The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Directions Paperbook)

Book Description

1st paper edtn, incl English tr of Canto LXXII

Customer Reviews:

Good luck...........2007-09-02

with this drivel. I can't remember ever reading anyone who used so many words to say so little. If Pound should be credited with anything it should be that he could be looked upon as father of the beatnik generation where you could spew out any blend of flowery language and then lavish yourself with praise.

Sorry but if you think this blather is the greatest poetry ever written then you need psychiatric help. If you ever wonder how radicals are created then read this garbage. It's always easy to be looked upon as a genius when the critics are radicals like yourself. Pound has said that America is an insane asylum and if that were so, he would be our most famous inmate. What a nut.

To Mr. Meyerhofer,.......2007-01-25

Ezra Pound is the greatest American poet.

I love your condemnation of him. And I do not wish to thought of as sarcastic because the controversy is half of the aura about Mr. Pound's dynamic presence in the poetry of the past century.

Robert Graves called Pound a charlatan and I do not know if he is correct. If he is correct than all charlatans must attain to the greatness of Ezra Loomis Pound.

The Cantos of Ezra Pound is not an epic, it is not a notebook of any sort.

And it is relevant to the times in which it was written.

"Make it new." said Pound.

He made it new by gathering the limbs of osiris, resurecting old poets and crowning new ones. He lived in history while he was still alive. He reminds me of myself sometimes.
The Cantos was relevant but one must read between the lines to see that it was relevant. Canto XLV for instance, the famous litany agains Usury, is in particular rlevant to the times it was published, 1937. The Great Depression still upon the US and banks failing, Pound sought to condemn the practice of usury, not saying that it was going on, but as a warning that this is how bad could get worse.

with usura, sin against nature,
is thy bread ever more of stale rags
is thy bread dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour

With those lines, I picture the breadlines stretching around streetcorners with dark looking men, ashen gray, all with rotting overcoats up to their small red eyes. I picture the people starving because of this strange practice of usury, not just during the Depression, but all through time.

Here is yet another theme that is relevant during the time the Cantos were published, human nature being the same so history repeats itself. Pound was trying to prove this by pointing to models for a better future, Confucius, and Pier della Francesca, Pietro Lombardo.

The fact that Pound knew so many languages, translated much, is just incredible. We clearly had a genius in the nuthouse during that vacuous time.
Take the first Canto as an example of Pound's immense Godlike talent.

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheeo aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe's this craft, the trim coifed goddess.

I remember when I first read those lines and I was immediately pulled into the work itself and the poetry of Mr. Pound. His controversial anti-semitism, his support of the regime of Mussolini, the absurd trial he had to take for treason against the US (the cage he was placed in, exposed to the elements) and the long internment in the House of Bedlam, St. Elizabeth's Mental Hospital in Washington D.C. from 1946 - 1958. I don't think there is one aspect of the thought and the writings of Ezra Pound that do not facinate me and have taught me how to compose poetry.

So sir, I must say that I have never read the two poets you have named but if they are anything like what I have a feeling they are, they are vastly inferior to the mighty voice of Pound (sounded like a Scottish goat by the way if you were wondering, funny and haunting)

You will probably never read these words so I close by saying that Ezra Pound is my idol poet. I have never read anything that had kept me so captivated and inspired me so. I hope my words shall be read and taken into consideration and be understood.

Thank you.

The pink elephant.......2006-12-20

Let's assume for a moment that Ezra Pound actually was a genius; that doesn't make him a good poet. Good poetry consists of strong images and elegantly phrased sentences consisting mostly of short words, in order to build tension and avoid a lazy sound that stems from too many unstressed syllables. That's why I always tell my poetry students to avoid "big" words and contentrate instead on using more comprehesible (but still exciting) language as elegantly as possible.

But Pound's mangled syntax and sloppy lines strike me as cowardly, elitist nonsense too distanced from humanity, too steeped in the author's own inadequacies, to say anything of real importance. Pound apologists would rank him over such excellent modern poets as Sharon Olds and Tony Hoagland, but personally, I credit Pound for making the bulk of modern poetry incomprehensible and thusly irrelevant.

Par Excelente.......2006-11-14

The Cantos are great in what they do for the writer. "Elitism" is the nickname the idiot gives to the question. The Cantos include everything (yes, even Pounds' barbarisms). Man alive! Must I agree with the Bible to read it?

A flawed masterpiece.......2006-06-08

It seems many people prefer to judge Pound by his politics and not by his poetry, to their loss. Make no mistake, the man was a genius, however it may rankle in certain quarters...

