Although readers may disagree as to the kinds of groupings one can find in The Cantos, almost everyone will recognize that cantos VIII through XI form a distinct unit, unified by their preoccupation with the deeds and exploits of Sigismondo Malatesta, an Italian prince of the Renaissance, Lord of Rimini during the middle years of the 15th Century. By almost all accounts Sigismondo (or Sigismundo, as Pound spelled the name) was a much detested figure, although his infamous reputation can be traced to Pope Pius II's description of his exploits in Pius' Commentaries which Pound cites. Posterity has taken Pius' cue; he has been almost universally denounced by historians. (p. 107)

Pound's evocation of Sigismondo's world is different. He wants us to feel Sigismondo in our bones, see what he saw, participate vicariously in what he did. This means seeing the man through his words, through his works, through the "stuff" he has left for posterity. As Hugh Kenner shows us [in The Pound Era], there are two dominating symbols in the Malatesta Cantos: the "post-bag" which contains correspondence to and from Sigismondo and his peers, and the Tempio, that strange, unfinished monument to his ego that he built at Rimini. The former represents Sigismondo's present, the intrigues, squabbles, jealousies, love-affairs, battles, etc. that occupied his life. The latter is "what remains" of the man for us to see today: the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, half church, half personal monument, "which yet survives." Like Shelley's statue of Ozymandias whose shattered hulk conjures a world for us in the desert, the carved stone of the Tempio embodies Sigismondo's world for our present.

Pound enters this world circuitously, through the lines of a fellow traveler in the historical junk-heap. Canto VIII opens with an explicit, though modified reference to Eliot's Waste Land…. Like Eliot, [Pound] uses the historical past in his poetry, reaches into the historical grab-bag to present what he finds there. The difference is that Eliot views that past as a wasteland, and any such vision negates the vitality of his references for the present…. The Cantos (at this point) are an attempt to revivify the wasteland.

This brings us quickly to what appears to be the fragment of a document…. If we look ahead a bit we can see that this particular document occupies some forty-three lines, that Giohanni de Medici of Florence is the man to whom it is addressed, that it is signed by Sigismundus Pandolphus de Malatestis, and that it is dated April 7, 1449…. The letter itself is our first "view" of Sigismondo; it comes to us unfiltered through the attitudes of historians and Popes. The only alteration is that the language is not, with occasional exceptions, 15th-century Italian but is the vernacular of Pound's own day. It is Sigismondo incarnated in Pound's voice.

What that voice tells us is surprising if we have any of history's preconceptions about Sigismondo and his exploits. We see him here as a peacemaker (although this is not to be taken too seriously, since all warmakers present themselves as peacemakers) and as a generous patron of the arts. (pp. 108-09)

After Sigismondo's letter to Giohanni de Medici, the next twenty lines of the poem are a fragment from a quasi-legal document dated August 5, 1452, aligning Sigismondo and his forces with "the most magnificent commune of the Florentines." Agnolo della Stufa is the Florentine Ambassador and the "ten of the baily" refers to the ruling authority of Florence during these times.

So the first two documents in the "Malatesta" sequence reveal two aspects of Sigismondo's life which are typical of a Renaissance condottiere: the military man and the patron of the arts…. These documents reflect that dichotomy and underscore the poles of Sigismondo's character—warrior and patron—in a direct, unimpeded way, without historical gloss and bias. He is presented, as Kenner tells us, as a "concentration" of the life of the time.

Then, as if to remind us that these events are rooted in place as well as time, Pound offers an explicit description of the Marche countryside surrounding Rimini. It is the land which contains the "spirits" of its own past, spirits which Pound is renewing in his poem. A lyrical interlude [is quoted from one of Sigismondo's own poems, and makes Pound's] intent clear. (pp. 110-11)

The lyric is "interrupted" by another letter to Giohanni de Medici, Cosimo's son…. But after seven lines of facts and figures the letter seems to fade into a series of images which evoke the wedding ceremony of Francesco Sforza, the powerful Duke of Milan, and Bianca Maria Visconti…. The technique of shifting from document to image is striking and notably cinematic. Pound moves from words on a page to visual images (in this case also evoked by words on a page), a technique very widely used in films, even those of the 1920's.

