The Cantos Themes

The Cantos is one of the most difficult and erudite of the epic poems. Attempting to rewrite Dante's journey from hell to paradise, Pound chooses the form of a fugue in which to write his poem. The work is suffused with history, myth, crosscultural allusions, striking images, pedantry, and a deep love for humanity. However, the poem also expresses many opinions that are almost medieval in their ignorance and hatefulness. Pound's poem makes us confront questions of whether truly great art can express abhorrent viewpoints.

The Palimpsest
A palimpsest, most simply, is a piece of paper or parchment that has been written on a number of times and on which the earlier writing has been only partially effaced. But the term also designates a building that incorporates an earlier building, especially one from a previous historical period. The image of the palimpsest is both a structural principle for The Cantos and one of its most important themes. Pound began his adult life as a scholar of Provencal, the Latinate language spoken in southern France, and in his early years in Europe he traveled extensively in the Provence region. In that part of France, as in much of Europe, cultures are laid on top of each other both metaphorically and literally. Roman architecture and literature were important influences for the Provencals, and the Romans, of course, appropriated Greek themes and religion. Pound loved Provence and Provencal troubadour literature, but he traced its influence forward, to Dante and from there to the Italian Renaissance and to modern times.

Pound strongly believed in the idea, most pithily stated by the American novelist William Faulkner, that the past is not gone—it is not even past. Throughout The Cantos Pound argues how the past underlies our present beliefs and practices. He felt, for instance, that one could not understand modern war and finance without carefully studying the foundations of modern banking in Florence and Siena. His obsession with the idea of the image or the "luminous detail" found a correlative in his study of the Chinese ideogram, in which he felt that the very ideas at the base of language itself were expressed in pictorial and verbal form....