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.