Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound.

by Ezra Pound

This selection from the Cantos was made by Ezra Pound himself in 1965. It is intended to "indicate main elements" in the long poem -- his personal epic -- with which he was engaged for more than fifty years. His choice includes, of course, a number of the Cantos most admired by critics and anthologists, such as Canto XIII ("Kung [Confucius] walked by the dynastic temple..."), Canto XLV ("With usura hath no man a house of good stone...") and the passage from The Pisan Cantos (LXXXI) beginning "What thou lovest well remains / the rest is dross," and so the book is an ideal introduction for newcomers to the great work. But it has, too, particular interest for the already initiated reader and the specialist, in its revelation, through Pound's own selection of "main elements," of the relative importance which he himself placed on various motifs as they figure in the architecture of the whole poem.

Genres: Poetry, 20th Century, Classics

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early-to-mid 20th century poetry.

Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."

In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.

Reviews

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's more than a little surreal coming to the Selected Cantos a few years after working my way through the whole thing for a class. I wonder what use my impressions will be to others--I thought the selection quite good, it avoided most of the really impenetrable stuff, avoided most of the really obnoxious stuff, and included most of the loveliest lines. Plus, I more or less understood it.

And after all this, I still don't know what to think of Pound. On the one hand, without him, we'd probably all still be reading Arnold Bennett novels and poor man's Tennyson 'epics.' His ambition alone makes it worth a look at his work. He also mastered i) satire (though thanks to his slightly silly understanding of poetry*, he didn't use this mode as often as he should have done) and ii) a style of Anglo-poetry closer to ancient Chinese verse than the romantics etc who preceded him.

The voice of famine unheard.
How came beauty against this blackness,
Twice beauty under the elms--
To be saved by squirrels and bluejays?

More importantly, he wrote about *the world* rather than himself.

On the other hand, he was totally incapable of following a train of thought (hence, he managed to simultaneously believe that a) we need a Great Leader to save us; b) the people should decide on most issues; c) the most important issue is politics is the economy; d) see (a)). He fell into the common trap of coming up with an ideal (Confucianism + Social Credit economics) and then trying to find it in the actually existing world, so he ended up saying nice things about the Nazis.

These two things are obviously connected (i.e., if you're capable of following a train of thought, and you begin from not insane assumptions, you probably won't end up saying nice things about the Nazis). And yet so many popular poets and thinkers are notably incapable of thinking consecutively. Why do we so prefer those who have moments of dazzling insight, which appear from nowhere, to those who burrow down and try to work out where those dazzling insights lead?

I can only hope it's *not* because most people are too lazy to think things through, and would rather be impressed by the dazzle.

All of which is to say: Pound. Well worth reading, but the more exaggerated claims for him** probably shouldn't be taken too seriously.


*: in short, prose is for satire, poetry is for something grander.
**: e.g., that by writing in juxtaposed fragments he discovers a new way of thinking, because Mussolini-Jefferson-Social Credit-Confucius. On the other hand, Pound is so enthusiastic that he makes me want to run out and read books by/about everything he's interested in, other than the troubadors.

[Fin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barely counting this as read. Just a first pass through the cantos via this selection with a guide to get me acquainted. So much beauty and fury and awe and discomfort to be had here - i've no idea yet of the vast shape of the whole poem, but have tunnelled around in the edges with Adams and Confucius and the troubadours and Mussolini enough to have a bit of a sense of what's what. 2025 lets do this for real

[Tyrone_Slothrop (ex-MB) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Il genio della poesia

E' molto arrogante tentare di scrivere qualcosa su queste pagine, vertice della poesia del secolo scorso (e non solo): Ezra Pound è un genio del verso. Superate il bisogno della comprensione, lasciatevi catturare dalla musica delle sue parole, sbigottite dalla capacità di prendere Storia, Economia, Filosofia e frantumarle in versi incredibili e complicatissimi. Quando qualcuno può scrivere pagine di poesia immensa sulla fondazione del Monte dei Paschi di Siena, quell'uomo è un genio - folle, incontrollabile, selvaggio, ma un genio! peccato per la traduzione in italiano della figlia di Pound che ho trovato molte volte incapace di rendere la magia dei versi originali e anche alquanto libera (troppo) nel deformare il senso di molti passaggi…. ma una nuova traduzione di Pound da un vero letterato italiano è impossibile da immaginare?

