Ezra Pound and Canto CXX

By Jack Brummet, Poetry Editor

Photograph from Pound's booking for treason

Ezra Pound, friend and supporter of Hemingway, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, and many more, wrote an incredibly beautiful, maddeningly convoluted, tantalizingly allusive, and frustratingly obscure poem over the course of his lifetime. The final Canto was the shortest in the entire book, and undoubtedly the most accessible.  It was published posthumously in the collected edition of the work:

______________________________

Notes for Canto CXX

by Ezra Pound

I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.

Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.
______________________________

A decent summing up of Ezra Pound's life, and The Cantos (although skipping his conviction and incarceration for treason following World War II):

From Project Muse: "No major work of modernist literature reveals so intensely conflicted a relation to the public, simultaneously spurning and courting it, as Ezra Pound's Cantos. At the age of twenty, when he was captivated by the exclusionary poetics of the coterie, Pound nonetheless declared his ambition to write a "forty-year epic," a poem, he would claim later, "containing history"--a people's history, "the tale of the tribe." As the poem evolved over the last fifty-five years of Pound's life, however, it grew ever more erudite, ever more removed from its public aspirations, until it confronted even the most devoted scholars with a mass of obscure references, cryptic "facts," and fractured narratives. As Pound himself lamented in 1919, only two years after the first three cantos had appeared in Poetry: "I suspect my 'Cantos' are getting too too too abstruse and obscure for human consumption." Despite moments of assurance and bravado, this suspicion would haunt Pound increasingly throughout his career."

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