanain
early 1945; re-published in 1973 in an edition of 25; in Cantos editions (untranslated in Italian) since 1986.
• 2002 Massimo Bacigalupo (ed.): Canti postumi. Mondadori, Milan, (Cantos)
• 2002 Margaret Fisher, Ezra Pound's Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments 1931–1933 (MIT Press) with the
complete radio script by Pound for the 1931 broadcast of Le Testament.
• 2003 First edition of Cavalcanti, three-act opera (1931–1932). Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher: Calvacanti: A
Perspective on The Music of Ezra Pound (engraved music score of complete opera, Second Evening Art
Publishing ISBN 978-0-9728859-0-4). A compact disk Ego Scriptor Cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound was
Ezra Pound 44

published in 2003 by Other Minds; OM 1005-2, (music; 2 operas).

• 2005 First edition of the unfinished third opera, Collis O Heliconii (c. 1933): The Recovery of Ezra Pound's Third
Opera Collis O Heliconii, Settings of Poems by Catullus and Sappho, Margaret Fisher (ed.),(engraved music
scores of two unfinished arias and musical interludes, Second Evening Art Publishing ISBN 978-0-9728859-3-5).
User-friendly editions
• 2003 Richard Sieburth (ed.): Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations. Library of America. ISBN
978-1-931082-41-9.
• 2004 First edition, Complete Violin Works of Ezra Pound, Robert Hughes, ed. (engraved music scores, Second
Evening Art Publishing ISBN 978-0-9728859-2-8).
• 2008 First editions of the 1926 and 1933 versions of Ezra Pound's opera Le Testament. Margaret Fisher and
Robert Hughes (eds.), (engraved music scores, Second Evening Art Publishing ISBN 978-0-9728859-4-2).
• projected, 2011: First edition of the 1923 Le Testament de Villon. Facsimile of the 1923 holograph music score
edited by George Antheil, with audio CD of the complete opera. Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher (eds.),
(Second Evening Art Publishing ISBN 978-0-9728859-8-0).

Memorial
The Homer Pound House, Ezra's birthplace in Hailey, Idaho, survives and is listed on the U.S. National Register of
Historic Places.

Notes
[1] Nadel (1999), xiv–xxxi
• For details of the publication sequence of the final cantos, see Bush (1999), 109
• For a different view of the beginning of the Imagist movement, see Brown, Mark. "Enthusiasts mark centenary of modern poetry" (http:/ /
www. guardian. co. uk/ books/ 2009/ mar/ 25/ hulme-modern-poetry-ezra-pound-imagists), The Guardian, 25 March 2009.
[2] For his promotion of other writers, see Hammer, Langdon. Lecture on Ezra Pound (http:/ / videolectures. net/ yaleengl310s07_hammer_lec09/
), Yale University, accessed 11 April 2012.
• Also see Montgomery, Paul L. "Ezra Pound: A Man of Contradictions" (http:/ / select. nytimes. com/ gst/ abstract.
html?res=FB091EF83A591A7493C0A9178AD95F468785F9& scp=1& sq="A Man of Contradictions" Ezra Pound& st=cse), The New
York Times, 2 November 1972.
• For the quote from Hemingway, see Bruccoli and Baughman (2006), 5–6 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=0iCYVqAMnfkC&
pg=PA5)
[3] For his support of Mussolini and Hitler, see Witemeyer (1996), 123–124
• For his relationship with Mosley, see Haller (2005), 195
• For the broadcasts, see Gill (2005), 115–116
• For his mental breakdown, and the quote from The Pisan Cantos (80.665–67), see Sieburth (2003), xiii
[4] For the controversy about the Bollingen prize, see Hammer, Langdon. Lecture on Ezra Pound (http:/ / videolectures. net/
yaleengl310s07_hammer_lec09/ ), Yale University, accessed 11 April 2012.
• For the Time quote, see "Books: Unpegged Pound" (http:/ / www. time. com/ time/ magazine/ article/ 0,9171,745380,00. html), Time, 20
March 1933, accessed 12 April 2012.
• For Hemingway, see Bruccoli and Baughman (2006), 25
[5] Moody (2007), xiii–13
[6] Lyon 1632 passenger list (http:/ / www. whipple. org/ docs/ lyon. html)
[7] Cockram (2005), 238
[8] qtd in Redman (1999), 251
[9] Levy (1983), 11
[10] Doolittle (1979), 67–68
• Hilda's Book is in the Houghton Library at Harvard; see "Poems and Translations" (http:/ / www. loa. org/ volume. jsp?RequestID=201&
section=notes), Library of America, accessed 21 October 2010.
[11] Nadel (1999), 3–6
[12] He would later apply the form he imagined throughout the writing of the Cantos. See Moody (2007), 24
[13] Moody (2007), 23–24, 28–33
Ezra Pound 45

