The Cantos of Ezra Pound

Produto entregue como descrito. Chegou antes do prazo.

Edición clásica en inglés de los famosos Cantos de Pound en tapa blanda y por la editorial tradicional y más recomendable para esta obra.

Perfect! Beautiful book enclosing beautiful treasures!

Aunque tienen sus momentos tediosos, los Cantos de Ezra Pound son una lectura obligada para cualquier interesado en la literatura más allá del entretenimiento. La publicación también es muy agradable, New Directions lo mantiene simple y elegante.

An indispensable classic.

This barely legible (on its own - to be read with Terrell's "Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound") text is to be heard, read, seen, spoken aloud. It is a monument of poetry, a guide for later poets and also a link with the rest of humanity's literary history, encompassing literature from Homer to Dante and more modern art. Though reading The Cantos will take a lifetime, it is incomparable experience to embark on such a quest, because of the breadth of references - economics, politics, history, philosophy, art etc. - it alludes to, paraphrases, or rewrites.

impeccable

How can you be critical about an opus which was so many decades in the writing and whose themes and methods changed between the slabs which were published piece by piece? Starting in the middle of Homer's Odssey and moving through Ovidian metamorphosis through several themes to the Russian Revolution, dropping in at the Italian Quattracento (and Lucrezia Borgia - `Madame Matter') as well as on his old pal Baldy Bacon en route (not to mention the Sigismondo cantos). He even brings in his granddad who `sweat blood' put to put that railroad... We follow the chapters on Jefferson `Nuovo Mundo' and even the Adams cantos put side by side with the Chinese history cantos. On the down side we read the fascism of the Italian Cantos, with a skull in a North African desert crying `Alamein! We will return!', and old Adolf `furious from perception'. On the other hand, we read the quiet reflections from Piza prisoner camp, follow American history intermingled with the Shu King, Confucius with modern life; and after the `rock drill', the 'thrones' showing flashes of saintly acts (eg del Mar)with flashes of the inferno. Finally, sad fragments from his depressed reflections in later life, the No-Khi wind ceremony. What can we make of this jumble of archaic snatchings and even hieroglyphics? Pound's need to change society, to battle against usury and to take example from those who lived the right way - Confucius, the Byzantines and the Sacred Edict of K'ung Hui. And to change ourselves. `Pull down thy vanity' is not the only beautiful introspective line in this maze of quotations. And we can watch the transformations take place in his `ideogram' method, where fragments are welded together in snatches to give an impression; just as Chinese characters are composed of several elements which add up to the meaning. For, obscure and complex as the Cantos are, they are undoubtedly a labour of love and an attempt to show society where it is going wrong. They are many beautiful passages in the text, and I suggest the reader wander through this book and appreciate them in their rightful place - the seven lakes canto, for example, and the canto on `lynxes', to mention but two. We can learn a lot from Pound and enjoy what he wrote, but we must make the effort. There is so much that is of great value in this huge work - it really is a modern masterpiece.