[J. Alfred · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are all sorts of nasty comments out there about how Pound's Cantos are 'the wreckage of poetry' and suchlike. I'm tempted to think of them as only haltingly intelligible, but then something astonishing and beautiful will come through and I wonder if it's sort of supra-intelligable. Was it Thoreau who said that sometimes the one and a half-minded get confused with the half-minded? Give some love to the architect of all modern poetry.

[YL · Rating 5 out of 5]

Selected cantos: cantos :: groundwork of the metaphysics of morals : critique of pure reason

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've actually been reading this for a few months on and off and I've finally finished it.
This is not the most accessible poetry collection and the edition I own had no notes, which did not help.
I will definitely return to Pound in the future when I have the time and patience to research each cantos. There are so many references and sections are in different languages with no translation.

[Nems · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I understood maybe 8% of what was going on

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed feelings protrude as my introduction to the polarizing figure began to unravel. The great poet shimmers only momentarily through the murkiness of name-dropping & political economic posturing. It begins as a difficult read, a little incoherent, & just when confusion sets in, it gathers momentum. A pattern emerges. The reader is as one staring into a Monet with nose pressed firmly against it. It is only as we step back, a confluence takes hold. A guard is lowered. A vulnerability is shown. And yet as I read, I found that he continuously mentions the economic system; debt & taxes specifically. This is a man passionate about politics enough to inundate his poetry with the mundane details of such a process. Though I believe it is a strong political stance, I cannot help but think of it as propaganda. I cannot separate the mingling of his poetic voice, something usually supremely spiritual, with something so ideologically conjoined to the toxicity of sociopolitical economics. He sneers at taxes, he sneers at Hamilton, he sneers at large governments. I feel like I’m reading a libertarian sympathizer, & yet when he speaks in other terms & forms & uses other carriages, it is all wiped away by the beauty of language. It is in this sense a perplexing & difficult read. All of us are prisoners of time. As readers & as writers, the art is chronologically enshrined. A time & place encapsulated. Pound is no different. Though he speaks of different times & places, he brings them into his modern context, & each time someone reads these Cantos, he brings them into our own. Perhaps this is to show time is an illusion. Perhaps this is to say that the human animal will always incur these endeavors & strife. He presents the relevance of little nooks of history as quite profound. His anecdotal little tales involving ancient Romans, those of an Asian dynasty, & the founders of America are amusing. They are vestiges for his varying thought processes, & yet these carriages take on a life of their own in this poetic soil of creativity. Perhaps the anecdotal carriage carries more weight than I had first observed. After all, the little nooks & crannies of existence are what make the collective so special, so individual, so unique, esoteric conversations spawning massive ideas between two ordinary people. Now to the subject of his anti-Semitism. His anti-Semitic language is not so much shocking to me as it was in the past. I believe this shows more the level of cynicism that exists now rather than the shock devaluing. Perhaps it is also because I find this kind of ideology ludicrous. What have they ever done to deserve so much hate throughout history? A subject for another day. Because this is the only work I’ve read of his so far, I do not know if this form is typical of the author. I would agree that it is quite an enigmatic & original style. The interchanging of linguistics is perhaps a tool to give tonal variation much in the way many writers use colloquial terms or ebonics & even spelling in regional accents, purely artistic move. Perhaps this is to show his versatility. Or perhaps he had an affinity for these particular languages. I can see it detracting from or intimidating the casual reader. Canto XIV turned out to be my favorite, in any case. As I mentioned, there’s quite a bit of name-dropping which has been well-documented with Pound. Though I found this aspect enlightening to learn about, what may now be, obscure writers, philosophers, astrologers, & political theorists. The originality of this piece, the time at which it was published, the nefarious use of hate speech, the plagiarism, to a degree, all make this piece controversial. I find the paradoxical beauty & hideousness of the piece make it a work of art, if nothing else. Perhaps when all is said & done, that is all an artist can really do, create.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain's tower/
While calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers
- Bob Dylan, "Desolation Row"