[14] Moody (2007), 59–60; Wilhelm (1985), 177; Carpenter (1988a), 80

[15] For Venice, see Tytell (1987), 35
• For the dedication of A Lume Spento, see Zinnes (1980) xi
• For his sales of A Lume Spento, see Montgomery, Paul L. "Ezra Pound: A Man of Contradictions" (http:/ / select. nytimes. com/ gst/
abstract. html?res=FB091EF83A591A7493C0A9178AD95F468785F9& scp=1& sq="A Man of Contradictions" Ezra Pound& st=cse),
The New York Times, 2 November 1972, accessed 12 April 2012.
• For the Evening Standard quote, see Eliot (1917), 5
• For information about Brooke Smith, see Carpenter (1988a), 91, 95
[16] Knapp (1979), 25–27
[17] Pound (2003), 80, lines 334–336
• Also see Campbell, James. "Home from home" (http:/ / www. guardian. co. uk/ books/ 2008/ may/ 17/ poetry3), The Guardian, 17 May
2008.
[18] Wilhelm (2008), 3–11
[19] Moody (2007), 113
[20] For the money from Cravens, see Moody (2007), 124–125; for the speculation they were lovers, see Carpenter (1988), 155; Dennis (1999),
264; Pound, Omar (1988), 66
[21] For Brooke's review, see Moody (2007), 91–93, and for his move to Church Walk, see p. 180.
• For Personae, see Elek, Jon. "Personae" (http:/ / www. litencyc. com/ php/ sworks. php?rec=true& UID=2841), The Literary
Encyclopedia, 8 April 2004, accessed 12 October 2010.
• For Exultations, see Wilson, Peter. "Exultations" (http:/ / www. litencyc. com/ php/ sworks. php?rec=true& UID=5224), The Literary
Encyclopedia, 20 April 2004, accessed 13 October 2010.
[22] Stock (1970), 70; Nadel (1999), xiv–xxv
[23] Montgomery, Paul L. "Ezra Pound: A Man of Contradictions" (http:/ / select. nytimes. com/ gst/ abstract.
html?res=FB091EF83A591A7493C0A9178AD95F468785F9& scp=1& sq="A Man of Contradictions" Ezra Pound& st=cse), The New York
Times, 2 November 1972, accessed 3 Septer 2012
[24] For his view of the U.S., see Wilhelm (2008), 62–65
• For Canzoni, see Elek, Jon. "Canzoni" (http:/ / www. litencyc. com/ php/ sworks. php?rec=true& UID=6100), The Literary Encyclopedia,
8 March 2005, accessed 6 October 2010.
• Orage also made an appearance in The Cantos (where Possum is T. S. Eliot): "But the lot of 'em, / Yeats, Possum and Wyndham / had no
ground beneath 'em. / Orage had." See Wilhelm (2008), 83, citing Canto 98/685.
[25] Moody (2007), 180
[26] Arrowsmith (2011), 103–164
• Also see Arrowsmith (2011), 27–42
• Also see Dennis (2000), 101
[27] Video of a lecture discussing the importance of Japanese culture to Pound's early poetry (http:/ / vimeo. com/ arrowsmith/
cosmopolitanism-and-modernism), London University School of Advanced Study, March 2012.
[28] Venuti (1979), 88
• Also see Knapp (1979), 54
[29] Pound, Ezra. "A Retrospect" (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=uOQMlH_zYNAC& pg=PA3), in T. S. Eliot. (1968). Literary Essays of
Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions Publishing. 3–5; first published 1918.
[30] Witemeyer (1969), 34
• For its description as the classic Imagist poem, see Witemeyer (1999), 49
[31] Pound, Ezra, Ripostes, Stephen Swift & Co Ltd, London, 1912.
[32] For submission and publication dates, see Pound, Ezra. Poems and translations (http:/ / books. google. com/
books?ei=K4G-TPKUOobCnAebw_mJDg& ct=result& id=bS9bAAAAMAAJ& pg=PA1239), Library of America, 2003, p. 1239.
• For Knapp's view, see Knapp (1979) (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?ei=32K-TL_pBIiKnQeR3PGKDg& pg=PA57), 57
• For Pound's first use of the word "Imagiste," see Pound (1918) (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=uOQMlH_zYNAC& pg=PA4), 4
• For Alexander's view and the unpopularity of Pound's translations, see Alexander (1979), 62
• For the original text of The Seafarer, see "The Seafarer" (http:/ / www. anglo-saxons. net/ hwaet/ ?do=get& type=text& id=Sfr&
textOnly=true), Anglo-Saxons.net, accessed 19 October 2010.
• For Pound's interpretation of the poem, see Pound, Ezra. "The Seafarer" (http:/ / rpo. library. utoronto. ca/ poem/ 1664. html),
Representative Poetry Online, University of Toronto, accessed 19 October 2010.
• For more information about Ripostes, see Wilson, Peter. "Ripostes of Ezra Pound" (http:/ / www. litencyc. com/ php/ sworks.
php?rec=true& UID=2386), The Literary Encyclopedia, 7 September 2004, accessed 12 October 2010.
[33] "The Fenollosa Papers" in Stock, 1965 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=mYcrAAAAYAAJ& pg=PA177), 177–179
[34] Moody (2007), 239
[35] Alexander (1979), 95
Ezra Pound 46