The lovely and colorful imagery associated with Sforza's wedding enlivens the poem at this point and we are caught up in a burst of movement and color…. This scene emerges out of the dead past, "out of the dust," and through the vigor of the lines appears before us like those gods in the azure air Pound saw on the Dogana's steps. But the repetition of the words "to the wars southward" is an ominous reminder of beauty as momentary respite; the historical artist turns his gaze southward and the language becomes military, the language of conflict and destruction. We hear "Talking of the war" and about Plato's observation of tyrants, and Sigismondo, the poet-lover-patron, becomes Sigismondo, captive-warrior-manipulator. (pp. 111-12)

But at this point in the canto the importance of Sigismondo for Pound becomes clearer, for this controversial condottiere seems to have been everywhere in Italy during his day, making his mark on his time, and finally embodying his spirit (and literally his flesh and bones) in the Tempio at Rimini. Pound puts it simply, and in Latin for endurance: "He, Sigismundo, templum aedifica it."…

The catalog of ten parallelly-constructed lines which ends the canto takes us back to the ending of cantos II and III and recalls the flow of time, the evocation of the past, the arena of history as transformed by the artist. Sigismondo's life is "rolled back" and we see him momentarily at the age of twelve, before the building of the Tempio, a young lad of flesh and blood awaiting his historical moment. (p. 112)

The end is to awaken the spirit of Sigismondo's time, the sense of intrigue, charge and countercharge that filled the life of this man whom Pound sees as an embodiment of his age. We watch the events of Sigismondo's life through a kaleidoscope; they come in and out of focus, presenting different shapes and colors. Just when we seem to see a pattern it is gone, changing in form and color to another pattern. The opening of Canto IX which picks up the catalog-ending of the previous canto stresses this kaleidoscopic technique…. The effect of this is simply to parade the events before us. one after another, with little attention to chronological or causative detail. The sum of these events is Sigismondo's life. (p. 113)

[Sigismondo's "post-bag," the contents of which Pound translates,] contains several letters and excerpts from letters dated December 20 through December 22, 1454…. These letters and excerpts give us a slice of the life of the time and reveal Sigismondo in many of his guises: builder, patron, lover, warrior, employer, father. Pound sums it up explicitly:

            That's what they found in the post-bag
            And some more of it to the effect that he "lived and ruled"….

The phrase "lived and ruled" is an historical generalization, the sort of standard summation of an individual's life one would find in an historical survey. Pound fleshes the generalization with particulars but uses the historical summation to introduce two historical views of Sigismondo, one from Yriate's Un Condottiere au XV^e Siècle [1882] and the other from Pius II's condemnation of Sigismondo. These historical views take us away from Sigismondo's present and the mundane details of the post-bag but move us toward the carved marble of the Tempio, what remains of Sigismondo's energy for us to see. (pp. 113-14)

[Between] dotted lines and in the Latin of Pope Pius II, we encounter the description of the burning of Sigismondo in effigy in front of the steps of Saint Peter's. Pius elegant Latin disguises the hostility of his feelings. As a contrast with this we get Sigismondo's feelings in plain Poundian English, hardly disguised or tempered…. [Here] is historical charge and counter-charge, solemn and light, the Pope and Sigismondo "slanging each other," the words echoing through the centuries and languages…. The canto ends with an omen, an eagle landing on a tent pole, while the papal forces gather to destroy Sigismondo and his army.

This event which occurred in August of 1462 at Monodolfo led to Sigismondo's defeat by his arch-rival Federico d'Urbino and the papal forces. That defeat and its aftermath are described in Canto XI, which is linked to the previous canto by a repetition of the Italian phrase "And greatly the Roman Knights believed these signs." As this canto progresses Sigismondo becomes more and more an isolated figure, holding on to the last threads of his life, waiting for the end…. We have had now a kaleidoscopic view of Sigismondo's career and we are near its end. Sigismondo fights a few more battles … but the human energy that sustained him is dissipated. We—historians, poets, readers, simply living human beings—can only be observers of the recorded tangible remains of that energy, the documents which have survived, the art and architecture which still stands. Sigismondo, for Pound, was a man of extraordinary energy, a man who ordered and structured the events of his time. But the human lot is such that all such energy dissipates and enters the current of time in the form of human memory. (pp. 115-117)

A few more lines picturing Sigismondo "with his luck gone out of him" take us to a magnificent line evoking the sunset of a man and of an era: "In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it."… But this man, more than most, has left a legacy to the memory of his civilization. We find him at the end of the Malatesta Cantos and at the end of his life turning to his steward Enricho de Aquabello (Henry), as Hamlet turns to Horatio, asking that his memory be kept alive…. But Ezra Pound, not Enricho de Aquabello, is Sigismondo's Horatio for us, and the Malatesta Cantos conjure for us the events of his time and place as well as the Temple he built which still stands on a busy street corner in Rimini. (p. 118)