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The Cantos | Introduction

The difficult, sometimes frustrating, often moving, occasionally brilliant epic poem The Cantos is Ezra Pound's most significant contribution to world literature. The poem, though, is rarely read all the way through, and Pound is better remembered for his short poems, his early theoretical writings and manifestoes, and his turbulent personal history. This is unfortunate, because in The Cantos are some of the most beautiful and powerful passages in twentieth-century poetry. Written over more than fifty years, the poem is a document of the rise, reign, and fall of a literary style, a generation of artists, and a way of life. Pound was perhaps the central figure in the development of modernism, not only in literature but in fiction, drama, sculpture, and even music, and in The Cantos so many of his enduring concerns and artistic innovations are present, both as prefigurations and reminiscences of the heady days of the 1920s and 1930s. Although the poem is erratic, difficult, and at times willfully obscure, it merits careful attention and has much to reward the patient reader.

The Cantos Summary

The Cantos really has no plot. The poem consists of approximately 120 shorter poems (themselves called "cantos," after the sections into which Dante divided each book of his Divine Comedy), some of which tell unified stories and some of which are simply collections of musings, observations, memories, and exhortations. To summarize the "plot" of The Cantos, therefore, it is probably best to describe the poem in terms of sections.

Although the first draft of the first three cantos appeared in Poetry magazine in 1917, these three cantos were significantly changed for their first appearance in a book. This book, A Draft of XVI Cantos, appeared in 1925. Ten other installments followed, ending with Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII in 1968 (a publication that was prompted by an illegal "bootleg" edition of the same poems). Pound never lived to complete the entire 120-poem cycle that he envisioned, but as it stands today the complete Cantos includes 116 complete cantos and fragments of the remaining four.

A Draft of XVI Cantos
The first installment of cantos appeared just as Pound was leaving Paris. Published in a small, limited, expensive edition with medieval-looking illuminated capitals, the book was self-consciously aimed at an exclusive public. In these first sixteen poems, Pound introduces the themes that he intends to pursue throughout his long "poem containing history."

The first canto, certainly one of the finest, is both a retelling of the story of Book 11 of Homer's Odyssey and a modeling of the "palimpsestic" mode of the construction of poetry that Pound uses throughout The Cantos. A palimpsest is an ancient piece of paper or parchment that has been written on a number of times at different points in history. On a palimpsest, the traces of the earlier writing are incompletely erased and are visible. Pound was fascinated by this idea. In this first canto, Pound uses a number of "texts." Obviously, Homer is the most important—it is his book that is the source text—but we learn at the end of the canto that Pound has found his text of Homer in a Latin translation from 1538. Pound's own translation (of a translation) sounds less like Latin or Greek or contemporary English than it sounds like his earlier translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Seafarer." So here we have an Anglo-Saxon sounding version of a Latin version of a Greek poem that Pound found in a book on the banks of the Seine in Paris.

Much of the rest of this installment continues in this vein. From Homer we go immediately to the Provencal troubadours' stories as retold by the Victorian English poet Robert Browning, to China, and back to Homer. The third canto takes us to Pound's own life, recently arrived in Venice and sitting "on the Dogana's steps." Canto IV reels around the Mediterranean as it goes from the smoking stones of destroyed Troy to the ruins of a Roman arena in Verona, Italy. These cantos, through number seven, introduce Pound's themes: history, the persistence of the image, the senselessness of violence and destruction, the beauty of human accomplishments.

In Cantos VIII through XI, Pound tells his version of the story of the Renaissance Italian condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta, the lord of Rimini who fought as a mercenary and was condemned by the Pope to burn in hell. Pound's attraction to Malatesta was complicated, but he was particularly... » Complete The Cantos Summary