• Yip, Wai-lim. Ezra Pound's Cathay. Princeton University Press, 1969, cited in Alexander (1979), 99
[36] Stock (1970), 143–147; Tytell (1987), 97
[37] Moody (2007), 240
• Also see Longenbach, James. "The Odd Couple: Pound and Yeats Together" (http:/ / www. nytimes. com/ 1988/ 01/ 10/ books/
the-odd-couple-pound-and-yeats-together. html?scp=30& sq=Ezra Pound& st=cse), The New York Times, 10 January 1988, accessed 12
April 2012.
[38] Moody (2007), 246–249
[39] Moody (2007), 230, 256
[40] Campbell, James. "Home from home" (http:/ / www. guardian. co. uk/ books/ 2008/ may/ 17/ poetry3), The Guardian, 17 May 2008,
accessed 12 April 2012.
[41] Moody (2007), 222–225
[42] Aiken (1965), 4–5
[43] Mertens, Richard. "Letter by letter" (http:/ / magazine. uchicago. edu/ 0108/ features/ letter. html), University of Chicago Magazine, 93.6,
August 2001.
[44] Moody (2007), 306–307
[45] Moody (2007), 330
[46] Kenner (1971), 286
[47] Adams (2005), 149
• Bilan (2010), 89
• Pound, Ezra. "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (http:/ / www. gutenberg. org/ cache/ epub/ 23538/ pg23538. html), the text from Project
Gutenberg, 18 November 2007, accessed 20 October 2010.
• Also see Leavis (1932), 134, 150
[48] Moody (2007), 394–396
[49] Moody (2007), 410
[50] Badenhausen (2004), 84
[51] Carpenter (1988a), 430–431, 448
[52] Meyers (1985), 70–74
[53] For his need of a mistress, see Tytell (1987), 180
• For their belonging to different circles, see Wilhelm (2008), 251 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=UpmBwzOT7hwC&
printsec=frontcover& hl=en#v=snippet& q=Rive Gauche& f=false)
[54] For his operas, see Kenner (1973), 390
• For his pieces for violin, see Stock (1970), 252–256
[55] Tytell (1987), 191–193
[56] Baker (1981), 127
[57] Tytell (1987), 225
[58] Tytell (1987), 197–198, 218
[59] *For more about the woman who raised Mary, and Pound telling Dorothy, see Wilhelm (1994) (http:/ / books. google. com/
books?id=s3mw-IZom4sC& pg=PA13), 13–15
• Also see Carpenter (1988a), 448
• For Mary's memoir, see de Rachewiltz(1971), 11
[60] Wilhelm (1994) (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=s3mw-IZom4sC& pg=PA22), 22–24
[61] Nadel (1999), xxi–xxiii
[62] Terrell, Carroll F. (1980). A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=8uEqOrAnat0C& pg=PR7).
Berkeley: University of California Press, vii
[63] Tate (1965), np
[64] Bush (1976), xiii–xv
[65] Ackroyd, Peter. Ezra Pound. Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1980, p. 121. For early publications, see Eliot, T. S. Ezra Pound, His Metric and
Poetry. Alfred A. Knopf, 1917, pp. 29–31.
[66] Alexander (1979), 122, 128–129, 134
[67] Preda (2005), 90
[68] Tytell (1987), 228–232
[69] Barnhisel (2005), 3
[70] Tytell (1987), 250–253
[71] Tytell (1987), 253–265
[72] "Selected World War II Broadcasts" (http:/ / www. english. illinois. edu/ maps/ poets/ m_r/ pound/ radio. htm), Modern American Poetry,
accessed 13 October 2010.
[73] For the quote from Pound, the payments, his traveling to Rome for the broadcasts, and the indictment, see Tytell (1987), 253, 265, 267
• For the title of the first broadcast, see Redman (1991), 158
Ezra Pound 47

