The Pisan Cantos

by Ezra Pound

Book Overview

Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos was written in 1945, while the poet was being held in an American military detention center near Pisa, Italy, as a result of his pro-Fascist wartime broadcasts to America on Radio Rome. Imprisoned for some weeks in a wire cage open to the elements, Pound suffered a nervous collapse from the physical and emotional strain. Out of the agony of his own inferno came the eleven cantos that became the sixth book of his modernist...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081121558X
• ISBN13: 9780811215589
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Ambition and madness

The Pantos Cantos takes us back to the days of Modernism when artists had heart and desired to experiment. These days, writers have to pander to illiterate readers, ambitious editors and know-nothing marketing departments. This is in-your-face art for art's sake, gloriously elitist, ugly, difficult, sprawling, all that good and high art should be. Who needs readers? Who needs post-modernist defence of the popular and accessible?

Gorgeously wrought

This magnum opus of one of the most celebrated and controversial figures in literature was written while he was being held in detention for treason. He was a fascist, and anti-Semite, but how the chicks, and Allen Ginsberg, dug him. And you should, too--politics aside. Pound's writings on poetry were monumental in the formation of greats like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and the aforementioned Ginsberg. The Cantos are gorgeously wrought, and range from exquisitely beautiful to fantastically erudite and opaque. And it's fun to watch him make up arbitrary meanings for Chinese ideograms because some posthumously debunked scholar misled him.

Superb edition

This superbly edited volume makes Pound's "Pisans" readily available in an attractive and affordable paperback edition. This is some of the most important American poetry of the post-War period, with intelligent and helpful annotations to make the work fully accessible even to those not versed in Poundian arcana. Indispensable!