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88-411: The Cantos is a long modernist poem by Ezra Pound , written in 109 canonical sections in addition to a number of drafts and fragments added as a supplement at the request of the poem's American publisher, James Laughlin. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the material in the first three cantos was abandoned or redistributed in 1923, when Pound prepared the first instalment of

176-449: A coda ( pronounced [ˈkoːda] ; Italian for 'tail'; plural code ) is a passage that brings a piece (or a movement ) to an end. It may be as simple as a few measures , or as complex as an entire section . The presence of a coda as a structural element in a movement is especially clear in works written in particular musical forms . Codas were commonly used in both sonata form and variation movements during

264-644: A European war and his anti-Semitism. In 1943, he was indicted for treason in his absence, and wrote a letter to the indicting judge in which he claimed the right to freedom of speech in his defence. Modernist poem It is usually said to have begun with the French Symbolist movement and it artificially ends with the Second World War , the beginning and ending of the modernist period are of course arbitrary. Poets like W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) started in

352-451: A bilingual edition of “Posthumous Cantos” ( Canti postumi ) appeared in Italy. This is a concise selection from the mass of drafts (circa 1915–1965) uncollected or unpublished by Pound, and contains many passages that throw light on The Cantos . Pound was discussing the possibility of writing a long poem since around 1905, but work did not begin until sometime in 1915. The initial versions of

440-442: 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

528-514: A form of investment and profit. At the time of writing the canto (1935) The Bank of England was still a private company, whose activities were primarily subjected to shareholder interest not the British government. The Bank was nationalised in 1946. The poem returns to the island of Circe and Odysseus about to "sail after knowledge" in Canto XLVII. There follows a long lyrical passage in which

616-485: A glimpse of the printer Hieronymus Soncinus of Fano preparing to print the works of Petrarch . The first four cantos of this volume (Cantos XXXI–XXXIV) quote extensively from the letters of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams , and the diary of John Quincy Adams , to deal with the emergence of the fledgling United States. Canto XXXI opens with the Malatesta family motto Tempus loquendi, tempus tacendi ("a time to speak,

704-409: A low-interest, credit institution whose funds were guaranteed by taxing the grazing of sheep on community land (the "BANK of the grassland" of Canto XLIII). Canto XLV is a litany against Usura or usury , which Pound later defined as a charge on credit regardless of actual production focusing on examples from the arts in which cultural creation is independent of the market. The canto declares usury

792-664: 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

880-533: A nexus of survival of the old pagan beliefs, and the destruction of the Cathar stronghold at Montsegur 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 Mont Segur is implicitly compared with the destruction of Troy in the closing lines of the canto. Canto XXIV then returns to 15th-century Italy and

968-467: A post-Romantic, Symbolist vein and modernised their poetic idiom after being affected by political and literary developments. Acmeist poetry was a Russian modernist poetic school, which emerged c.  1911 and to symbols preferred direct expression through exact images. Figures involved with Acmeism include Nikolay Gumilev , Osip Mandelstam , Mikhail Kuzmin , Anna Akhmatova , and Georgiy Ivanov . The Imagism , Anglo-American school from

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1056-490: 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 a suite of instances of what Pound considers to be the degradation of intelligence and civilisation due to usury. At the same time he proposes remedies: travel and exploration, as well as sexual and religious freedom. Canto XLIX

1144-540: A string of little magazines and 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. 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

1232-611: A time to be silent") to link again Jefferson and Sigismundo 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 , the Austro-Hungarian empire. This canto contains some distinctly unpleasant expressions of anti-Semitic opinions. Canto XXXVI opens with

1320-525: A tradition of lyrical expression, emphasising the personal imagination, culture, emotions, and memories of the poet. For the modernists, it was essential to move away from the merely personal towards an intellectual statement that poetry could make about the world. Even when they reverted to the personal, like T. S. Eliot in the Four Quartets and Ezra Pound in The Cantos , they distilled

1408-513: A translation of Cavalcanti's canzone Donna mi pregha ("A lady asks me"). This poem, a lyric meditation on 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 continues with the figure of the 9th-century Irish philosopher and poet John Scotus Eriugena , who