In his memoirs, Chronicles, Volume 1 (there has yet to be a volume 2, 17 years on), Bob Dylan writes of a meeting he had with the poet Archibald MacLeish:

'Pound and Eliot were too scholastic, weren't they?' he [MacLeish]says. What I know about Pound is that he was a Nazi sympathizer in World War II and did anti-American broadcasts from Italy. I never did read him. I liked T.S. Eliot. He was worth reading. Archie says, 'I knew them both. Hard men. We have to go through them. But I know what you mean when you say they are fighting in a captain's tower.'

I've resisted reading Ezra Pound for the reasons Dylan notes in his memoirs, knowing of him as a poet who had lost his mind and spent many years institutionalized after vocally supporting Mussolini and Hitler during the war years. Having recently re-read Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, I decided to give Pound a chance, with Hemingway showering him with praise (more than any other figure in his memoir).

Selected Cantos seemed like a reasonable entry point to determine if I should have any desire to read more of Pound's work.

It's difficult to separate an artist or thinker from his personal life, but I think it is important to do so. The legacies of those like Phil Spector, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and the French philosopher Louis Althusser are marred by scandals, but it is undoubtedly true that they each made monumental contributions in their respected fields. The same can be said for Ezra Pound, a central figure in modernist poetry.

There were certain Cantos that I admired more than others (XIII; LXXXI; XCV; CV), and I was surprised at how funny Pound was at times ("Ugly? a bore,/Pretty, a whore!"; "There is worship in plowing/and equity in the weeding hoe,/A field marshal can be literate./Might we see it again in our day!"). There were passages that were very lovely, amusing shout-outs to the likes of Hemingway and Wyndham Lewis, and, more than anything else, layer upon layer of obscurity. The works were filled with references to contemporary writers, the Ancients, history, and the works were mostly written in English, but at times lengthy passages appeared in French or Italian with sprinklings of Chinese, Spanish, Greek, Old English and more. At times the work read like Finnegans Wake, with its many layers of meaning, much of which Pound himself probably did not really understand (quoting Jung in his Foreword: "Being essentially the instrument for his work, he [the artist] is subordinate to it and we have no reason for expecting him to interpret it for us. He has done the best that is in him by giving it form and he must leave interpretation to others and to the future").

The biggest turnoff for me in reading the pages - and perhaps this was owed to my modern reading of Pound, with the history of his fascist sympathies as baggage that I brought with me when approaching the text - was his frequent praise for order and "good rule".

I'm glad that I gave Ezra Pound a chance but I'm not sure that this inspired me to read any more of his Cantos. And who shall win out in the end, Eliot or Pound? For me, with Prufrock and "The Waste Land", it has to be Eliot. But posterity shall judge and for now I leave them to continue their battle in the captain's tower.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

The SELECTED CANTOS of Ezra Pound is the poet's own collection of those portions of his magnum opus that he thought the best and most representative of the work.

I won't attempt here to review the Cantos in any real depth. Suffice it to say that in a work of 818 pages, written from youth through maturity and mental breakdown to senescence, with a wide variety of concerns from Chinese antiquity to kooky modern economics, the material within is quite heterogenous and inconsistent. In the complete work there are portions of total banality and clumsiness, and of course Pound's infamous anti-Semitism. But there are also moments of awesome and inspiring poetry, especially in the exotic Chinese poems and in the chronicle of individual experience in the Pisan cantos. I can't promise to anyone that they will like the Cantos--a reason why all of my reviews of its editions are three stars--but for me, I find some of Pound's own lines to explain my attitude towards the work, "What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross". There's enough here to make me a very happy reader, in spite of all the faults.

