Readings in the Cantos

Abstract

Readings in The Cantos Volume 2 is a collection of critical essays that explore individual Cantos from the long experimental modernist poem The Cantos of Ezra Pound. The approaches taken here attempt and demonstrate different reading strategies for working with Pound’s fragmented and difficult text, offering a vital reference resource for Pound’s long poem as well as a model for academic and general readers about how to work with this text and with modernism more generally. This volume covers twenty-six Cantos produced between The Fifth Decad of the Cantos XLII–LI (1937) and The Pisan Cantos (1948). This period was the most troubled period in Pound’s life, as well as one of his most poetically productive. Through the late 1930s and up to 1945—the period before the Second World War and through the war itself—Pound was mostly in Italy, gradually strengthening his connections with the ruling Italian Fascists and then working with and within that regime during wartime to broadcast over Fascist-run radio in favour of the Axis powers. The final volume dealt with here, The Pisan Cantos, was produced after Pound’s arrest and during his incarceration before his return to the USA to face the consequences of his wartime actions. The essays in this volume contain detailed accounts of Pound’s poetic activities throughout these events and convey the inextricable connection between this difficult poetry and the events from which it emerged.