Ezra Pound 1948 The Cantos Of Ezra Pound Epic Modernist Poetry Hardcover w/DJ

Description: Hardcover. 8vo. New Directions, New York. 1948. 822 pgs. Fourth Printing. DJ has shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities. Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. Previous owner's name present to the FFEP. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. Delmore Schwartz said about The Cantos: "They are one of the touchstones of modern poetry." William Carlos WIlliams said "[Pound] discloses history by its odor, by the feel of it-in the words; fuses it with the words, present and past, to MAKE his Cantos. Make them." Since the 1969 revised edition, the Italian Cantos LXXII and LXXIII (as well as a 1966 fragment concluding the work) have been added. Now appearing for the first time is Pound's recently found Eglish translation of Italian Canto LXXII. Ezra Pound 1948 The Cantos Of Ezra Pound Epic Modernist Poetry Hardcover w/DJ Click images to enlarge Description Up For Sale Today is The Cantos of Ezra Pound Hardcover. 8vo. New Directions, New York. 1948. 822 pgs. Fourth Printing. DJ has shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities. Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. Previous owner's name present to the FFEP. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. Delmore Schwartz said about The Cantos: "They are one of the touchstones of modern poetry." William Carlos WIlliams said "[Pound] discloses history by its odor, by the feel of it-in the words; fuses it with the words, present and past, to MAKE his Cantos. Make them." Since the 1969 revised edition, the Italian Cantos LXXII and LXXIII (as well as a 1966 fragment concluding the work) have been added. Now appearing for the first time is Pound's recently found Eglish translation of Italian Canto LXXII. FROM WIKIPEDIA: 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. The Cantos is generally considered one of the most significant works of modernist poetry in the 20th century. As in Pound's prose writing, the themes of economics, governance and culture are integral to the work's 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 17th century, and details from Africa he had obtained from Leo Frobenius. References without explanation abound. Pound initially believed that he possessed poetic and rhetorical techniques which would themselves generate significance, but as time passed he became more concerned with the messages he wished to convey. The section he wrote at the end of World War II, begun while he was interned in American-occupied Italy, has become known as The Pisan Cantos, and is often considered to be self-contained. 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 in his native country. The earliest part of The Cantos to be published were released by Three Mountains Press in 1925 under the title A Draft of XVI Cantos. The first complete edition was New Directions' The Cantos (1-109) The Cantos has always been a controversial work, initially so because of the experimental nature of the writing. The controversy has intensified since 1940 when Pound's very public stance on the war in Europe and his support for Benito Mussolini's fascism became widely known. Much critical discussion of the poem has focused on the relationship between, on the one hand, the economic thesis on usura, Pound's antisemitism, his adulation of Confucian ideals of government and his attitude towards fascism, and, on the other, passages of lyrical poetry and the historical scene-setting that he performed with his 'ideographic' technique. At one end of the spectrum George P. Elliot has drawn a parallel between Pound and Adolf Eichmann based on their antisemitism, while at the other Marjorie Perloff places Pound's antisemitism in a wider context by examining the political views of many of his contemporaries, arguing that "We have to try to understand why" antisemitism was widespread in the early twentieth century, "and not say let's get rid of Ezra Pound, who also happens to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th C." However, all of this is complicated by the fact that The Cantos themselves contain very little evidence of Pound's otherwise blatant antisemitism: in fact, in a close study of the poem, Wendy Stallard Flory concluded that it contained only seven passages of antisemitic sentiment in the 803 pages she read. Further, when Allen Ginsberg visited him in Rapallo in October 1967, Pound described his previous work to Ginsberg as: "A mess ... stupidity and ignorance all the way through." And later (as they dined in the Pensione Alle Salute da Cici restaurant in Venice) he even admitted to Ginsberg, Peter Russell, and Michael Reck that: "... my worst mistake was the stupid suburban anti-Semitic prejudice, all along that spoiled everything ... I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron ... I should have been able to do better ..." Even his views on usury shifted in his later years: two weeks before his 87th birthday he read for a gathering of friends at a café: "re USURY / I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. / The cause is AVARICE." However, even despite his earlier views, Pound still had defenders: Louis Zukofsky (who was Jewish) defended Pound on the basis of his personal knowledge of antisemitism on the level of human exchange — even though (according to William Cookson) their correspondence contained some of Pound's offensive views. Thus, although Pound indeed distrusted the masses, "foreigners," and so forth, The Cantos themselves (with their references to Confucius, the agrarian populism of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democracy, and even the "enlightened despotism" of Leopold II) reflect the underlying conservative sentiment behind his more well-known social and economic views (including his antisemitism.) 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 Cantos are not complex, they are complicated; they are not arrayed by logic or driven by pursuing emotion, they are connected because they follow one another, are set side by side, and because an anecdote, an allusion or a sentence begun in one Canto may be continued in another and may never be completed at all; and as for a theme to be realized, they seem to have only, like Mauberley, the general sense of continuity — not unity — which may arise in the mind when read seriatim. The Cantos are what Mr Pound himself called them in a passage now excised from the canon, a rag-bag. 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 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. Eliot had previously approached the subject of fragmentation of human experience: while Eliot was writing, and Pound editing, The Waste Land, Pound had said that he looked upon experience as similar to a series of iron filings on a mirror.