The Cantos

Pound called it the 'poem including history,' and he meant all of it: Homer's Odysseus next to Renaissance condottieri, Chinese emperors, American presidents, and the contents of his own mail. He had been drafting and discarding openings since 1915; the project found its footing in Paris, where William Bird's Three Mountains Press published A Draft of XVI. Cantos in 1925 — a folio printed in an edition of about ninety copies, with grand initial letters by the painter Henry Strater, the most beautiful object the movement ever made.

The poem then simply kept going — through Rapallo, through his obsession with credit and usury, through the section everyone quotes (the usura canto) and the sections nobody finishes — for more than a hundred cantos across half a century, growing a masterpiece and a case file at once. His wartime broadcasts for Mussolini's Italy ended in a treason indictment, a cage at Pisa, and twelve years in a Washington asylum; the Pisan Cantos, written in the cage, won the first Bollingen Prize in 1949 and ignited a controversy about art and its maker that has never really gone out.

He worked at it nearly to his death in Venice in 1972, and the late fragments concede what readers had long suspected — that it would not, could not cohere. It didn't need to. The Cantos stand as modernism's Everest: unclimbable whole, endlessly climbed in parts, and the wreckage and grandeur of the century are both in it.

The poem begins in the underworld: Canto I is Odysseus sailing to consult the dead, translated from a Renaissance Latin translation of Homer — which is the method in miniature, history speaking through layered voices. From there it opens outward with no plot and no perimeter: the condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta building his temple amid wars and treacheries; Confucian China administered dynasty by dynasty; John Adams and Jefferson corresponding; Venice and Provence; the money system anatomized in the famous canto against usura, the force the poem blames for corrupting art, marriage, and bread alike.

The war years break the poem and remake it: the Pisan Cantos, written while Pound was held in an American military cage at Pisa, drop the pedagogy for memory and grief — the dead friends of the Paris and London years, the ant on the tent wall, the fragments of a life audited by disaster. The late sections thin toward silence, and the final fragments concede that the great design would not cohere. It is the century's most ambitious poem and its most instructive ruin: nobody reads all of it, everybody should read some of it, and the parts repay the visit.