Ezra Pound Italy And The Cantos

Ezra Pound spent most of his life in Italy and wrote about it incessantly in his poetry. Only by following his footsteps, acquaintances and composition processes can we make sense of and enjoy his forbidding Cantos. This study provides for the first time an account of Pound’s Italian wanderings and of what they became in his work. After this study we will be able to read Pound as a guide to the places, people and books he loved, and we will share his the poet traveler’s joys and discoveries.

The Cantos of Ezra Pound is the most important epic poem of the twentieth century.

At last, a definitive, paperback edition of Ezra Pound's finest work.

Pound's 800 page Cantos, written over a period of more than fifty years (1917-1969), invites the reader to join the poet on a journey from darkness and despair towards light and positive activity. In this book, George Kearns addresses the reader approaching The Cantos for the first time. He examines the poem's aesthetic and political-ethical-didactic dimensions and shows that despite its complexity and the many objections which can be raised to its poetics and politics, its study can be greatly rewarding.

This book will be required reading for any serious Pound scholar but also for those who work in the area of modernist poetry. Many of the book' s contributors (and its editor) are affiliated with the Ezra Pound Society, which will provide a built-in audience and mechanism for promoting the work. Although the book will be of interest to any library containing a copy of Pound' s Cantos, it will also be attractive to individual scholars who may not want to wade through the considerable scholarship but are looking for entry into specific cantos

"Ezra Pound's Posthumous Cantos collects unpublished pages of his great poem, drawn from manuscripts held in the archive at Yale's Beinecke Library and elsewhere. They are assembled by Pound's Italian translator, the critic and scholar Massimo Bacigalupo, into a companion book to the Cantos, running from 1917 to 1972 and including the Cantos he wrote in Italian in 1944-5. An Italian edition was published in 2002 and revised in 2012. This is the first English edition of a crucial part of the Pound canon. Posthumous Cantos is arranged to reflect the eight phases of the Cantos' composition. Pound's writing suffered the consequences of the turbulent history of his century. World War I left the cultural world he came to Europe for in ruins; and the aftermath of the World War II in which he took a contrary side, made his work, like his life, discontinuous, a sequence of brilliant moments and profound ruptures"--http://www.carcanet.co.uk.