Harold Bloom observes in his book, "The Western Canon," that for literary heavyweights, Dante tends to be the role model. (Joseph Campbell observes as much regarding James Joyce: "The model for Joyce's life was Dante.")Dante felt strongly that educated people have a duty to assist practically in the betterment of humanity. Being a mere aesthete, for Dante, was burying one's talents at best, and moral cowardice at worst.Pound's Cantos is modeled clearly on Dante's "Divine Comedy," and Pound felt a responsibility to "shout from the rooftops" what he felt was threatening the family as an institution, world culture, the environment, and American democracy. The Cantos thus are very much a personal record of Pound's own odyssey through the tumult of the early 20th century.The Cantos commence with the Ulysses quest of Canto I, then time-travel through European culture by presenting the paratactic history of heroic individuals who resisted vice and championed virtue. In this sense, the Cantos are a modern-day "Plutarch's Lives" - history interpreted by a poet.Pound's first personal crisis was after the First World War, (in which many of his own friends died). "I sought to discover what causes war," Pound stated. His conclusion, after years of historical research, was that wars are fomented by elite power groups: royalty, militarists, industrialists. It was at this time that both the Cantos' character, and Pound's character, changed (somewhere around Canto 45, the famous-infamous "Usury Canto").Pound found in his historical researches that rates of interest are an accurate gauge to the civilized state of a culture: high levels of interest, "usury," correspond to levels of philistine barbarism in which the weak are devoured by the powerful. Pound's equation, then, was that social Darwinism, political economy, rampant capitalism, debasement of currency, are destroyers of people's families, personal lives, and therefore, of culture.It was natural, given this view, for Pound to be attracted to Confucianism, with its accent on the family as the hub from which all things virtuous radiate. A large part of the Cantos is taken up with Pound's presentation of Chinese wisdom and virtue.In the thirties, Pound crafted the American cantos, or "Adams Cantos," as they usually are called. Clear from this section of the Cantos is Pound's immense respect for American democracy. Pound foresaw the coming of the Second World War and engaged in a vigorous letter-writing campaign with several US senators, urging avoidance of foreign entanglements.During the war, Pound, having failed to leave Italy before his visa expired, and thus finding himself trapped in fascist Italy, engaged in a series of polemical and rather idiosyncratic radio broadcasts, depicting the war as the latest historical example of the economically powerful preying upon the politically weak. While Pound wrote only two cantos during this time, the "Italian Cantos," the sense of the broadcasts is already clear in those cantos preceding the war.This was Pound's second crisis.Once the war ended, the sixty year-old Pound found himself incarcerated in a gorilla cage, lying on cold concrete, left to the open air, with a nighttime spotlight shining on him as he tried to sleep. Pound had made powerful political enemies, and his incarcerators were not sadistic fascists but the victorious US Army in Pisa, Italy.It was here, while incarcerated in Pisa, that Pound wrote the "Pisan Cantos," that section of the Cantos which would earn him the first Bollingen Prize of 1948. By then, however, Pound was become a political prisoner in St. Elizabeth's in Washington, D.C.Based on subsequent assertions of Pound's attorney, Pound was in no danger of the government's treason charge. Nevertheless, Pound's wife opted to have Ezra committed rather than face a possible capital charge of treason for his wartime radio broadcasts.It was during his twelve-year stay in St. Elizabeth's that Pound would write the "Rock-Drill" and "Thrones" sections of the Cantos, and St. Elizabeth's became a site of pilgrimage for poets and authors the world over.Asked to say what is most central to the Cantos, I think Pound would say with considerable self-respect, were he here, that he foresaw the very problems American democracy is reeling under now: endless wars and fiscal mismanagement impoverishing the lives of millions of Americans.It is topical to think of Pound as a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Yet Eisenhower's farewell address, the observations of USMC general Smedley Butler on the robber baron nature of US gunboat diplomacy, F.D.R.'s now-proven foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack, the six million deaths caused by the US paramilitary since 1947, the daylight assassination of the only American president to oppose and attempt to abolish the Federal Reserve Bank, the faked Gulf of Tonkin Incident used to justify the Vietnam War, the Saturday Night Massacre, the "Wag the Dog" spectacle of modern US politics, the infiltration of the US media in Operation Cointelpro, the proposed fake terror of Operation Northwoods, the current "war for peace": these are the very things Pound would understand, and which he presciently railed against.Pound is an unpleasant reminder for many literary types, that, at least by Dante's standard, they are mere aesthetes lacking political and economic acumen. This perturbs the literati, and thus they find Pound infuriating or irrelevant. The Cantos - which I have indeed read - are beautiful and diaphanous. Even the boring sections are impeccably crafted. What really moves me in reading Pound is how he seemed to mean every word he wrote. You cannot help but sense Pound's profound sincerity in his views. As such, the Cantos, like Pound's life, are a document of personal courage.That said, the Cantos aren't for everybody.You simply *must* familiarize yourself with Eustace Mullin's "Secrets of the Federal Reserve" to grasp how far Ezra Pound's understanding of economics outstrips his modern-day nay-sayers.I once described Pound's economic ideas to a neighbor, an economist, and his immediate reply was, "That's right. He's exactly right."Good luck on your odyssey.

The Cantos are monolithic, and I think one of the most valuable pieces of literature to read from Western Civilization. Sure, they don't contain the secrets to the universe, but they do contain the thoughts of a genius who was trying to get his mind wrapped around truth. I do not think that Pound always speaks the truth in his works. But he is always trying to and is always fanatically convinced of what he is saying. For the conviction and emotional tonality alone this work is worth reading. Pound rages on the page and you can feel it. Reading it can be like getting shouted at for an hour. He also finds sympathy for some and you feel his description of them as a close friend relating a nostalgic tale. He can also be grim, and his words seem the perfect eulogy for Western Civilization. Reading it is like getting pummeled! Yet with each struggle one comes out feeling a desire to know more about the world and to search out truth.When I first opened the Cantos, I felt that they were not well written, because the writing is choppy, in places it seems haphazard and sloppy. One can also read his 'Guide to Culture' and find that it reads like a notebook; not for public consumption. However, Pound's power does not lie with his 'technical' skill. There I would look perhaps to Louis Zukofsky, whose style and thought was similar, but whose technique is profound and impeccable. By contrast, Pound gives the impression of writing with incredible haste and bluster, as if fighting with his life to complete this work before his death. There is no real pattern to all of the cantos. It probably should be read more as a collection of poems on similar themes than in a Dantesque sort of way. But you see the unfolding of Pound's wild and weird life as the Cantos unfold, and his intellect and passions fight against the world that would ultimately defeat him. The cantos are not written to be accepted technically; they are about teaching life (Pound would say wisdom; APPLIED knowledge) and about truth, and not about words.Reading Pound, one feels the weight of civic responsibility. Pound rages at what he sees rending Western Civilization from its roots. He discloses history by mentioning it, using events as metaphors, as expressions, as examples of his points, and in doing this he expects you to know them. Pound's poetry convicts one to read Dante, to read Homer, to read the Troubadours. And if you took nothing more away from that Cantos than that, that isn't bad. But you see in this work someone who is absolutely dedicated to how he felt the world should be. There is no apathy here. We can all stand to nod to Pound's conviction. I do not agree with him on many issues (although some I do), but I think that even if one disagreed on all counts with Pound, they could take from the Cantos the fervor and mission of a man dedicated to changing the world for what he saw as the better. You can still feel his intent and intensity on these pages. I think that as long as people read it, they will. Read this.