1496-456: A unified whole. The Cantos was initially published in the form of separate sections, each containing several cantos that were numbered sequentially using Roman numerals (except cantos 85–109, first published with Arabic numerals ). The original publication dates for the groups of cantos are as given below. The complete collection of cantos was published together in 1987 (including a final short coda or fragment, dated 24 August 1966). In 2002

1584-478: 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 is an investigation of a theory by one of the writers that Pound was in contact with, namely Robert McNair Wilson, a specialist in the life of Napoleon . Wilson's idea was that Bonaparte had been a flawed hero who had fought and been crushed by usury. The canto actively follows this idea but finds rather that Napoleon did not change

1672-507: Is 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. Canto XLVI presents the dark heart of usury, i.e. the procedures whereby money is created in liberal institutions such as the Bank of England . In Pound's view, issuing money as a form of state debt was contributing to poverty, social deprivation, crime and implicitly to "bad" art made as

1760-627: 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 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,

1848-559: Is mainly concerned with Ghengis and Kublai Khan and the rise of their Yeun dynasty . The canto closes with the overthrow of the Yuan 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

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1936-477: 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

2024-730: 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

2112-460: 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

2200-746: The d'Este family, again focusing on their Venetian activities and Niccolo d'Este 's voyage to the Holy Land . Cantos XXV draws 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. Cantos XXVI is a history of Venice. Canto XXVII outlines the Russian Revolution, which is seen as being destructive, not constructive, and echoes

2288-568: The lotus eaters . 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 difference of patronage between the Medici family, especially Lorenzo the Magnificent and Thomas Jefferson. A phrase from one of Sigismundo Malatesta's letters inserted into the Jefferson passage ("affatigandose per suo piacere o no") draws an explicit parallel between

2376-427: The 1914 proved radical and important, marking a new point of departure for poetry. Some consider that it began in the works of H.D. , Hardy and Pound , Eliot and Yeats , Williams and Stevens . Around World War II, a new generation of poets sought to revoke the effort of their predecessors towards impersonality and objectivity. Thus, Objectivism was a loose-knit group of second-generation modernists from

2464-629: The 1930s. They include Louis Zukofsky , Lorine Niedecker , Charles Reznikoff , George Oppen , Carl Rakosi , and Basil Bunting . Objectivists treated the poem as an object; they emphasised sincerity, intelligence, and the clarity of the poet's vision. In the English-language modernism ends with the turn towards confessional poetry in the work of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath , among others. Poets, like Robert Frost , Wallace Stevens , and E. E. Cummings also went on to produce work after World War II. The British Poetry Revival

2552-521: The 1968 single " Hey Jude " by the Beatles . The coda lasted nearly four minutes, making the song's full length at just over the seven-minute mark. In music notation , the coda symbol , which resembles a set of crosshairs, is used as a navigation marker, similar to the dal segno sign. It is used where the exit from a repeated section is within that section rather than at the end. The instruction "To Coda" indicates that, upon reaching that point during

2640-415: 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. 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 their excessive love of the past (Pound) and of

2728-489: The Classical era. In a sonata form movement, the recapitulation section will, in general, follow the exposition in its thematic content, while adhering to the home key . The recapitulation often ends with a passage that sounds like a termination, paralleling the music that ended the exposition; thus, any music coming after this termination will be perceived as extra material, i.e., as a coda. In works in variation form,

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2816-686: The West coast of Africa. The collection ends with canto XLI balancing an account of Benito Mussolini during WWI and Thomas Jefferson in Paris, just before the French Revolution. Cantos XLII, XLIII and XLIV move to the Sienese bank, the Banca 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

2904-572: 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 1790. 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

2992-460: 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

3080-557: The basis of the Social Credit theory. Canto XXXIX returns to the island of Circe and the events before the voyage undertaken in the first canto and unfolds as a hymn to natural fertility and ritual sex. Canto XL is a diptych: the first section is dedicated to a summary of J. P. Morgan's fraudulent financial career; this is followed by another periplus , a condensed version of Hanno the Navigator 's account of his voyage along

3168-550: 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 of its structure. For Pound, who spent a good deal of time seeking patrons for himself, James Joyce , Eliot and

3256-478: 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

3344-678: The classical Mediterranean culture and East Asia selective topics from medieval and early modern Italy and Provence, the beginnings of the United States, England of the seventeenth century, and details from Africa he had obtained from Leo Frobenius . The Cantos can appear on first reading to be chaotic or structureless because the poem lacks an obvious plot. R. P. Blackmur , an early critic, wrote, "The work of Ezra Pound has been for most people almost as difficult to understand as Soviet Russia … The Cantos are not complex, they are complicated". Pound and T. S. Eliot had previously approached

