Ezra Pound's Cantos A Casebook [Paperback]

This casebook provides a selection of key criticism, including an article newly translated into English, on theCantosof Ezra Pound. The introduction positions the poem within Pound's corpus, contextualizes the contributions included and outlines their arguments, and concludes with suggestions for how the student may best approach this troubled and fascinating artifact. The selected articles maintain a high level of immediate contact with theCantos, with the intention of preparing students for reading individual cantos on their own. Contributors discuss the nature of many of the successive major blocks of work, allowing the Pound newcomer to experience the poem as an irregular progression, varying greatly in its qualities. The first selection discusses Canto I ; subsequent selections discuss, successively, major elements from Canto II , theDraft of XXX, theChinaCantos, thePisan Cantos, andDrafts and Fragments. As a whole, the collection elucidates the personal and historical shifts that profoundly impacted Pound and consequentially produced the changing fusions of technique and matter in theCantos. It also shows some of the huge variation in critics conceptions of the poem, or poetry itself, and of what it meant to be a poet and citizen of the West during the half-century in which theCantoswere written.

Introduction
PETER MAKIN

Ezra Pound
HUGH KENNER

Persephone's Ezra
GUY DAVENPORT

The Ideogrammic Method inThe Cantos
GIROLAMO MANCUSO

Why theCommediais Not the Model forThe Cantosand What Is
REED WAY DASENBROCK

History and Money, Fact and Hysteria
PETER MAKIN

Safe with My Lynxes : Pound's Figure in the Carpet?
MASSIMO BACIGALUPO