The Cantos
by Ezra Pound(1962)
Novelc. 800 pages
“What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross.”
One great work, every day
by Ezra Pound(1962)
“What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross.”
Ezra Pound(1962)
Ezra Pound worked on these poems from 1915 until his death in 1972, intending an epic that would include history, economics, Confucian ethics, personal memory, and the record of a mind moving through time. The project is a magnificent ruin: some passages of extraordinary beauty, some of impenetrable difficulty, some of vicious antisemitism that cannot be excused. Pound spent years in a psychiatric hospital after World War II, charged with treason. The poem is the wreckage of the ambition to make it new.