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Canto 81 (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)

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The Poem

Canto 81 is a free-verse poem of 173 lines in Ezra Pound’s long epic poem entitled the Cantos. “Canto” is an Italian word for song, poem, or chant. Pound worked on the Cantos for more than fifty years, from about 1915 until his death. Canto 81 is part of The Pisan Cantos (cantos 74-84), which Pound wrote in 1945 while a prisoner of war in the United States Army’s Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) near Pisa, Italy. With a naïve and misplaced faith in the economic reforms of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, Pound had delivered...

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