Average customer rating:

Indispensable
The Cantos
The Cantos
An indispensable key to unlocking many mysteries.
Fine, but incomplete.

A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound
Carroll F. Terrell
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Criticism | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books

Literature & Fiction | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0520082877

Book Description

The Companion is a major contribution to the literary evaluation of Pound's great, but often bewildering and abstruse work, The Cantos. Available in a one-volume paperback edition for the first time, the Companion brings together in conveniently numbered glosses for each canto the most pertinent details from the vast body of work on the Cantos during the last thirty years. The Companion contains 10,421 separate glosses that include translations from eight languages, identification of all proper names and works, Pound's literary and historical allusions, and other exotica, with exegeses based upon Pound's sources. Also included is a supplementary bibliography of works on Pound, newly updated, and an alphabetized index to The Cantos.

Customer Reviews:

Indispensable.......2003-10-22

Professor Terrell was my neighbor and a very kind man. He was also a World War Two veteran with a keen appreciation of Ezra Pound's astute assessments of twentieth century US militarism. We spoke at his home several times about Ezra Pound and about this book of scholarly exegesis. Professor Terrell said he spent six years preparing it with the help of English graduate students who collated his notes and assisted his research of recondite Poundian references. A Companion to The Cantos is a cornerstone of every Poundian library. Professor Terrell provides an annotation for nearly all the literary, religious, architectural, and historical references Pound consistently invokes throughout the Cantos. Like James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the Cantos are nearly unintelligible without a companion reference; so for serious study this text is an excellent resource. It is hard to conceive penetration of the Cantos without it.

Another fine but far briefer reference is William Cookson's A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, Revised Edition. Unlike Terrell, Cookson concentrates less on Poundian vocabulary and more on the broad historical sweep of the Cantos. The two books together provide a master key.

The Cantos.......2002-12-08

This volume has been invaluable in my attempts to illuminate Ezra Pound's Cantos. Disregarding the words of those who shrink back from his genius, it can be said that Pound forged a singular poetry. However, the daunting initiation to his work is the mass of referential and anecdotal material that must be absorbed. This has intmidated pseudo-intellectuals since the work was written, and most likely accounts for the blatant hostility that is evident in other reviews.
This companion does not explicate The Cantos for the average reader, for Pound quite simply will never appeal to that reader. Rather, this work gives the earnest student the tools to allow these works to achieve their intended effect. It can reveal the raw substance that fills the beautifully sculpted verse, but the reader can and must allow it to achieve proper harmony within his own mind. It does not require genius, but it does demand a sincere and open mind. Once the music of these words - both the aural and the conceptual - has been grasped and integrated, then we begin to glimpse the majesty of Pound's achievement.

The Cantos.......2002-12-08

An indispensable key to unlocking many mysteries........2001-06-27

A COMPANION TO THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND. By Carroll F. Terrell. 791 pp. (Published in Cooperation with The National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine at Orono, Maine). Berkeley : University of California Press, First Paperback Printing 1993 (1980). ISBN 0-520-08287-7

In his Preface, Terrell tells us that "the Companion was conceived to be the logical step" between 'The Annotated Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound' by John Hamilton Edwards and William W. Vasse (1957) "and the definitive variorum edition of 'The Cantos' which would be the function of the future" (p.x). Originally published in two volumes, with 4,722 numbered glosses in Volume I and 5,649 glosses in Volume II, the 10,421 glosses have been conveniently brought together in the present 1-volume paperback edition. These glosses include translations from eight languages, identification of all proper names and works, Pound's literary and historical allusions, and so on. The text is based on the 1975 edition of 'The Cantos' published by New Directions and Faber.

Terrell also points out that, since 'The Cantos' is such a difficult poem, there is a very real need for it to "be made more easily comprehensible to a sizable audience of students and professors as well as critics" (p.ix). Hence the Companion "is not ... for Pound scholars who do not need it. It is ... a handbook for new students of 'The Cantos' who need it badly. Therefore it is not designed as a complete compendium of present knowledge about 'The Cantos,' with exegeses and analyses of the text; such a 10-volume work must be left to the future....The book is designed for the beginner so as to (1) answer his first and most immediate questions; (2) tell him where to go next for exegesis and comment; (3) tell him where to go to find the sources EP used" (p.x).