• For the number of broadcasts and dates, see Gill (2005) (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=ttMlqGMYCsIC& pg=PA115), 115–116
• For the references to "kikes," see Michael (2008), 174
• For the transcripts of the broadcasts, see Doob (1978)
[74] Tytell (1987), 272–273
[75] Sieburth (2003), ix–xiv
[76] Kimpel (1981), 470–474
[77] Tytell (1987), 289–297, 304–305
[79] For Cornell's efforts, see "Julien Cornell, 83, The Defense Lawyer In Ezra Pound Case" (http:/ / www. nytimes. com/ 1994/ 12/ 07/
obituaries/ julien-cornell-83-the-defense-lawyer-in-ezra-pound-case. html), The New York Times, 7 December 1994, accessed 3 September
2012.
[80] Mitgang, Herbert. " Researchers dispute Ezra Pound's 'insanity' (http:/ / query. nytimes. com/ gst/ fullpage. html?sec=health&
res=9A02E0DC1139F932A05753C1A967948260)," The New York Times, 31 October 1981, accessed 3 September 2012.
[81] Tytell (1987), 293, 302–303
• For more details of who supported and opposed, see McGuire (1988) (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=IoZeAAAACAAJ&
dq=Poetry's+ Catbird+ Seat& hl=en& ei=J9-_TPqgIpGonQermpDtCQ& sa=X& oi=book_result& ct=result& resnum=1&
ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA)
• For MacLeish's position, Tytell cites MacLeish, Archibald. Riders on the Earth (http:/ / books. google. com/
books?id=qv1WMYEus6QC& q=Riders+ on+ the+ Earth), Houghton Mifflin, 1978, 120; Winnick, R.H. (ed.) Letters of Archibald
MacLeish, 1907 to 1982 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=n_UNAAAAIAAJ& q=Letters+ of+ Archibald+ MacLeish,+ 1907+ to+
1982). Houghton Mifflin, 1983; and in particular a letter from MacLeish to Milton Eisenhower, which is in the Library of Congress.
• Also see Sieburth (2003), xxxviii–xxxix. Sieburth writes: "At their [the committee's first] meeting [in November 1948], and to no one's
great surprise, given [Allen] Tate's behind-the-scenes maneuverings and the intimidating presence of recent Nobel Laureate T. S. Eliot,
The Pisan Cantos emerged as the major contender ..."
• See Sieburth (above) for Pound's response.
• The Associated Press reported the list of judges as Conrad Aiken, W. H. Auden, Louise Bogan, Katherine Garrison Chapin, T. S. Eliot,
Paul Green, Robert Lowell, Katherine Anne Porter, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate, Willard Thorp, and Robert Penn Warren. Also on the list of
judges were Leonie Adams, the Library of Congress's poetry consultant, and Theodore Spencer, who died on 18 January 1949, just before
