Introduction
Ezra Pound devoted much of his life to the writing of a long poem, The Cantos, which was to be a history both of the world and of himself, a new Odyssey telling the story of an exile’s return to his home and promised land, and a new Divine Comedy depicting the arduous ascent from Hell to an erotic and visionary Paradise. However, while those great models were based on a linear narrative, Pound, a poet of the image and of sudden intuitions, tells his story circularly, by repetition and variation. The part contains the whole, and canto 1 already offers a blueprint for the entire poem, going from Odysseus’s descent to Hades to a vision of Venus, she of ‘dark eyelids’, as well as ‘mirthful’. She is Baudelaire’s beautiful temptress, revisited by an American poet who arrived in Europe with an insatiable desire for knowledge and self-affirmation.
Consequently, over the fifty-year course of Pound’s poem, states of mind alternate, and the only continuous and irreversible story that we can make out in its turbulent pages is the poet’s own life, his travels and sudden departures, his pitfalls and misadventures, his aesthetic youth, his maturity increasingly occupied by economic projects, the day of reckoning of his incarceration, the relatively serene twilight of his final years.
Pound always wrote with incisiveness and passion, and the best parts of The Cantos are an eccentric but powerful chronicle of his times and of some of their most representative figures. The troubadour and friend of Yeats of the London salons; the Renaissance scholiast and guru of Shakespeare and Company, the Paris bookshop patronized by Joyce and Hemingway; the passionate tennis player and compiler of ABCs (How to Read, Guide to Kulchur, ABC of Economics), perfectly
