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Cover of The Cantos by Ezra Pound

The Cantos

by Ezra Pound

The 'poem including history' — fifty years, 116 cantos, and modernism's most magnificent ruin.

Published
1925
Pages
824
Setting
Italy, Paris
Shelf rating
4.0
Where to read:Your local bookstoreYour libraryRetailer links coming soon

The story, briefly

Spoiler-free

Begun in London, launched from Paris — A Draft of XVI Cantos was hand-printed there in 1925 — and continued for half a century, The Cantos is Pound's attempt to write an epic containing everything: Odysseus and Confucius, Renaissance bankers and American presidents, economics, paradise, and eventually his own catastrophe, drafted in a Pisan detention cage. No one calls it a success; no one serious calls it skippable. It is the most ambitious poem in English of its century, wreckage included.

Why we recommend it

  1. Canto I alone

    Odysseus sailing to the dead, rendered through Anglo-Saxon verse rhythms — the most thrilling opening page in modern poetry, and free of everything that later poisons the poem.

  2. The Pisan Cantos

    Written in an American military cage in 1945, with the empire of his delusions in ashes — 'Pull down thy vanity' is the sound of modernism judging itself.

  3. Because the argument is the point

    Genius and moral ruin in one binding: no book on our shelves poses the reader's hardest question — what do we do with the art of the indefensible? — more directly.

What this book explores

  • The craftWriting about writing — one true sentence at a time.
  • Exile & expatriationLeaving home to see it clearly, and the price of staying gone.
  • DisillusionmentWhat's left when the big words — glory, honor, courage — stop working.

Bring it to book club

  • Can The Cantos' antisemitic passages be bracketed from the rest, or does honesty require reading them as part of the design?
  • 'I cannot make it cohere,' Pound wrote near the end. Is incoherence the poem's failure or its truest subject?
  • Does the Pisan sequence read as repentance? Should that change anything?

A complete discussion guide is on our editorial calendar. Join the letter to hear when it ships.

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