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The Cantos
8Ezra Pound
Pound's lifelong attempt at a modern epic — multilingual, encyclopedic, sometimes crazy, sometimes sublime; Pound was also the midwife of every major modernist other than himself.
GBM Assessment (Score: 8/10)
The Cantos represent Ezra Pound's lifelong attempt to write a modern epic encompassing history, economics, politics, and lyric beauty in a single, sprawling, multilingual poem. Pound was the architect of literary modernism in English: he edited The Waste Land (Eliot dedicated it to him as "il miglior fabbro"), championed Joyce, promoted Frost and Hemingway, and co-founded Imagism and Vorticism. No single figure did more to shape the trajectory of twentieth-century poetry.
The first major Cantos appeared alongside the works of Eliot, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, and Woolf during the high modernist period of the 1920s. Pound's life became inseparable from the century's darkest politics: his embrace of Mussolini's regime and wartime radio broadcasts led to his arrest for treason and confinement in St. Elizabeths hospital, where he received the controversial Bollingen Prize in 1949. His influence extended to the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and Language poetry.
Weimar Culture, 1924-1926
The Weimar Republic's golden years. Mann publishes The Magic Mountain. Kafka's works appear posthumously. Hitler writes Mein Kampf in prison. The Bauhaus flourishes. Fitzgerald captures the Jazz Age. Woolf invents stream-of-consciousness narrative. Pound begins publishing The Cantos, his lifelong modernist epic, while living in Italy and increasingly drawn to Mussolini's regime. Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and the Paris expatriate scene define the Lost Generation.
Awards & Adaptations
Bollingen Prize (1949, controversial — awarded while in custody for treason). Edited the defining works of modernist literature. Influenced the Beats, Black Mountain poets, Language poetry. Completes the modernist poetry trinity: Yeats–Eliot–Pound.
Recommended Edition
New Directions: The Cantos (collected, 1970); Personae: Collected Shorter Poems (1926/1990)