The Companion contains glosses on Cantos 1-16, Cantos 17-30, XI New Cantos, Leopoldine Cantos, The China Cantos, The Adams Cantos, The Pisan Cantos, Rock-Drill Cantos, Thrones, The Coke Cantos, Drafts and Fragments. The glosses range in length from a single line to several paragraphs, and many of them are very full. Each section is preceded with a short list covering Sources, Background, and Exegeses.

Terrell's own view of the poem, as he admits, has to a certain extent influenced his glosses. He tells us that, for him : "'The Cantos' is a great religious poem .... an account of man's progress from the darkness of hell to the light of paradise. Thus it is a revelation of how divinity is manifested in the universe..." (p.viii).

But although the major import of the poem can be stated simply, the fact of Pound having "opted for a musical thematic structure rather than the more traditional historical or narrative structure ... and the extreme concentration of his piths and gists [has made] the text difficult to adjust to " (p.viii). Hence the need of the reader for extensive glosses.

In a book of this nature, it would of course be impossible to satisfy everyone. Some readers will probably wish that certain glosses had been fuller, others less extensive, and yet others will probably go hunting for glosses which aren't there. Terrell has tried to strike a balance between what he felt might and might not be of use to the kind of reader the book is aimed at, and on the whole seems to have done an excellent job.

Besides the glosses on Cantos 1-117, the book also contains three Indexes : 1. an alphabetized Index to The Cantos; 2. an Index to Foreign Words and Phrases in Roman Alphabet; 3. an Index to Words and Phrases in Greek; 4. an Index to Chinese Characters. It appears that Pound used only about 300 different Chinese Characters in 'The Cantos,' not too large a number for the keen student to learn.

In Terrell's Index the Chinese Characters are printed, unfortunately, in a rather small font, and also (at least in my copy) are very poorly printed. This is the only part of the book which might have been much better, since beginners need to see large bold printed forms in which the structure of complex characters can be easily discerned, and not tiny weak faint smudges in which some of the strokes don't show up at all.

Happily, Terrell has thoughtfully provided Mathews numbers for all of the Characters, and readers with access to the easily available (and excellent) 'Mathews Chinese-English Dictionary' will quickly be able to locate clearly printed forms along with their definitions.

This book is a heavy volume, well-printed (except for the Chinese) in a small clear font in double columns on strong high-quality paper, and is bound in a sturdy wrapper. Although not stitched, it has one of those flexible glued spines that don't crack on opening, and seems designed to stand up to the heavy use a reference work of this kind can get.

Some of its readers will no doubt have quibbles, others will fail to realize the staggering amount of work that goes into writing a book of this kind, but all students of 'The Cantos' owe a huge debt of gratitude to Terrell for having provided them with an indispensable key to unlocking some of the many mysteries this beautiful but obscure poem holds.

Fine, but incomplete........2000-06-12

It is a truly useful book. But there are no references to the Italian Cantos ('These damned Eyetalians') nor the fragment at the end ('That her acts of beauty be remembered'). Maybe it is time for a new edition to come (?).

Ezra Pound and the Mysteries of Love: A Plan for the Cantos

Average customer rating:

a rare and important glimpse at the work of Gabriele Rossetti...

Ezra Pound and the Mysteries of Love: A Plan for the Cantos
Akiko Miyake
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Love Poems | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Book Description

For more than a decade scholars have understood that Ezra Pound employed mystical concepts of love in his writing of The Cantos. In Ezra Pound and the Mysteries of Love, Akiko Miyake furthers this understanding by looking at The Cantos as a major work in the Christian mystic religious tradition. The author uncovers, in the five volumes of Gabriel Dante Rossetti’s Il mistero dell’amor platonico del medio evo, the crucial link between The Cantos and the traditions of mystical love established by the ancient Greeks at Eleusis and borrowed by the late medieval Italian and ProvenÃ§al poets.
Drawing upon this key five-volume work, as well as comprehensive research in both primary and secondary sources, Miyake brings the partial perceptions of other critics and commentators into an illuminating whole. Disclosing the deliberateness of The Cantos, Miyake provides new insight into Pound’s sense of culture and into the nature of his Confucianism. She sheds light on the disastrous path Pound followed into Fascism and anti-Semitism, and, in contrast to the image of a âpaganâ Pound that has emerged in recent years, reveals a poet writing as a Christian from within the Christian mythical tradition.

Customer Reviews:

a rare and important glimpse at the work of Gabriele Rossetti... .......2007-05-16

The publisher notes:

"The author uncovers, in the five volumes of Gabriel Dante Rossetti's Il mistero dell'amor platonico del medio evo, the crucial link between The Cantos and the traditions of mystical love established by the ancient Greeks at Eleusis and borrowed by the late medieval Italian and Provençal poets."

