Cantos 64–66

Abstract

Writing the Adams Cantos in the 1920s, entre deux guerres, Ezra Pound abruptly changes his poetic style to reflect his engagements with John Adams’ political works and correspondence. What doesn’t change is Pound’s commitment to political activism regarding the arts, monetary exchange, fair wages for labor, equal rights for women and a limited non-discrimination policy. I bring a new interpretation to David Ten Eyck’s coverage of “the documentary method,” training primarily a geo-political and ecopoetical lens on Pound’s activism at ground level. Pound exposes Adams’ attention to geo-political materiality: physical landmarks, place names, ecosystems, cultural anthropology, and others. Pound evidences ecopoetics through green things: ways that the new American colonies commit to self-sustenance, ways that we sustain ourselves, inclusion of women and minority groups (Native Americans, slaves). Pound highlights Adams’ liberal education which enabled him to call by their right names the legitimacy of the emergent United States’ claims against the illegitimacy of England’s claims. Pound’s geopolitical and ecopoetic activism in the Adams Cantos promotes a fecundity of renewables, a message that reverberated then and now through a war-torn contemporary world that could not envision stability in the near future.