Ezra Pound's Cantos

This casebook provides a selection of key criticism including an article newly translated into English on the Cantos of 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 the Cantos 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 the Draft of XXX the China Cantos the Pisan Cantos and Drafts and Fragments. As a whole the collection elucidates the personal andhistorical shifts that profoundly impacted Pound and consequentially produced the changing fusions of technique and matter in the Cantos. 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 the Cantos were written.