[9] Each filing is disconnected, but they are drawn into the shape of a rose by the presence of a magnet. The Cantos takes a position between the mythic unity of Eliot's poem and Joyce's flow of consciousness and attempting to work out how history (as fragment) and personality (as shattered by modern existence) can cohere in the "field" of poetry.[citation needed] Nevertheless, there are indications in Pound's other writings that there may have been some formal plan underlying the work. In his 1918 essay A Retrospect, Pound wrote "I think there is a 'fluid' as well as a 'solid' content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical forms have certain uses. That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms". Critics like Hugh Kenner who take a more positive view of The Cantos have tended to follow this hint, seeing the poem as a poetic record of Pound's life and reading that sends out new branches as new needs arise with the final poem, like a tree, displaying a kind of unpredictable inevitability.[citation needed] Another approach to the structure of the work is based on a letter Pound wrote to his father in the 1920s, in which he stated that his plan was: A. A. Live man goes down into world of dead. C. B. 'The repeat in history.' B. C. The 'magic moment' or moment of metamorphosis, bust through from quotidian into 'divine or permanent world.' Gods, etc. [The letter columns ACB/ABC may indicate the sequences in which the concepts could be presented.] In the light of cantos written later than this letter, it would be possible to add other recurring motifs to this list, such as: periploi ('voyages around'); vegetation rituals such as the Eleusinian Mysteries; usura, banking and credit; and the drive towards clarity in art, such as the 'clear line' of Renaissance painting and the 'clear song' of the troubadours.[citation needed] The poem's symbolic structure also makes use of an opposition between darkness and light. Images of light are used variously, and may represent Neoplatonic ideas of divinity, the artistic impulse, love (both sacred and physical) and good governance, amongst other things. The moon is frequently associated in the poem with creativity, while the sun is more often found in relation to the sphere of political and social activity, although there is frequent overlap between the two. From the Rock Drill sequence on, the poem's effort is to merge these two aspects of light into a unified whole. The Cantos was initially published in the form of separate sections, each containing several cantos that were numbered sequentially using Roman numerals (except cantos 85–109, first published with Arabic numerals). The original publication dates for the groups of cantos are as given below. Despite all the controversy surrounding both poem and poet, The Cantos has been influential in the development of English-language long poems since the appearance of the early sections in the 1920s. Amongst poets of Pound's own generation, both H.D. and William Carlos Williams wrote long poems that show this influence. Almost all of H.D.'s poetry from 1940 onwards takes the form of long sequences, and her Helen in Egypt, written during the 1950s, covers much of the same Homeric ground as The Cantos (but from a feminist perspective), and the three sequences that make up Hermetic Definition (1972) include direct quotations from Pound's poem. In the case of Williams, his Paterson (1963) follows Pound in using incidents and documents from the early history of the United States as part of its material. As with Pound, Williams includes Alexander Hamilton as the villain of the piece. Pound was a major influence on the Objectivist poets, and the effect of The Cantos on Zukofsky's "A" has already been noted. The other major long work by an Objectivist, Charles Reznikoff's Testimony (1934–1978), follows Pound in the direct use of primary source documents as its raw material. In the next generation of American poets, Charles Olson also drew on Pound's example in writing his own unfinished Modernist epic, The Maximus Poems. Pound was also an important figure for the poets of the Beat generation, especially Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. Snyder's interest in things Chinese and Japanese stemmed from his early reading of Pound's writings. and his long poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965–1996) reflects his reading of The Cantos in many of the formal devices used. In Ginsberg's development, reading Pound was influential in his move away from the long, Whitmanesque lines of his early poetry, and towards the more varied metric and inclusive approach to a variety of subjects in the single poem that is to be found especially in his book-length sequences Planet News (1968) and The Fall of America: Poems of These States (1973). More generally, The Cantos, with its wide range of references and inclusion of primary sources, including prose texts, can be seen as prefiguring found poetry. Pound's tacit insistence that this material becomes poetry because of his action in including it in a text he chose to call a poem also prefigures the attitudes and practices that underlie 20th-century Conceptual art. The poetic response to The Cantos is summed up in Basil Bunting's poem, "On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos": There are the Alps. What is there to say about them? They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb, jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree, et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger. Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing? There they are, you will have to go a long way round if you want to avoid them. It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps, fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble! A fraction of the poem is read near the ending of Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1975 film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. OUR MISSION STATEMENT: Our goal is to provide the best books for the lowest prices. We understand that you have more choices than ever to buy books, so we strive to provide the best service, accurate descriptions, the cheapest shipping and the best customer service in the realm of bookselling. Thank you for visiting this listing and we hope to see you again soon! 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Price: 74.95 USD

Location: Charlottesville, Virginia

End Time: 2025-02-05T03:29:31.000Z

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