This casebook provides a selection of key criticism, including an article newly translated into English, on the Cantos of Ezra Pound. The introduction positions the poem within Pound's corpus, contextualizes the contributions included and outlines their arguments, and concludes with suggestions for how the student may best approach this troubled and fascinating artifact. The selected articles maintain a high level of immediate contact with the Cantos, with the intention of preparing students for reading individual cantos on their own. Contributors discuss the nature of many of the successive major blocks of work, allowing the Pound newcomer to experience the poem as an irregular progression, varying greatly in its qualities. The first selection discusses "Canto I"; subsequent selections discuss, successively, major elements from "Canto II", the Draft of XXX, the China Cantos, the Pisan Cantos, and Drafts and Fragments. As a whole, the collection elucidates the personal and
historical shifts that profoundly impacted Pound and consequentially produced the changing fusions of technique and matter in the Cantos. It also shows some of the huge variation in critics conceptions of the poem, or poetry itself, and of what it meant to be a poet and citizen of the West during the half-century in which the Cantos were written.
Introduction; PETER MAKIN;
; Ezra Pound; HUGH KENNER;
; Persephone's Ezra; GUY DAVENPORT;
; The Ideogrammic Method in The Cantos; GIROLAMO MANCUSO;
; Why the Commedia is Not the Model for The Cantos and What Is; REED WAY DASENBROCK;
; History and Money, Fact and Hysteria; PETER MAKIN;
; "Safe with My Lynxes": Pound's Figure in the Carpet?; MASSIMO BACIGALUPO;
; Extracts from Ezra Pound and the Erotic Medium; KEVIN ODERMAN;
; A Metaphysics of the State; PETER NICHOLLS;
; Inventing Confucius; HUGH KENNER;
; The Music of a Lost Dynasty: Pound in the Classroom; D. S. CARNE-ROSS;
; Res and Verba in Rock-Drill and After; DONALD DAVIE;
; "Unstill, Ever Turning": The Composition of Ezra's Pound's Drafts & Fragments; RONALD BUSH;
; An Interview with Ezra Pound; D. G. BRIDSON;
; Ezra Pound: An Interview; DONALD HALL;
; Selected Fu
