Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound

Few would claim that Ezra Pound's Cantos, taken in their entirety, are an unqualified success. As a sequence they lack any clearly discernible structure, and there is just too much in them that is obscure. At the same time, few would deny that they are studded throughout with passages of great force and beauty - brilliant lines, fragments, and even complete cantos which can be extracted from the complete text with little if any loss. One of these is what is perhaps Pound's greatest poem - his impassioned denunciation of 'Usura' : 'With Usura hath no man a house of good stone' - in Canto XLV. It is this canto, along with twenty-three others either in whole or in part, that will be found in the present book. These were selected largely by Pound himself, as he said, 'to provide the best introduction to the whole work for those coming to it for the first time.' Readers of poetry will find much to enjoy here, and some will probably be inspired to go on to a reading of the complete Cantos.Those who do so would be well advised to get hold of a copy of Carroll F. Terrell's 'A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound' (University of California, 1993 printing), a reference work which contains glosses to Pound's numerous literary and historical allusions, identifications of all proper names and works, and translations of his foreign quotations. Those who become interested in the life of this extraordinary and colorful personality might consider taking a look at Humphrey Carpenter's 'A Serious Character : the Life of Ezra Pound' (Houghton Mifflin, 1988), a hugely entertaining and informative book which is perhaps the finest critical biography of Pound to have yet appeared and one which also helps considerably to elucidate many of Pound's obscurities.

If you like very much Pound's poetry, I really cannot advise you to buy this book. There is certainly great poetry inside it, (Canto XLV and LXXXI are among my favourites), but all the sense of continuity is dramatically lost in this selection. If you are interested in buying a good selection of Pound's Cantos in order to see how 'they look alike', I cannot advise you eihter another better selection than this. But remember, arriving at one Malatesta's Canto without knowing the history and development of the Banca del Paschi, or to arrive to the 'ed ascoltando al leggier mormorio' (Canto LXXXI) without any furhter refernce is like seeing 5 minutes of a very good 2 hour movie. Hence, this book is very good, but you can only expect from it 1/8 of the pleasure of reading the complete Cantos, as it only has 1/8 of its pages.