What does this SELECTED CANTOS volume offer? Well, for one, it's much more accessible than the complete edition. Instead of an intimidating hardbound 818 pages, we get a softcover of 119 pages. This is much more manageable for one who wants to discover some of the work before committing to buying the whole. The selection was made in 1966, when all but the final two poems were written. It is representative of the whole, as we do get the final cantos where Pound mourns his inability to write a "paradiso". The Fragment for the final Canto, which I think doggerel, is thankfully missing. The publisher added 200 more lines to the excepts of Cantos already selected here, as well as some fragments of Cantos which appeared in 1970.

As the selection was made so late, after Pound had to show contrition for his anti-semitic demagogery of the 1930s, the selections here avoid that most uncomfortable and deplorable material. This works out very well. An excerpt is given here from Canto LII that shows a beautiful transformation of a Chinese calendar text into almost Hesiod-like metres; all the awful Jew-hating content from the beginning of that canto, so inconsistent with the following material, is nicely trimmed away. However, Pound's interest in the consequences of usury are still represented. Canto XLV, beginning "With usura hath no man a house of good stone", is one of the most striking poems of the work and did indeed have to be found here.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the books of poetry I've had since the 1970s which was pulled out to read aloud. This time, it feels that the poems are definitely male, which is not to say they are good or bad. Interesting to read Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives concurrently, as Bolano refers to many writers throughout the book. Of course, Pound is included.

[Rodney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Debt and taxes and oxen and Chinese emperors and cathedrals and letters and asses and arses and Adams and

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Hay aqui mucho catolicismo."

[Leopoldo · Rating 3 out of 5]

¿Cómo calificar este mosaico humano tan complejo, este caleidoscopio de momentos y de historias, de lenguas, de sonidos?

Pues con 3. Tres estrellas. Jejejeje.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Make it new". That was Ezra Pound's motto, taken from the inscription on a Chinese emperor's bathtub. Pound incarnated Cicero's dictum that the true writer must "educate, enlighten, and entertain". The SELECTED CANTOS, chosen by Pound himself, record twentieth-century history in his own inimitable style, Pound's vast reading and translations of Italian, Provencal and Chinese literature, and the rise and fall of Ezra Pound, poet. After an eccentric rendering of a passage from the ODYSSEY, "Circe's this craft/The trim-coiffed goddess", and a dive back into the Italian Renaissance in search of political heroes and art patrons, we're off into the modern world. The "Hell Cantos" treat Pound's experience in World War I London and the collapse of the West: "Newspapermen men talking through their bungholes/ Episcopus with a napkin wrapped around his penis". The horrors of the war are evoked by Pound through the voice of a French soldier in the trenches speaking in slang, while Lenin is paraphrased as the new wind from the East, "Yes, those gentlemen know how to do everything, everything but action/Listen to them, then come over to the Bolsheviki". The 1920s CANTOS testify to Pound's growing mania for with economics "With usura hath no man a good stone", his admiration for Mussolini "(The Boss) and fascism, and his discovery of Confucius (Kung) on how to build a new civilization based on filial deference, not religion. Pound's collapse, and that of Europe in World War II, ("Say this to the Possum{TS Eliot}, a bang, not a whimper", are the basis of THE PISAN CANTOS, his masterpiece. Alone and under detention by the US occupation forces in 1945 Italy, Pound wracks his typewrite for some reason to stay alive. Subsequent CANTOS, written in the Washington DC insane asylum where Pound was confined for a dozen years, ROCK-DRILL CANTOS and TRONOS DE LOS CANTARES are brilliant but recondite, even for Pound, touching on Chinese history, Egyptian poetry anf his heroes in American history, John Adams and Thomas Hart Benton. DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS OF THE CANTOS, the finishing touch, have Pound ruing over a life misspent and the hell in his heart: "When friends hate each other, how can there be peace in the world?" THE CANTOS recall the wreckage of Western civilization by war, intellectual decadence and poor political leadership. They remain timely. What Pound said on Eliot's death applies equally to il miglior fabro: READ HIM!

[Duffy Pratt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'd like to like this more, but there is little in it that is comprehensible as a whole, which may simply mean that I didn't work at it hard enough. What I did understand was mainly stuff about the horrors of usury. There was quite a bit of obscure references that I couldn't bother to look up, together with passages in foreign tongues that I couldn't be bothered to translate, and passages that seemed to defy syntax or grammar.