3432-403: The closing theme (if there is one). Thus, in the exposition, it usually appears in the secondary key, but, in the recapitulation, in the primary key. The codetta ordinarily closes with a perfect cadence in the appropriate key, confirming the tonality. If the exposition is repeated, the codetta is likewise repeated. Sometimes it has its ending slightly changed, depending on whether it leads back to

3520-425: The coda occurs following the last variation and will be very noticeable as the first music not based on the theme. One of the ways that Beethoven extended and intensified Classical practice was to expand the coda sections, producing a final section sometimes of equal musical weight to the foregoing exposition, development, and recapitulation sections and completing the musical argument . For one famous example, see

3608-679: The connection with Sigismondo Malatesta's Rimini.) Both cantos end on a positive and optimistic note, 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 anti-Semitic content, although it must be said that there are several positive references to Italian fascism and some racist expressions (e.g., "Son marocchini ed altra immondizia"—"They are Moroccans and other trash", Canto LXXII). Italian scholars have been intrigued by Pound's idiosyncratic recreation of

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3696-483: 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

3784-452: 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

3872-414: 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

3960-474: The exposition or into the development sections. Cauda , a Latin word meaning "tail", "edge" or "trail" is the root of coda and is used in the study of conductus of the 12th and 13th centuries. The cauda was a long melisma on one of the last syllables of the text, repeated in each strophe. Conducti were traditionally divided into two groups, conductus cum cauda and conductus sine cauda ( Latin : "conductus with cauda", "conductus without cauda"), based on

4048-400: The finale of Symphony No. 8 (Beethoven) . Charles Burkhart suggests that the reason codas are common, even necessary, is that, in the climax of the main body of a piece, a "particularly effortful passage", often an expanded phrase , is often created by "working an idea through to its structural conclusions" and that, after all this momentum is created, a coda is required to "look back" on

4136-491: The financial arrangements of his day, or had any progressive economic idea. Pound also shows how the Rothschild family actively helped the British and Austrian cause against him. 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. They decad ends with

4224-536: 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 XXXIV was added when The Cantos was published as a single volume). These 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

4312-436: The first three cantos of the proposed "poem of some length" were published in the journal Poetry . In this version, the poem began very much as a direct address by the poet, not to the reader but to the ghost of Robert Browning . Pound came to realise that this need to be a controlling narrative voice was working against the revolutionary intent of his own poetic position, and these first three ur-cantos were soon abandoned and

4400-486: The first volume by starting with the Renaissance and ending with the Russian Revolution. 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

4488-457: 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

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4576-507: 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

4664-710: The great Tartar horse fairs, leading to the rise of the 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 during the reign of Emperor Kang Xi, as evidenced by the Sino-Russian border treaty in 1684 and the founding of the Jesuit mission in 1685 under Jean-François Gerbillon . Canto LX deals with

4752-489: 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. 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

4840-413: 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

4928-631: 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

5016-620: 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 . 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,

5104-420: The main body, allow listeners to "take it all in", and "create a sense of balance." Codetta ( Italian for "little tail", the diminutive form) has a similar purpose to the coda, but on a smaller scale, concluding a section of a work instead of the work as a whole. A typical codetta concludes the exposition and recapitulation sections of a work in sonata form , following the second ( modulated ) theme, or

5192-815: The middle of the Tang dynasty. Canto LV is mainly concerned with the decadence of the Tang, The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdom's period and the rise of the Song dynasty, including 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

5280-605: The one, the few and the many. A parallel is drawn between Adams and Lycurgus , 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

5368-482: 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 nomination of Washington as president dominates the opening pages of Canto LXV. The canto shows Adams concerned with

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5456-582: The period from the founding of the Xia dynasty up to circa 225 BCE including the life of Confucius in the 5th century BC. 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. Canto LIV moves the story on to around 805 CE. from the first emperor Qin Shi Huang to

5544-486: The personal into a poetic texture that claimed universal human significance. Herbert Read said of it, "The modern poet has no essential alliance with regular schemes of any sorts. They reserve the right to adapt their rhythm to their mood, to modulate their metre as they progress. Far from seeking freedom and irresponsibility (implied by the unfortunate term free verse ) they seek a stricter discipline of exact concord of thought and feeling." Coda (music) In music,