the award was announced. See "Pound, in Mental Clinic, Wins Prize for Poetry Penned in Treason Cell" (http:/ / query. nytimes. com/
mem/ archive/ pdf?res=F20615F8345C177B93C2AB1789D85F4D8485F9), The New York Times, 19 February 1949, accessed 12 April
2012.
[82] "Canto Controversy" (http:/ / news. google. com/ newspapers?id=4eQMAAAAIBAJ& sjid=imoDAAAAIBAJ& pg=1394,1049824& hl=en)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 22 August 1949, accessed 12 April 2012.
• Hillyer, Robert. "Treason's Strange Fruit" and "Poetry's New Priesthood," in The Saturday Review of Literature, 11 and 18 June 1949.
• For a discussion, see McGuire, William. Poetry's Catbird Seat (http:/ / writing. upenn. edu/ ~afilreis/ 88/ pound-bollingen. html), Library
of Congress, 1998; this excerpt courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania.
[83] Wilhelm (1994), 286, 306
[84] Hickman (2005), 127
[85] Tytell (1987), 306–308
• Also see "Police Firmness in Nashville" (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=PD8EAAAAMBAJ& pg=PA34), Life magazine, 23
September 1957, 34, accessed 12 April 2012.
[86] Hemingway, Ernest. "The Art of Fiction" (http:/ / www. theparisreview. org/ interviews/ 4825/ the-art-of-fiction-no-21-ernest-hemingway),
Paris Review, No. 21.
[87] For the money from Hemingway, see Reynolds (2000), 303
• For the Hemingway quote, see Goacher, Dennis. Foreword in Ezra Pound. Women of Trachis (http:/ / books. google. com/
books?id=B6OXT9Tt6_sC& pg=PR9). New Directions Publishing, 1985, p. ix.
[88] Lewis, Anthony. U.S. asked to end Pound indictment" (http:/ / select. nytimes. com/ gst/ abstract.
html?res=F70A13F63D59107B93C7A8178FD85F4C8585F9), The New York Times, 14 April 1958, accessed 3 September 2012.
[89] Tytell (1987), 325–326
[90] "Pound, in Italy, Gives Fascist Salute; Calls United States an 'Insane Asylum'" (http:/ / select. nytimes. com/ mem/ archive/
pdf?res=FA0E12FF3C5F117B93C2A8178CD85F4C8585F9), The New York Times, 10 July 1958, accessed 12 April 2012.
[91] Tytell (1987), 328–332
• For the fascist salute, see "Pound, in Italy, Gives Fascist Salute; Calls United States an 'Insane Asylum'" (http:/ / select. nytimes. com/
mem/ archive/ pdf?res=FA0E12FF3C5F117B93C2A8178CD85F4C8585F9), The New York Times, 10 July 1958, accessed 12 April 2012.
• For the reference to Canto 113, see Sieburth (2003), xl
[92] Tytell (1987), 333–336
• For the Hall interview, see Hall, Donald. "Ezra Pound, The Art of Poetry No. 5" (http:/ / www. theparisreview. org/ interviews/ 4598/
the-art-of-poetry-no-5-ezra-pound), The Paris Review, No. 28, Summer-Fall 1962.
Ezra Pound 48

