Ezra Pound: Canto 120

By Ezra Pound [1]

[Richard Avedon's 1958 photos of Ezra Pound, shortly after he was released from his 13 year stint in St. Elizabeth's mental hospital in Washington, D.C., where he was committed in lieu of being tried for treason for his broadcasts from Italy during WW II]

"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.”

[1] E.P. wrote many wonderful and some baffling works.  I truly love a lot of the Cantos.  The problem with liking E.P. are the broadcasts, and his virulent rants about the the Jews and the alleged international banking conspiracy.  He broadcast hundreds of addresses over Italian radio, paid for by the Italian government.  And of course, when the Americans liberated Italy, one of the first persons they came looking for was Ez.   So, how do you reconcile this?  Do good works somehow ameliorate the invective and hate speech?  I've read about anti-Jewish comments coming from people I admire (just a sampling: Harry Truman, T.S. Eliot, Lennin, Churchill, Martin Luther, George Washington), , and whose work I love. My best friend (R.I.P.) had a thing about Jewish people...not hatred I don't think, but a very deep mistrust  Do you forgive and forget, or forgive but never forget?  Maybe it all falls under "hate the sin; love the sinner."

Of the mainly poor blue collar families people I grew up with, there was plenty of animosity toward African-Americans.  Until I was maybe in high school, I don't think I ever heard anyone describe them as black, or even negro.  Except on television.  They used the other four words--the n word, the c word, the j word, and the s word.
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Marginalia in a Harvard University copy of Ezra Pound's cantos

By Jack Brummet, Poetry Editor

Ezra Pound, who made all the famous cuts and marginal comments in T.S. Eliot's Waste Land, gets the sama marginalia treatment from the undergrad and grad students at Harvard.  This is a shot of one of the circulating copies of the book in their library.  This is really appropos of nothing at all; I just love marginalia, corrected proofs and manuscripts, and in general, the now soon to be lost analog methods of interacting with text.

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Ezra Pound's Canto CXX

Photograph during 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, undoubtedly the most accessible and 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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