Following a passage on the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, the canto returns to Adams' mission to France, focusing on his dealings with the American legation in that country, consisting of Franklin, Silas Deane and Edward Bancroft and with the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes. And I cried in hurried speech: “Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast? It is also among the most influential, having affected poets as different as H.D. Images of light are used variously, and may represent Neoplatonic ideas of divinity, the artistic impulse, love (both sacred and physical) and good governance, amongst other things. Another theme sees Ecbatana, the seven-walled "city of Dioce", blend with the city of Wagadu, from the African tale of Gassire's Lute that Pound derived from Frobenius. This canto contains some distinctly unpleasant expressions of antisemitic opinions. The Latin is paraphrased in English as the final lines of the canto. Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus. It, in turn, blends with the DTC in which the poet is imprisoned. After three weeks, he had a breakdown that resulted in his being given a cot and pup tent in the medical compound. After a number of cantos in which the elements of earth and air feature so strongly, Canto LXXXIII opens with images of water and light, drawn from Pindar, George Gemistos Plethon, John Scotus Eriugena, the mermaid carvings of Pietro Lombardo and Heraclitus' phrase panta rei ("everything flows"). Originally, Pound conceived of Cantos XVII–XXVII as a group that would follow the first volume by starting with the Renaissance and ending with the Russian Revolution. Many references in the text lack explanation. The canto then closes with the figure of the 9th-century Irish philosopher and poet John Scotus Eriugena, who was an influence on the Cathars and whose writings were condemned as heretical in both the 11th and 13th centuries. The thrones in The Cantos are an attempt to move out from egoism and to establish some definition of an order possible or at any rate conceivable on earth … Thrones concerns the states of mind of people responsible for something more than their personal conduct.". Ezra Pound's Cantos represent some of the highest achievement in 20th century poetry. Canto CXVI was the last canto completed by Pound. Cantos CIII and CIV range over a number of examples of the relationships between war, money and government drawn from American and European history, mostly familiar from earlier sections of the work. The main theme of this canto is one of harmony between human society and the natural order, and a number of passing references are made to related items from earlier cantos: Confucius, Kati, Dante on citizenship, the Book of the Prefect and Plotinus amongst them. The closing lines of the canto, and of the sequence, "If the hoar frost grip thy tent / Thou wilt give thanks when night is spent", sound a final note of acceptance and resignation, despite the return to the sphere of action, prompted by the death of Angold, that marks most of the canto. Pound's fascination with history is evident throughout the Cantos. Canto XLIX is a poem of tranquil nature derived from a Chinese picture book that Pound's parents brought with them when they retired to Rapallo. Oh yeah, and everyone's been crying. Canto XXXV contrasts the dynamism of Revolutionary America with the "general indefinite wobble" of the decaying aristocratic society of Mitteleuropa. A passage addressed to a Dryad speaks out against the death sentence and cages for wild animals and is followed by lines on equity in government and natural processes based on the writings of Mencius. Instead, Pound like to spend most of "Canto I" talking about mourning, loss, death, and all that less-than-se... Allusions Homer, The Odyssey (1-71) Andreas Divus (68) Georgius Dartona Cretensis (73) William Frazer, The Golden Bough (76) Canto XXVII returns to the Russian Revolution, which is seen as being destructive, not constructive, and echoes the ruin of Eblis from Canto VI. “But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied. Page At one end of the spectrum George P. Elliot has drawn a parallel between Pound and Adolf Eichmann based on their antisemitism,[4] while at the other Marjorie Perloff places Pound's antisemitism in a wider context by examining the political views of many of his contemporaries, arguing that "We have to try to understand why" antisemitism was widespread in the early twentieth century, "and not say let's get rid of Ezra Pound, who also happens to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th C."[5], This is complicated by the fact that The Cantos themselves contain very little evidence of Pound's otherwise blatant antisemitism: in a close study of the poem, Wendy Stallard Flory concluded that it contained only seven passages of antisemitic sentiment in the 803 pages she read. Amongst poets of Pound's own generation, both H.D. The appearance of the single Greek word "THUMON", meaning heart, returns us to the world of Homer's Odyssey and Pound's use of Odysseus as a model for all his heroes, including Adams. Pound later came to see this canto as a key central point in the poem. 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?' From the Rock Drill sequence on, the poem's effort is to merge these two aspects of light into a unified whole. The opening of Canto LXXXII marks a return to the camp and its inmates. In Canto LXXII, imitative of Dante's tercets (terza rima), Pound meets the recently dead Futurist writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and they discuss the current war and the dangers of excessive love of the past (Pound's librarian friend, Manlio Torquato Dazzi) or of the future (Marinetti). This canto also refers to Dante's vision of philosophers that reveal themselves as light in the Paradiso. Pound also claims in this canto that Anselm's writings influenced Cavalcanti and François Villon. In the Cretan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite, Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden, Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids. The canto opens with the name of Hendrik van Brederode, a lost leader of the Dutch Revolution, forgotten while William I, Prince of Orange is remembered. Divus created the translation of The Odyssey that Pound translated himself into "Canto 1." This section of the cantos is, for the most part, made up of fragmentary citations from the writings of John Adams. Like “The shadow of the tent's peak treads on its corner peg These vision fragments are cross-cut with an invocation of the Taoist Kuan Tzu (Book of Master Kuan). Towards the close of the canto, the reader is returned to the world of Odysseus; a line from Book Five of the Odyssey tells of the winds breaking up the hero's boat and is followed shortly by Leucothea, "Kadamon thugater" or Cadmon's daughter) offering him her veil to carry him to shore ("my bikini is worth yr raft"). "The Return to Italy: 'To Confess Wrong... For the meeting in the restaurant, see Reck, Michael; Weiss, Theodore; Kazin, Alfred; and Taplin, Oliver. Ocellus is first introduced in Canto LXXXVII, "Y Yin, Ocellus, Erigena." and Gary Snyder. The question of banking and money also recurs, with an antisemitic passage aimed at the banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild. Found unfit to stand trial because of the state of his mental health, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital, where he was to remain until 1958. The canto contains the following well-known lines: This passage has often been taken as an admission of failure on Pound's part, but the reality may be more complex. The canto opens with an epigraph in Latin to the effect that while the human spirit is not love, it delights in the love that proceeds from it. This canto begins with Pound looking out of the DTC at peasants working in the fields nearby and reflecting on the news of the death of Mussolini, "hung by the heels". The rest of the canto consists mainly of paraphrases and quotations from Philostratus' Life of Apollonius. In summary, Pound opens Canto II by mentioning four different versions of the 13 th-century troubadour poet Sordello: Pound’s version of the poet, Robert Browning’s version from a work of 1840, Sordello the real man, and the version of Sordello that can be gleaned from the biographical fragments appended to his poems. This casebook provides a selection of key criticism, including an article newly translated into English, on the Cantos of Ezra Pound. / The cause is AVARICE. Okay, so it sounds like someone is talking to us about walking onto a ship, loading the thing with a bunch of sheep, and sailing away from some unknown place. Peterson, Leland D. "Ezra Pound: The Use and Abuse of History". originally consisted of three fragments, with a fourth, sometimes titled Canto CXX, added after Pound's death. Deadline 30 October 2021 . In the canto, these are summed up in the line "Our dynasty came in because of a great sensibility", where sensibility translates the key character Ling, and in the reference to the four Tuan, or foundations, benevolence, rectitude, manners and knowledge. In the first thread, the figure of Pound/Odysseus reappears in the guise of "OY TIS", or No Man, the name the hero uses in the Cyclops episode of the Odyssey. Eliot used as epigraph to The Waste Land at Pound's suggestion. 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