Extract

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross.

A ship sets sail for the underworld in the opening lines, and from that Homeric descent the poem spirals outward across three thousand years of civilization, through Confucian China and Malatesta's Rimini, Provençal troubadours and Jeffersonian economics, gathering fragments into a mosaic that never fully coheres and was never meant to. Ezra Pound worked on The Cantos from 1915 until the 1960s, composing portions in a cage in Pisa where he was held for treason, and the poem bears the marks of its own impossible ambition. It is beautiful and monstrous, luminous in its music and repellent in its hatreds. To read it is to confront whether greatness and moral failure can coexist in a single breath. The wreck is also the monument.