Ezra Pound's Cantos: A Compact History of Twentieth‐Century Authorship, Publishing and Editing

Abstract

AbstractThis paper forms part of a Literature Compass cluster on Modern Book History. The full cluster is made up of the following articles:‘Between Then and Now: Modern Book History’, Kate Longworth, Literature Compass 4 (2007), 10.1111/j.1741‐4113.2007.00474.x.‘Ezra Pound's Cantos: A Compact History of Twentieth‐Century Authorship, Publishing and Editing’, Mark Byron, Literature Compass 4 (2007), 10.1111/j.1741‐4113.2007.00475.x.‘ “The Making of the Book”: Roy Fisher, the Circle Press and the Poetics of Book Art’, Matthew Sperling, Literature Compass 4 (2007), 10.1111/j.1741‐4113.2007.00476.x.‘Bakhtinian “Journalization” and the Mid‐Victorian Literary Marketplace’, Dallas Liddle, Literature Compass 4 (2007), 10.1111/j.1741‐4113.2007.00477.x.‘Manuscript in Print: The Materiality of Alternative Comics’, Emma Tinker, Literature Compass 4 (2007), 10.1111/j.1741‐4113.2007.00478.x.‘Lost in a World of Books: Reading and Identity in Pre‐War Japan’, Susan C. Townsend, Literature Compass 4 (2007), 10.1111/j.1741‐4113.2007.00479.x.***Ezra Pound's modernist epic poem, The Cantos, was composed over almost six decades of the twentieth century. Its publication history – from the earliest instalments in little magazines in the nineteen‐teens to collected and posthumous editions – entails several challenges to traditional notions of literary completion, authorial control, justified (and unjustified) editorial intervention, and collaboration between authors and scholars intent on ‘cleaning‐up’ apparently corrupted texts. Pound's cultural engagements (particularly politics and economics), creative pursuits and personal history inflect some of these aspects of his text's literary and bibliographical career over the last ninety years (for example, his incarceration by the United States Army during the Second World War and the subsequent loss of his status as the legal owner of his written words). In this paper I will indicate some challenges to literary and bibliographical convention arising from Pound's text as well as from his personal circumstances and his relations with his principal editors: T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, and James Laughlin at New Directions. I will also address some challenges to editing Pound's text today: the ways in which competing printed versions and ancillary materials might be brought to bear on persistent questions of status and permissible editorial agency; the role of technology in attempts to ‘clean up’ Pound's text; and the way in which editorial theory might assist in reflecting upon the kind(s) of authorial status and editorial mediation at work in this distillation of so much history and cultural production. Pound's epic poem can be seen to challenge the very boundaries of the text and the book in radical ways, both in modernist and in contemporary (including electronic) modes.