THE CANTOS (1-95)-EZRA POUND-FIRST EDITION AND PRINTING-1956

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POUND, Ezra "THE CANTOS (1-95)" New York . New Directions Publishing Company. 1956. First Printing. Octavo. Approximately 350 pp. Hardcover. Bound in black cloth, with silver-foil title on spine. With photographic portrait frontispiece of Ezra Pound. Interior with very little light page yellowing, pages are clean and crisp. Covers with general light wear on edges and top and bottom of spine. Dust Jacket has scuffing and a couple of tear on spine and one on the back cover. The inside cover page has had the previous owners mark removed from page. This is a very nicer copy in Very Good condition. The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered to present formidable difficulties to the reader. Strong claims have been made for it as the most significant work of modernist poetry of the 20th century. As in Pound's prose writing, the themes of economics, governance, and culture are integral to its content. The most striking feature of the text, to a casual browser, is the inclusion of Chinese characters as well as quotations in European languages other than English. Recourse to scholarly commentaries is almost inevitable for a close reader. The range of allusion to historical events is very broad, and abrupt changes occur with little transition. There is also wide geographical reference; Pound added to his earlier interests in the classical Mediterranean culture and East Asia selective topics from medieval and early modern Italy and Provence , the beginnings of the United States , England of the 17th century, and details from Africa he had obtained from Leo Frobenius. References without explanation abound. Pound initially believed that he possessed poetic and rhetorical techniques which would themselves generate significance, but as time passed he became more concerned with the messages he wished to convey. "I got more interested in the meaning of what I got on the page." The section he wrote at the end of World War II, begun while he was interned in American-occupied Italy, has become known as The Pisan Cantos, is often considered to be self-contained. It was awarded the first Bollingen Prize in 1948. There were many repercussions, since this in effect honored a poet who had been condemned as a traitor in his native country, and who had been diagnosed with a serious mental illness. Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 - 1 November 1972) was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry. He became known for his role in developing Imagism, which, in reaction to the Victorian and Georgian poets, favored tight language, unadorned imagery, and a strong correspondence between the verbal and musical qualities of the verse and the mood it expressed. His best-known works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos, which consumed his middle and late career, and was published between 1917 and 1969. Working in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, Pound helped to discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway. Pound was responsible for the publication in 1915 of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and for the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote in 1925: "He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. ... He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying ... he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide." Outraged by the loss of life during the First Wo... read more

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