I bought the Miyake book because it's the rare work sketching a glimpse of the mysticism of Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti's FATHER, Gabriele Rossetti. Il mistero dell'amor platonico was his work, and oh, for a translation of that. Unfortunately, you'll have to do what Ezra Pound did: sit in the reading room of the Brit Museum, reading it in archive. Gabriele Rossetti's influence on his famous children, their circle, is -- though inferred -- unmistakable. He was the model for Pesca in Collins's The Woman in White. His son Dante Gabriel Rossetti's icons, poems, fascinations all speak to his time curled up in his father's library, forming a brotherhood, the Pre-Raphaelites, a mini renaissance amid the contradictions of Victoriana.

Average customer rating:

Ambition and madness
Gorgeously wrought
Superb edition

The Pisan Cantos
Ezra Pound
Manufacturer: New Directions Publishing Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 081121558X

Book Description

At last, a definitive, paperback edition of Ezra Pound's finest work.

Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos was written in 1945, while the poet was being held in an American military detention center near Pisa, Italy, as a result of his pro-Fascist wartime broadcasts to America on Radio Rome. Imprisoned for some weeks in a wire cage open to the elements, Pound suffered a nervous collapse from the physical and emotional strain. Out of the agony of his own inferno came the eleven cantos that became the sixth book of his modernist epic, The Cantos, themselves conceived as a Divine Comedy for our time.

The Pisan Cantos were published in 1948 by New Directions and in the following year were awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry by the Library of Congress. The honor came amid violent controversy, for the dark cloud of treason still hung over Pound, incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Yet there is no doubt that The Pisan Cantos displays some of his finest and most affecting writing, marking an elegaic turn to the personal while synthesizing the philosophical and economic political themes of his previous cantos. They are now being published for the first time as a separate paperback, in a fully annotated edition prepared by Richard Sieburth, who also contributes a thoroughgoing introduction, making Pound's master-work fully accessible to students and general readers.

Customer Reviews:

Ambition and madness.......2006-10-15

The Pantos Cantos takes us back to the days of Modernism when artists had heart and desired to experiment. These days, writers have to pander to illiterate readers, ambitious editors and know-nothing marketing departments. This is in-your-face art for art's sake, gloriously elitist, ugly, difficult, sprawling, all that good and high art should be. Who needs readers? Who needs post-modernist defence of the popular and accessible?

Gorgeously wrought.......2006-07-07

This magnum opus of one of the most celebrated and controversial figures in literature was written while he was being held in detention for treason. He was a fascist, and anti-Semite, but how the chicks, and Allen Ginsberg, dug him. And you should, too--politics aside. Pound's writings on poetry were monumental in the formation of greats like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and the aforementioned Ginsberg. The Cantos are gorgeously wrought, and range from exquisitely beautiful to fantastically erudite and opaque. And it's fun to watch him make up arbitrary meanings for Chinese ideograms because some posthumously debunked scholar misled him.

Superb edition.......2005-12-24

This superbly edited volume makes Pound's "Pisans" readily available in an attractive and affordable paperback edition. This is some of the most important American poetry of the post-War period, with intelligent and helpful annotations to make the work fully accessible even to those not versed in Poundian arcana. Indispensable!

A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, Revised Edition

Average customer rating:

An excellent introductory guide.

A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, Revised Edition
William Cookson
Manufacturer: Persea Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Criticism | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0892552468

Book Description

A new edition of the accessible guide to one of the great works of the twentieth century. Drawing upon his deep knowledge of Ezra Pound's life and work, William Cookson provides introductory background material to each canto and a detailed, page-by-page commentary identifying quotations, explaining allusions and cross references, and translating foreign phrases. Expanded to include previously unavailable cantos, this book is an invaluable reference tool for Pound scholars and any interested reader. Foreword, introduction, preface, appendices.

Customer Reviews:

An excellent introductory guide........2001-07-02

The highly allusive nature of Pound's 'Cantos' makes them, as everyone knows, difficult to understand. Only when extensively annotated do they become comprehensible, and we are still waiting for the variorum edition that would provide us with an ideal text of the 'Cantos,' a fully annotated text that would clarify every allusion and obscurity, and that would provide sources and translations for Pound's numerous foreign quotations. In the meantime one is extremely grateful for books such as the present excellent introductory guide.

