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edition of The Cantos issued in Italy for the Pound centenary. (In 1986 they were added to the US edition.) From every point of view, cantos 72–73 are astonishing: an American writing in quasi-medieval Italian of El Alamein, Ezzelino da Romano (who figures in Dante), Marinetti, and that ‘half-foetus who sold all of Italy and the Empire’ (the proverbially diminutive King of Italy, who dismissed Mussolini). What chiefly strikes the reader is Pound’s passion – and passion is what invigorates these texts. Thus The Cantos could do anything – they could speak also in tragic times, of yesterday as well of today. Isolated as he was in the hills overlooking Rapallo, Pound planned further Italian poems, producing a quantity of tentative drafts. Here he wrote of visions he had encountered or imagined along the hillpaths, of Medieval and Renaissance figures, as well as of stray deranged women whose homes had been destroyed. They were Cunizza (another favourite Dante persona), the Moon, the Madonna of the Ligurian sea-shrines, and Isotta, beloved of Malatesta, whose ‘Temple’ in Rimini had been damaged by Allied attacks. (Rimini was on the ‘Gothic Line’, which in 1944–45 separated the Allies in the South of Italy from the Germans and their Fascist allies in the North.) Pound worked as indefatigably as always on these drafts, which also included a potted history of the Roman empire and meetings with further ghosts (among them Basinio, Malatesta’s court poet, and Scotus Erigena, the Carolingian philosopher). When on May 3, 1945, two partisans arrested him in his hillside retreat, these pages were on his desk. He never returned to them, the captive Italian audience for The Cantos having dissolved in the interim; instead he returned to English and composed his most celebrated and controversial work, the eleven Pisan cantos (74–84). But Pound the professional poet never wasted anything: remembered passages from the Italian drafts recur in the Pisan sequence, recalling that visionary period of suspension before the catastrophe. Here I offer a selection of these rather rough Italian drafts, with an English translation which I hope will allow readers to appreciate their mixture of historic drama and otherworldliness. (Buddha, Confucius and the Madonna of the Assumption of the hilltop shrines all figure together in Pound’s syncretic elysium.) Unlike the Italian drafts of 1945, which came to fruition only as material for later use, the Pisan cantos reveal few second thoughts in the transition from notebook to typescript to print. In the relative xiv Posthumous Cantos
page 15
quiet (the quiet after the storm) of the US Army disciplinary camp, Pound was able to write a prison journal in verse which was also a justification for his life and a realization of the project of The Cantos, which at this point (as mentioned above) was supposed to turn to philosophy and religion. The prisoner’s stream of consciousness is interspersed with visionary episodes, true celebrations of the rituals of Venus, Diana-Luna, the Sun, Dionysus – the latter present through the god’s and Pound’s totem-animal, the lynx. Pound wrote slowly but steadily through the summer, noting the changes of the season, from the oppressive July heat to the November hoarfrost. He deleted little of what he composed, the major exception being a long passage from the end of the last Pisan canto (84), and its 6-line prologue, a kind of formal testament, very explicit and emotional (Yet from my tomb such flame of love arise). He may have cancelled the latter because too personal and old-fashioned, or of ill omen (‘my tomb’). For all he knew, he could have been hanged, or electrocuted, for his ‘treason’. The deletion of the last pages results in a briefer and stronger conclusion to the Pisan sequence, so that the poet exits with new-found bravado – no tearful farewells. Pound never repented, except, at moments, for his personal failings. During the years of his detention at St Elizabeths Hospital (1945– 58), Pound composed two further volumes of cantos (or ‘cantares’, as he now called them). These are written in the Pisan style, but give little attention to their surroundings. Perhaps the confinement of the madhouse enters the poem in other ways, and at times one suspects that Pound’s crumb of folly has grown to full-scale paranoia. (What better proof of a conspiracy did he need than his own incarceration?) At any rate, The Cantos continue to present his version of world history, and he no longer intends to close with canto 100, as Dante had done: while there is the poem to be written there is life and hope. From this period we also have notebooks and drafts with passages that were not used in the published text. One such document is a long typewritten transcript of notebooks from the early Washington years, preliminary to cantos 85–95. These cantos appeared with the title Rock-Drill after Pound gave them final form in 1954, in the course of a few particularly fruitful and creative months. From this typescript nine extracts are offered here. In 1959 Pound himself made a similar yet briefer selection for a minuscule Italian pamphlet, Versi prosaici – hence the appropriate title of this section, Prosaic Verses . Introduction xv

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edition of The Cantos issued in Italy for the Pound centenary. (In 1986 they were added to the US edition.) From every point of view, cantos 72–73 are astonishing: an American writing in quasi-medieval Italian of El Alamein, Ezzelino da Romano (who figures in Dante), Marinetti, and that ‘half-foetus who sold all of Italy and the Empire’ (the proverbially diminutive King of Italy, who dismissed Mussolini). What chiefly strikes the reader is Pound’s passion – and passion is what invigorates these texts.

Thus The Cantos could do anything – they could speak also in tragic times, of yesterday as well of today. Isolated as he was in the hills overlooking Rapallo, Pound planned further Italian poems, producing a quantity of tentative drafts. Here he wrote of visions he had encountered or imagined along the hillpaths, of Medieval and Renaissance figures, as well as of stray deranged women whose homes had been destroyed. They were Cunizza (another favourite Dante persona), the Moon, the Madonna of the Ligurian sea-shrines, and Isotta, beloved of Malatesta, whose ‘Temple’ in Rimini had been damaged by Allied attacks. (Rimini was on the ‘Gothic Line’, which in 1944–45 separated the Allies in the South of Italy from the Germans and their Fascist allies in the North.) Pound worked as indefatigably as always on these drafts, which also included a potted history of the Roman empire and meetings with further ghosts (among them Basinio, Malatesta’s court poet, and Scotus Erigena, the Carolingian philosopher). When on May 3, 1945, two partisans arrested him in his hillside retreat, these pages were on his desk. He never returned to them, the captive Italian audience for The Cantos having dissolved in the interim; instead he returned to English and composed his most celebrated and controversial work, the eleven Pisan cantos (74–84). But Pound the professional poet never wasted anything: remembered passages from the Italian drafts recur in the Pisan sequence, recalling that visionary period of suspension before the catastrophe. Here I offer a selection of these rather rough Italian drafts, with an English translation which I hope will allow readers to appreciate their mixture of historic drama and otherworldliness. (Buddha, Confucius and the Madonna of the Assumption of the hilltop shrines all figure together in Pound’s syncretic elysium.)

Unlike the Italian drafts of 1945, which came to fruition only as material for later use, the Pisan cantos reveal few second thoughts in the transition from notebook to typescript to print. In the relative xiv Posthumous Cantos

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