The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Directions Books)

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Canto LXIV covers the Stamp act and other resistance to British taxation of the American colonies. It also shows Adams defending the accused in the Boston Massacre and engaging in agricultural experiments to ascertain the suitability of Old-World crops for American conditions. The phrases Cumis ego oculis meis, tu theleis, respondebat illa and apothanein are from the passage (taken from Petronius' Satyricon) that T.S. Eliot used as epigraph to The Waste Land at Pound's suggestion. The passage translates as "For with my own eyes I saw the Sibyl hanging in a jar at Cumae, and when the boys said to her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'I want to die.'" Canto LII opens with references to Duke Leopoldo, John Adams and Gertrude Bell, before sliding into a particularly virulent anti-Semitic passage, directed mainly at the Rothschild family. The remainder of the canto is concerned with the classic Chinese text known as the Li Ki or Book of Rites, especially those parts that deal with agriculture and natural increase. The diction is the same as that used in earlier cantos on similar subjects. Rainey, Lawrence Scott. Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Fang, Achilles. “Materials for the Study of Pound’s Cantos.” 4 vols. Diss. Harvard U, 1958. Vol I: 19-23; 28-9.

Alliteration is another common device in poetry, one that involves a very specific type of repetition, the use, and reuse of the same consonant sound at the beginning of multiple words. For example, “stretched sail” in line nine of the first stanza and “bloody bever” in line five of the third stanza. Eliot, T. S. (2014). Ezra Pound: His metric and poetry. In The complete prose of T.S. Eliot: Apprentice years, 1905–1918 (Eds., J. B. Spears & R. Schuchard) (pp. 626–647). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Drafts and fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII [ edit ] First published as Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII. New York: New Directions, 1969. Henry – possible reference to Henry Longfellow, as indicated in Mary de Rachewiltz’ Italian translation: “E i peones ‘alla baracca grande/Li portarono’-/ Avrebbe detto Henry Longfellow.” De Rachewiltz made her translation in collaboration with her father after he returned from St. Elizabeths in 1958, so it is fair to assume the indication of Longfellow’s name was sanctioned by him. Tang, Y. F. (2014). Translating across cultures: Yii jing and understanding Chinese poetry. Intercultural Communication Studies, 23(1), 187–202.

Sun, C. C. (2011). The poetics of repetition in English and Chinese lyric poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pound, E. (1984). Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: their letters 1909-1914. In O. Pound and A. W. Litz (Eds.), New York: New Directions. LXII–LXXI (The Adams Cantos) [ edit ] John Adams: "the man who at certain points /made us / at certain points / saved us" (Canto LXII). First published in Cantos LII–LXXI. Norfolk Conn.: New Directions, 1940.These two cantos, written in Italian, were not collected until their posthumous inclusion in the 1987 revision of the complete text of the poem. Pound reverts to the model of Dante’s Divine Comedy and casts himself as conversing with ghosts from Italy’s remote and recent past.