Ezra Pound's Cantos: A CasebookPeter Makin Oxford University Press, 2006 - 264 pages 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 and historical 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. |
Contents
Introduction | 3 |
Ezra Pound | 29 |
Persephones Ezra | 47 |
The Ideogrammic Method in The Cantos | 65 |
Why the Commedia Is Not the Model for The Cantos and What Is | 81 |
History and Money Fact and Hysteria | 93 |
Pounds Figure in the Carpet? | 111 |
Extracts from Ezra Pound and the Erotic Medium | 121 |
A Metaphysics of the State | 149 |
Inventing Confucius | 165 |
Pound in the Classroom | 181 |
Res and Verba in RockDrill and After | 205 |
The Composition of Ezra Pounds Drafts Fragments | 221 |
An Interview with Ezra Pound | 247 |
An Interview | 251 |
Selected Further Readings | 261 |
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Common terms and phrases
Aphrodite Artemis banks bread Canto CX Cantos of Ezra century Cerinthus character China Chinese Cantos Chung Yung Commedia Confucian Confucius critical Dante Dasenbrock Demeter Dorothy Drafts & Fragments early edition Eliot epic erotic essay Eva Hesse Ezra Pound Faber fact goddess Greek Hall Homer Hugh Kenner human idea ideogram ideogrammic method images interest INTERVIEWER Italian Kenner language later Latin Laughlin Letters light lines Literary London Marcella Spann Mary de Rachewiltz material means Mencius mind moral move Mussolini myth narrative nature Odyssey Ovid Paradise passage perhaps Persephone phrase Pisa Pisan Cantos poet poetry political Pound's Cantos principle prose proto-sequence Psychology and Troubadours reader Renaissance seems sense sequence sexuality suggests Sulpicia T. S. Eliot theme things thought Thrones translation tree typescript University ur-Canto usury vision visionary W. B. Yeats Wagadu words writing Yeats York Zagreus