• Also see Hall (1992) (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=s5cfAQAAIAAJ& q=Their+ Ancient+ Glittering+ Eyes& dq=Their+
Ancient+ Glittering+ Eyes& hl=en& ei=8NC_TNiGEI2mnAe_w6SBCg& sa=X& oi=book_result& ct=result& resnum=1&
ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA)
[93] Nadel (2007), 18
[94] Tytell (1987), 337–339
[95] Tytell (1987), 339
• Also see "Ezra Pound Dies in Venice at Age of 87" (http:/ / query. nytimes. com/ mem/ archive/
pdf?res=FB0D17F93A591A7493C0A9178AD95F468785F9), The New York Times, 2 November 1972, accessed 12 April 2012.
[96] Canto 120, the final canto, first published in Threshold, Belfast, and in The Anonym Quarterly, New York, 1969. See Pound, Ezra. The
Cantos of Ezra Pound. New Directions Books, 1983, p. 802.
• There is a debate about the placement of the final canto. See Bush (1999), 132
• Also see Stoicheff, Peter. The Hall of Mirrors: Drafts & Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound's Cantos (http:/ / books. google. com/
books?id=eG7Frx69UIAC& pg=PA66). University of Michigan Press, 1995, 66
[97] Nadel (1999), 1–6
• Witmeyer (1999), 47
• For strong lyricist, see O'Connor (1963), 7
[98] Albright (1999), 60
[99] Ming (1999), 204–212
[100] Kenner (1971), 199
[101] Alexander (1997), 23–30
[102] Bornstein (1999), 22–23
[103] Eliot,T S Ezra Pound:His Metric and Poetry ,Alfred Knapp, 1917
[104] For Witemeyer's point, see Witemeyer (1999), 48
• For the Sandburg quote, see Eliot (1917), 3
[105] Wilson, Edmund, "Ezra Pound's Patchwork," April 19, 1922, Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s, Library of America, 2007,
p. 45.
[106] Wilson, Edmund, "Ezra Pound's Patchwork," April 19, 1922, Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s, Library of America, 2007,
p. 44.
[107] Kenner (1983), 16.
[108] Letters to Monica, p. 318, letter to Monica Jones, 9 May 1963.
[109] Flory (1999), 285–286, 294–300
[110] For Arthur Miller's quote, see Torrey (1984), 200. For Rosenthal, see her A Primer of Ezra Pound (http:/ / books. google. com/
books?ei=7v6_TP-sKcq7ngePvqWBCg& pg=PA2) (Macmillan, 1960), 2.
[111] Ginsberg, Allen, The Letters of Allen Ginsberg edited by Bill Morgan (Da Capo Press, 2008), p. 335, 339–340.