5632-425: 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. 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 letters ABC/ACB indicate the sequences in which the concepts could be presented.] In

5720-536: 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. Originally, Pound conceived of Cantos XVII–XXVII as a group that would follow

5808-458: The poem, A Draft of XVI Cantos (Three Mountains Press, 1925). It is a book-length work, widely considered to present formidable difficulties to the reader. Strong claims have been made for it as the most significant work of modernist poetry of the twentieth century. As in Pound's prose writing, the themes of economics, governance and culture are integral to its content. The most striking feature of

5896-571: The poem, Pound introduces a major theme; the excavating of the "dead" past to illuminate both 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

5984-511: The poem. Given the fragmentary nature of the citations used, these cantos can be quite difficult to follow for the reader with no knowledge of the history of the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. 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

6072-432: The poetry of Dante and Cavalcanti . 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

6160-569: 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

6248-399: The presence of the melisma. Thus, the cauda provided a conclusionary role, similar to the modern coda. Many songs in rock and other genres of popular music have sections identifiable as codas. A coda in these genres is sometimes referred to as an " outro ", while in jazz, modern church music and barbershop arranging it is commonly called a "tag". One of the most famous codas is found in

6336-434: The primary theme of the preceding China Cantos sequence, which these cantos also follow from chronologically. Adams is depicted as a rounded figure; he is a strong leader with interests in political, legal and cultural matters in much the same way that Malatesta and Mussolini are portrayed elsewhere in the poem. The English jurist Sir Edward Coke , who is an important figure in some later cantos, first appears in this section of

6424-509: The reader off, as they serve to underline things that are in the English text. Canto LII is a diptych contrasting the Western world eroded by usury with the beginnings of Chinese civilisation as evident in the Book 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

6512-571: The revolutionary war of independence, also ended the Second Bank of the United States in the so-called "Bank War" of 1829-1836. Canto XXXVIII opens with a quotation from Dante in which he rightly accuses the king of France Philip the Fair, of falsifying the coinage. The canto then turns to modern commerce and the arms trade. The canto has acquired a certain notoriety among scholars for its succinct account of C.H. Douglas's A+B Theorem, which spells out

6600-406: 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

6688-615: 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 Writ 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

6776-538: 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

6864-430: 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. Each filing is disconnected, but they are drawn into the shape of a rose by the presence of a magnet. Nevertheless, there are indications in Pound's other writings that there may have been some formal plan underlying

6952-404: 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

7040-496: 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 profit from war, returning briefly to the Russian Revolution, and ends on the evil 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

7128-549: 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. These two cantos, written in Italian, were not collected until their posthumous inclusion in

7216-502: The two men - neither had the financial power of the Medici, yet assisted in the production of art even though they were of relatively modest means and far from the centres of culture. 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 neo-platonism. Pound saw Provençal culture as

7304-460: 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 : 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,

7392-468: 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

7480-502: The world of the troubadours , Sappho 's poetry, a scene from the legend of El Cid that introduces the theme of banking and credit, and Pound's own visits to Venice to create a textual collage saturated with neoplatonist images of clarity and light. Cantos VIII–XI draw on the story of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta , 15th-century poet, condottiero , lord of Rimini and patron of the arts. Quoting extensively from primary sources, including Malatesta's letters, Pound especially focuses on

7568-513: 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

7656-603: Was a loose wide-reaching collection of groupings and subgroupings during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a modernist reaction to the conservative The Movement influenced by Basil Bunting and others. The leading poets included J. H. Prynne , Eric Mottram , Tom Raworth , Denise Riley , and Lee Harwood . Modernism emerged with its insistent breaks with the immediate past, its different inventions, 'making it new' with elements from cultures remote in time and space. The questions of impersonality and objectivity seem to be crucial to Modernist poetry. Modernism developed out of

7744-556: Was an influence on the Cathars and whose writings were condemned as heretical in both the 11th and 13th centuries, and closes with the Italian poet Sordello. Canto XXXVII then returns to the period before the civil war in the United States with a portrait of the American President Martin Van Buren, focusing on the period he was vice-president to Andrew Jackson, who, following his repayment of the debt of

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