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. 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 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 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. References without explanation abound. The section he wrote at the end of World War II, a composition started while he was interned by American occupying forces in Italy, has become known as The Pisan Cantos, and is the part of the work most often considered to be self-sufficient. 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 of his native country, and was also diagnosed with a serious and disabling mental illness. 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 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". 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 the 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. Pound and T. S.