And I could forgive all that, if it was beautiful. But alas. The last Canto in the book, CXVI, however is extraordinary. And the first couple in the book I also liked.

The middle of the book, however, seemed more like the ravings of an insane man, which perhaps they were. I'll say nothing about Pound as a person. Some of his early poems and translations are remarkable, and I've long thought that I should read the Cantos. Based on these selections, I don't think that's going to happen.

[Luke Dylan Ramsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

B/B+

I can’t say I understood even half of what is collected here, but I did enjoy the journey the poems take you on… I feel like you could spend a lifetime diagramming and looking up every single reference in the Cantos. I can definitely see at least some interrelations between encyclopedic novelists like Pynchon and the Cantos, which was interesting.

All that being said, it’s super hard to parse what’s important and what’s not, even in this much shortened version of the longer work. I often felt like I was drowning in foreign languages and obscure proper nouns. I can’t really tell you what I took away from the book besides a sense of Pound’s immense ambition.

My score may be a bit generous considering how difficult to parse I found this book, but I did enjoy reading it, and can see its influence on a few different works of art that I really enjoy.

[Tim Bates]

"He will have to learn Greek for this, and the will, the dottard!" (A rendition made up not recalling that he was not "dottard" but it was said rather "dratt you"

Good exercise to test where your own literary familiarity lies....strange to find in a modern tone the rennaissance values coming to mind from the reading of lengthy ribbons of Latin, peppered Greek and German. The choice of figures used (persons-and forgive the pun- figuring even more so than deities i think is a useful mechanism to reorient the text of discourse from "the ivory tower" toward a more fitting, more immediately representative and necessary to our cultural moment.) I might have known diomedes, but tallyrand?

[Richard Clay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmm... I preferred the longer Selected Poems collection to this, made by Pound himself. The comparisons with TS Eliot are clear: the scattergun erudition, the frequent almost-but-not-quite brushes with convertional rhyme and metre... But Eliot had a vast range of tone and mood. Pound seems, in the Cantos, to be hard pressed ever to stray far from an overriding feeling of crabby cantankerousness so that, by the end, I was wondering if we'd have had a more varied collection if he'd just gone out and bought himself some pile ointment.

[Laura Noi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tra i più grandi poeti del Novecento, oscurato a causa della sua aperta adesione al fascismo. Una poetica immensa ma difficilmente accessibile, Pound si pone una missione eroica, quella di scrivere il poema di tutta la storia umana ma non in senso lineare quanto più circolare. Una sorta di eterno ritorno. Scrive per pochi, credo pochissimi leggendolo riescano a cogliere tutti i frammenti, le citazioni e i richiami che abbondano nella sua poesia. Sono briciole da seguire lungo la strada della comprensione, a cui abbandonarsi e farsi guidare e cullare dalla musicalità della sua metrica capace di travolgere.

[Simona · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unreadable. I stopped reading in the middle of the book

[mono · Rating 5 out of 5]

A welcome addition to my necromancer spell book -
inspiring awe,
humbling intelligence,
simultaneously.

[SirBilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Usuraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Usuraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

[Charles Pero · Rating 4 out of 5]

slightly incomprehensible, entirely dope
"one must count by the dawn star, thy peace is like water, there is September sun on the pools, Plura Diafana"

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like some poems, do not really understand most others.

When Pound gets it right he really does get it right, but most of these do not hit the mark for me.

[Sunblinding · Rating 4 out of 5]

What splendour!/It all coheres...

[Abigail · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did Pound select it himself well then I loved the first canto (and still do) and the Chinese one's fun but the rest about economics I'm no great fan

[Tim Weakley · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ezra Pound you have defeated me. I understood maybe 10% of these cantos. The few lines I did like I liked very much, but as a work I was at sea. I think the biggest reason is that I likely don't have the education needed to approach your work. The classical references were a mystery to me even if the historical ones weren't.

[Sundin Richards · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty handy when you don't want to lug around the whole thing.

[TR · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unreadable. I'll try it again in a decade.