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ved=0CDcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false), London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-31919-5
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978-0-8240-7500-2
Ezra Pound 52

• Wilhelm, James J. (1994). Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years 1925–1972|. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
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• Witemeyer, Hugh. (1999). "Early Poetry 1908–1920", in Ira Nadel (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra
Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64920-9
• Witemeyer, Hugh (ed.). (1969). The Poetry of Ezra Pound (http://books.google.com/
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• Zinnes, Harriet (ed). (1980). Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (http://books.google.com/
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f=false). New York: New Directions Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8112-0772-0

Further reading
• Works by Ezra Pound on Open Library at the Internet Archive
• Works by or about Ezra Pound (http://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n78-97014) in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Beasley, Rebecca. (2010). "Pound's New Criticism". Textual Practice. 24:4, 649–668
• Ezra Pound papers (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/pound.html), Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Yale University, accessed 12 October 2010.
• Ezra Pound collection (http://library.uvic.ca/site/spcoll/guides/sc096.html), University of Victoria, accessed
12 October 2010.
• Frequently requested records: Ezra Pound (http://www.justice.gov/criminal/foia/ezra-pound.html), United
States Department of Justice, accessed 14 October 2010.
• Archival search (http://research.archives.gov/search), The National Archives, accessed 14 October 2010.
• "Ezra Pound in his Time and Beyond" (http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/exhibits/pound/translation.htm),
University of Delaware Library, accessed 19 October 2010.
• Ezra Pound's "Vorticism" essay (http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/vorticism/), from The Fortnightly Review
archive.
• Ackroyd, Peter. (1980). Ezra Pound and his World (http://books.google.com/books?id=iwGpQgAACAAJ&
dq=Peter+Ackroyd+"Ezra+Pound+and+his+world"&hl=en&ei=w-u6TOWfLMTNnAej4_DvDQ&sa=X&
oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAQ). Thames and Hudson.
• Bonfante, Jordan. (27 March 1964). "An Aging Genius in Exile" (http://books.google.com/
books?id=AFQEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA48&dq), Life magazine.
• Boyle, Kay. (7 May 1987). "Pound in Rapallo" (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1987/may/07/
pound-in-rapallo/), The New York Review of Books.
• Cookson, William. (1985). A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (http://books.google.com/
books?id=tuEfAQAAIAAJ&q=A+Guide+to+the+Cantos+of+Ezra+Pound&dq=A+Guide+to+the+
Cantos+of+Ezra+Pound&hl=en&ei=K-y6TJq6NYfKnAef0vnuDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&
resnum=1&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA). Anvil.
• Hall, Donald (Summer-Fall 1962). "Ezra Pound, The Art of Poetry No. 5" (http://www.theparisreview.org/
interviews/4598/the-art-of-poetry-no-5-ezra-pound). The Paris Review.
• Desai, Meghnad. (2006). The Route of All Evil: The Political Economy of Ezra Pound. Faber and Faber.
• Mullins, E. (1961). This Difficult Individual Ezra Pound. Fleet Publishing Corporation.
• Ormsby, Eric. (March 2004). "The Voice Impersonator," The New Criterion, 34–38.
• Ricciardi, Caterina. (2006). "E. Pound, Ghiande di Luce". Rimini (Italy): Raffaelli. ISBN 9788889642203
Ezra Pound 53

• Rosenthal, Macha. (1960). A Primer of Ezra Pound. New York: Macmillan.

• Sanavio, Piero. (1974). Ezra Pound . Venice (Italy): Marsilio.
• Sanavio, Piero. (1984). La Gabbia di Ezra Pound (a limited ed.)Milano: Scheiwiller.
• Sanavio, Piero. (2002). Ezra Pound, Bellum Perenne. Rimini (Italy): Raffaelli. ISBN 9788887518382
• Sanavio, Piero. (2005). La Gabbia di Pound. (new enlarged ed. of the 1974 book - with new documents) Rome:
Fazi. ISBM 88-8122-575-7
• Wykes-Joyce, Max. Papers relating to Ezra Pound, 1949–1991 (http://discover.odai.yale.edu/ydc/Record/
3465177), Yale University.
Audio/video
• Hammer, Langdon. Lecture on Ezra Pound (http://videolectures.net/yaleengl310s07_hammer_lec09/), Yale
University, accessed 11 April 2012.
• Ezra Pound recordings (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Pound.html), University of Pennsylvania,
accessed 12 October 2010.
• "The Four Steps" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/pounde1.shtml), recording
of Pound discussing bureaucracy, BBC Home Service, 21 June 1958, accessed 19 October 2010.
• Pound reading Canto XLV, with Usura (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3IpkOZjyVw), courtesy of
YouTube, accessed 19 October 2010.
Article Sources and Contributors 54

Article Sources and Contributors

The Cantos  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=558581912  Contributors: Amakuru, Andi d, Andy Dingley, Andycjp, Angr, Angusmclellan, Antandrus, Anticipation of a New
Lover's Arrival, The, Aranel, Arch dude, Attilios, Basilo, Beyond My Ken, Bib, Bishonen, Bobblewik, Bobo192, Bolivian Unicyclist, Brighterorange, Ceoil, Charles Matthews, Chris the speller,
Cirt, Colonies Chris, CommonsDelinker, Comte de Maistre, Credema, D-Rock, D.C. Dweller, D6, DBaba, DJ Clayworth, DTOx, DanMS, Dangermao, DanielCD, Danny, Dark Shikari, Deor,
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Ezra Pound  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=559228750  Contributors: 121a0012, 703Frank, 78.26, A3 nm, AI, Abce2, Accotink2, Acheloys, Action Jackson IV, Active
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Image Sources, Licenses and Contributors 55