Basically the book consists of useful and occasionally extensive commentaries to each block of cantos, with briefer commentaries to individual cantos, followed by glosses to lines which require explication or are likely to cause puzzlement. Cookson's aim has been to provide the _minimum_ help a new reader requires.

The glosses are helpful and very well done, and Cookson's book will be found indispensable by new readers who are looking for a less intensive treatment than that found in the similar but much fuller guide by Terrell, details of which are as follows:

A COMPANION TO THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND. By Carroll F. Terrell. 791 pp. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1993 (1980). ISBN 0-520-08287-7 (pbk.)

Amazon.com

Among his fellow modernists, Ezra Pound inspired equal parts admiration and contempt. T.S. Eliot called him "il miglior fabbro" and dedicated "The Waste Land" to him after Pound had surgically stripped down the masterwork. Gertrude Stein, on the other hand, mocked his obsession with "Kulchur" and his pedagogical need to insert his versions of history, thought, economics, and morality into the Cantos. Pound was, she punched, "a village explainer, excellent if you are a village, but if you are not, not."

Turning to the poems affords illumination, though not resolution. The complete Cantos number 117, weigh in at more than 800 pages, and require several companion volumes of exegesis, filled as they are with private matters and forgotten, obscure souls and associations. Selected Cantos, 117 pages in all, contains what Pound called his "beauty spots": evocations of his heroes (from Chinese emperors to the Founding Fathers), cameos and critiques of his contemporaries (Yeats admiring the symbol of Notre Dame more than Notre Dame itself), and scabrous, unbeautiful visions of politicians, war profiteers, and "the perverts, the perverters of language" in hell. A signal irony is that the poet whose goal was to "make it new" is often freshest in his evocations and imitations of the past.

The greatest sequence is, however, "The Pisan Cantos". In 1945, following his pro-fascist Italian radio broadcasts, Pound was imprisoned by the American military. The art that emerged out of desperation, particularly Canto LXXXI, is a litany of nostalgia, pain, and delusion. Pound for once casts a sharp eye (usually reserved for others) on his personal and artistic failings: "Pull down thy vanity / How mean thy hates / Fostered in falsity ..." But even this section is troubling. In the end, the village explainer could explain little.

Customer Reviews:

Certainly a better introduction to this poem--about which opinions are ever divided--than the unabridged collection........2007-01-30

The SELECTED CANTOS of Ezra Pound is the poet's own collection of those portions of his magnum opus that he thought the best and most representative of the work.

I won't attempt here to review the Cantos in any real depth. Suffice it to say that in a work of 818 pages, written from youth through maturity and mental breakdown to senescence, with a wide variety of concerns from Chinese antiquity to kooky modern economics, the material within is quite heterogenous and inconsistent. In the complete work there are portions of total banality and clumsiness, and of course Pound's infamous anti-Semitism. But there are also moments of awesome and inspiring poetry, especially in the exotic Chinese poems and in the chronicle of individual experience in the Pisan cantos. I can't promise to anyone that they will like the Cantos--a reason why all of my reviews of its editions are three stars--but for me, I find some of Pound's own lines to explain my attitude towards the work, "What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross". There's enough here to make me a very happy reader, in spite of all the faults.

What does this SELECTED CANTOS volume offer? Well, for one, it's much more accessible than the complete edition. Instead of an intimidating hardbound 818 pages, we get a softcover of 119 pages. This is much more manageable for one who wants to discover some of the work before committing to buying the whole. The selection was made in 1966, when all but the final two poems were written. It is representative of the whole, as we do get the final cantos where Pound mourns his inability to write a "paradiso". TThe Fragment for the final Canto, which I think doggerel, is thankfully missing. The publisher added 200 more lines to the excepts of Cantos already selected here, as well as some fragments of Cantos which appeared in 1970.

As the selection was made so late, after Pound had to show contrition for his anti-semitic demagogery of the 1930s, the selections here avoid that most uncomfortable and deplorable material. This works out very well. An excerpt is given here from Canto LII that shows a beautiful transformation of a Chinese calendar text into almost Hesiod-like metres; all the awful Jew-hating content from the beginning of that canto, so inconsistent with the following material, is nicely trimmed away. However, Pound's interest in the consequences of usury are still represented. Canto XLV, beginning "With usura hath no man a house of good stone", is one of the most striking poems of the work and did indeed have to be found here.

