[1XZ]⋙ [PDF] Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound Ezra Pound 9780811201605 Books

Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound Ezra Pound 9780811201605 Books

Download As PDF : Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound Ezra Pound 9780811201605 Books

Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound Ezra Pound 9780811201605 Books

A much-lauded writer whose work is spiced with more than a touch of schizophrenia. Writing that does not deserve to be reproduced, but buried after burning.


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Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound Ezra Pound 9780811201605 Books Reviews

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.
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.
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". TThe 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 much-lauded writer whose work is spiced with more than a touch of schizophrenia. Writing that does not deserve to be reproduced, but buried after burning.