Image Sources, Licenses and Contributors

File:Ezra Pound.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Ezra_Pound.jpg  License: unknown  Contributors: Deor, J Milburn, Jatkins, Jcb, Mooret2, Nioger, Saibo,
Truthkeeper88
Image:SigismondoMalatesta.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:SigismondoMalatesta.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Bukk, Flamarande, G.dallorto,
Maksim, Red devil 666, Sailko, Shakko, Tony Wills, Utrechtse, 2 anonymous edits
Image:Pietro leopoldo.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Pietro_leopoldo.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Stefano Gaetano Neri
Image:Confucius 02.png  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Confucius_02.png  License: Public Domain  Contributors: DynV, Kintetsubuffalo, Ranveig, Ras67, Tholme,
Yann, Zhaladshar, Zolo, 6 anonymous edits
Image:johnadamsvp.flipped.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Johnadamsvp.flipped.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Andreagrossmann, DrKiernan,
Frumpy, Grenavitar, INS Pirat, Origamiemensch, Phrood, Schaengel89, Sebastian Wallroth, Tom, WTCA, 5 anonymous edits
Image:Thomas Hart Benton (senator).jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Thomas_Hart_Benton_(senator).jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Angusmclellan,
Fullofstars, Howcheng, Scooter
Image:Coke.JPG  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Coke.JPG  License: Public Domain  Contributors: DavidCooke, DrKiernan, Filiocht, 1 anonymous edits
Image:Voltaire3.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Voltaire3.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Unknown
File:Ezra Pound 2.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Ezra_Pound_2.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: (1882–1966)
file:Thaddeus C. Pound - Brady-Handy.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Thaddeus_C._Pound_-_Brady-Handy.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Davepape,
Frank C. Müller, Howcheng
file:EzraPound&IsabelPound1898.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:EzraPound&IsabelPound1898.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: J Milburn,
Mechamind90, Modernist, Peripitus, SchuminWeb, SlimVirgin, Victoriaearle
File:48 Langham Street, London W1.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:48_Langham_Street,_London_W1.jpg  License: Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0
 Contributors: Ankit Maity, Jcb, Selket, Sfan00 IMG, SlimVirgin, Soerfm
file:Church Walk, Kensington.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Church_Walk,_Kensington.jpg  License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0  Contributors:
SlimVirgin, Soerfm
file:Ezra Pound plaque in Church Walk, Kensington.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Ezra_Pound_plaque_in_Church_Walk,_Kensington.jpg  License: unknown
 Contributors: Jcb, SlimVirgin, Soerfm
File:Ezra Pound - Cathay Title Page 1915.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Ezra_Pound_-_Cathay_Title_Page_1915.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors:
Original uploader was Daderot at en.wikipedia
File:T.S. Eliot, 1923.JPG  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:T.S._Eliot,_1923.JPG  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Hbdragon88, Selket, Sfan00 IMG, SlimVirgin,
Stefan2
File:Olga Rudge Advertisement.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Olga_Rudge_Advertisement.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Anonymous concert
advertisement.
File:Rapallo (cropped).JPG  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Rapallo_(cropped).JPG  License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported  Contributors:
Davide Papalini
File:EzraPound Pavannes.JPG  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:EzraPound_Pavannes.JPG  License: Public Domain  Contributors: User:SreeBot
file:Ezra Pound 1945 May 26 mug shot.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Ezra_Pound_1945_May_26_mug_shot.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: U.S.
armed forces
File:Center building at Saint Elizabeths, August 23, 2006.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Center_building_at_Saint_Elizabeths,_August_23,_2006.jpg  License:
Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5  Contributors: User:Tomf688
File:poundgrave.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Poundgrave.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Smerus
License 56

License
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/