An excellent introduction to the Cantos for newcomers........2001-09-05

Few would claim that Ezra Pound's Cantos, taken in their entirety, are an unqualified success. As a sequence they lack any clearly discernible structure, and there is just too much in them that is obscure. At the same time, few would deny that they are studded throughout with passages of great force and beauty - brilliant lines, fragments, and even complete cantos which can be extracted from the complete text with little if any loss. One of these is what is perhaps Pound's greatest poem - his impassioned denunciation of 'Usura' : 'With Usura hath no man a house of good stone' - in Canto XLV. It is this canto, along with twenty-three others either in whole or in part, that will be found in the present book. These were selected largely by Pound himself, as he said, 'to provide the best introduction to the whole work for those coming to it for the first time.' Readers of poetry will find much to enjoy here, and some will probably be inspired to go on to a reading of the complete Cantos.

Those who do so would be well advised to get hold of a copy of Carroll F. Terrell's 'A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound' (University of California, 1993 printing), a reference work which contains glosses to Pound's numerous literary and historical allusions, identifications of all proper names and works, and translations of his foreign quotations. Those who become interested in the life of this extraordinary and colorful personality might consider taking a look at Humphrey Carpenter's 'A Serious Character : the Life of Ezra Pound' (Houghton Mifflin, 1988), a hugely entertaining and informative book which is perhaps the finest critical biography of Pound to have yet appeared and one which also helps considerably to elucidate many of Pound's obscurities.

The slight touch of grandeour........1999-04-29

If you like very much Pound's poetry, I really cannot advise you to buy this book. There is certainly great poetry inside it, (Canto XLV and LXXXI are among my favourites), but all the sense of continuity is dramatically lost in this selection. If you are interested in buying a good selection of Pound's Cantos in order to see how 'they look alike', I cannot advise you eihter another better selection than this. But remember, arriving at one Malatesta's Canto without knowing the history and development of the Banca del Paschi, or to arrive to the 'ed ascoltando al leggier mormorio' (Canto LXXXI) without any furhter refernce is like seeing 5 minutes of a very good 2 hour movie. Hence, this book is very good, but you can only expect from it 1/8 of the pleasure of reading the complete Cantos, as it only has 1/8 of its pages.

Ezra Pound and African American Modernism (Ezra Pound Scholarship Series)

Average customer rating:

Ezra Pound and African American Modernism (Ezra Pound Scholarship Series)

Manufacturer: National Poetry Foundation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Essays | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Book Description

Documentation of the intimate relationship between African American and European American Modernism.

Annotated index to The cantos of Ezra Pound: Cantos I-LXXXIV

Average customer rating:

Annotated index to The cantos of Ezra Pound: Cantos I-LXXXIV
John Hamilton Edwards
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B0007EL1P2

Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos

Average customer rating:

Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos
Lawrence S. Rainey
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books

Literature & Fiction | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
ASIN: 0226703169

Book Description

In the summer of 1922, Ezra Pound viewed the church of San Francesco in Rimini, Italy, for the first time. Commonly known as the Tempio Malatestiano, the edifice captured his imagination for the rest of his life. Lawrence S. Rainey here recounts an obsession that links together the whole of Pound's poetic career and thought.

Written by Pound in the months following his first visit, the four poems grouped as "The Malatesta Cantos" celebrate the church and the man who sponsored its construction, Sigismondo Malatesta. Upon receiving news of the building's devastation by Allied bombings in 1944, Pound wrote two more cantos that invoked the event as a rallying point for the revival of fascist Italy. These "forbidden" cantos were excluded from collected editions of his works until 1987. Pound even announced an abortive plan in 1958 to build a temple inspired by the church, and in 1963, at the age of eighty, he returned to Rimini to visit the Tempio Malatestiano one last, haunting time.

Drawing from hundreds of unpublished materials, Rainey explores the intellectual heritage that surrounded the church, Pound's relation to it, and the interpretation of his work by modern critics. The Malatesta Cantos, which have been called "one of the decisive turning-points in modern poetics" and "the most dramatic moment in The Cantos," here engender an intricate allegory of Pound's entire career, the central impulses of literary modernism, the growth of intellectual fascism, and the failure of critical culture in the twentieth century. Included are two-color illustrations from the 1925 edition of Pound's cantos and numerous black-and-white photographs.

Annotated Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Library Reprint)

Average customer rating:

The Annotated Index to The Cantos of Ezra Pound

Annotated Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Library Reprint)
John H. Edwards
Manufacturer: Univ of California Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Customer Reviews:

The Annotated Index to The Cantos of Ezra Pound.......2006-05-27

Absolutely the finest book written on The Cantos of Ezra Pound!

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books