The Cantos by Ezra Pound: An Honest Review

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What This Book Is

Ezra Pound began the poem that became The Cantos around 1915 and stopped working on it in the late 1960s, defeated. The finished object runs to 117 numbered sections plus fragments, and about eight hundred pages. There is no narrator, no plot, and no consistent language. A page may contain Homeric Greek, medieval Provencal, Italian, Chinese characters printed in the margin, a quotation from a Sienese bank charter, and a scrap of remembered conversation, with nothing joining them but the fact that they are adjacent.

This is why almost nobody finishes it and why the people who love it tend to love it more than they love any other twentieth-century poem. It is a genuinely difficult book in a way that most books called difficult are not. The difficulty is not in the sentences, which are usually simple. It is that the poem refuses to tell you what it is about.

The most useful single thing to know before starting is that Pound thought he was writing a sacred text. Not a poem about sacred things. A text that would work on the reader the way an initiation works, and that would transmit a body of knowledge he believed had been suppressed.

The Talk He Wrote for a Theosophist

In the autumn of 1911 Pound, then twenty-six and recently arrived in London, wrote a lecture at the request of G. R. S. Mead. Mead had been Helena Blavatsky's private secretary, had left the Theosophical Society in 1909 over the Leadbeater affair, and had founded his own Quest Society. Pound delivered the talk to that society and Mead published it in the October 1912 issue of his quarterly, The Quest.

The talk was called "Psychology and Troubadours." Pound later folded it into editions of his prose book The Spirit of Romance, where most readers now meet it without knowing where it first appeared. Its argument is that the love poetry of the Provencal troubadours is the visible surface of a psychological and religious practice, that the lady of the poems is at least partly a state of consciousness, and that the whole thing descends from a pagan mystery cult which Christianity drove underground.

That is the seed. Every later claim in The Cantos about light, about vision, about a sacred current running through Provence into Renaissance Italy, is already there in an essay Pound wrote for a Theosophical journal at twenty-six. It is not a stray influence he outgrew. He was still working the same ground in the 1960s.

Eleusis, and What Pound Thought Survived

The Eleusinian Mysteries ran near Athens for something close to two thousand years. Initiates were sworn to silence and the silence largely held, which is why we know the calendar and the procession and almost nothing about what happened inside the hall.

Pound filled the gap with a theory. He believed the content of the mystery was a sacramental understanding of generation, that the Demeter and Persephone material was about the actual fertility of actual earth and actual bodies, and that this was a real knowledge rather than a symbol system. He believed further that when the cult was suppressed it went underground instead of dying, resurfacing in the twelfth century in Provence, and again in fifteenth-century Italy in the circle around Sigismondo Malatesta and the temple he built at Rimini.

Leon Surette's A Light from Eleusis, published in 1979, was the first sustained scholarly attempt to take that structure seriously as the organising principle of the poem. Surette followed it in 1993 with The Birth of Modernism, which extended the argument to Eliot and Yeats and documented how much of early modernist aesthetics came out of occult circles. Demetres Tryphonopoulos's The Celestial Tradition (1992) argued that the poem is a palingenesis, a rebirth narrative, and should be read the way Hermetic writings on rebirth are read.

You do not have to accept all of this. Plenty of Pound scholars think Surette overstates the case, and Pound's own historical claims about a continuous underground cult are not supportable as history. What is no longer arguable is that Pound himself believed something close to it and built the poem accordingly.

The Light Philosophers

Alongside the mystery material runs a second line, and this one is respectable medieval philosophy. Pound was fascinated by thinkers who treated light as the fundamental substance of the created world rather than as a metaphor for it.

Three names recur. John Scotus Eriugena, the ninth-century Irish philosopher whose formula "all things that are, are lights" Pound quotes repeatedly. Robert Grosseteste, whose treatise De Luce derives the physical universe from an initial point of light expanding into a sphere. And Richard of St Victor, the twelfth-century mystic who divided the mind's operations into cogitation, meditation and contemplation, a scheme Pound used as a ladder.

Behind all three sits Neoplatonic emanation, the idea that reality pours outward from a single source in descending grades of light. Pound took the structure and discarded most of the theology attached to it.

Canto 36 is where this becomes concentrated. It is a translation of Guido Cavalcanti's canzone "Donna mi prega," a fourteenth-century poem about the nature of love written in deliberately technical philosophical language. Pound spent years on it and regarded it as a coded document, a piece of the Provencal transmission surfacing in Florence. His translation is strange and stiff and he knew it. He wanted the strangeness.

Descent, Rite, Vision

Tryphonopoulos proposed that the poem follows the shape of a mystery initiation in three stages: katabasis, the descent to the underworld; dromena, the things done, meaning the ritual acts; and epopteia, the final vision granted to the initiate.

The descent is unmistakable, because it is where the poem starts. Canto 1 is a translation of the eleventh book of the Odyssey, the passage where Odysseus digs a trench, pours blood, and calls up the dead. Pound does not translate it from the Greek. He translates it from a Latin version made by the Renaissance scholar Andreas Divus, printed in 1538, and he tells you so inside the canto. The poem's first move is a descent to the underworld conducted through a second-hand text, which is also a fair description of what Pound is doing with the entire European past.

The middle of the poem, on this reading, is the ritual work: the repeated returns to Malatesta's temple, to the founding of a bank in Siena, to Confucian statecraft, to the patient reading of records. The vision is what the late cantos keep reaching for and mostly do not reach.

Whether Pound planned it this way from the start is doubtful. He said different things about the structure at different times, including that it followed Dante and that it followed a fugue. What is clear is that the descent-and-vision frame is present, that Pound knew the pattern from the mystery literature, and that the poem's failure is a failure to arrive at the third stage.

The Ideogrammic Method

In 1913 Pound was given the unpublished papers of Ernest Fenollosa, an American scholar of Japanese and Chinese art who had died in 1908. Among them was an essay, "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry," which argued that Chinese characters preserve concrete pictorial relations that alphabetic writing has lost.

Fenollosa's linguistics were largely wrong. Sinologists have been saying so since the 1930s. The effect on Pound was enormous anyway. He drew from it a compositional principle he called the ideogrammic method: set concrete particulars beside one another and let the relation emerge, instead of stating a generalisation and then illustrating it.

This is the single most practical thing to understand about the poem's surface. When Pound puts a line of Homer next to a shipping record next to a remembered smell, he is not being obscure for its own sake. He is asserting that these things belong to one category and refusing to name the category. Once you accept that the naming is your job, the poem becomes readable in a way it is not otherwise.

The Confucian Half

From the 1930s Pound became a Confucian, in the specific sense that he translated Confucian texts, quoted them constantly, and treated them as the practical counterpart to the visionary material.

His central text was the Da Xue, which he rendered as Ta Hio and which is usually called The Great Learning in English. Its chain of reasoning, running from the investigation of things through the rectification of the heart to the ordering of the state, gave Pound exactly what he wanted: a claim that clear perception at the individual level and good government are the same operation performed at different scales. His versions of it and of the Analects are unreliable as scholarship and interesting as poetry.

Cantos 52 to 61 are a versified run through Chinese dynastic history taken from a French Jesuit compilation, and they are the section where most readers quit. Cantos 62 to 71 do the same for John Adams. Pound's intention was to show a single principle of just governance appearing independently in two civilisations. The result is long stretches of chronicle that even sympathetic critics call unreadable.

Usura

Canto 45 is the most anthologised page Pound ever wrote. It is a litany, built on the repeated word "usura," listing what money lent at interest destroys: the stonecutter's craft, the weaver's, the painter's, and finally the sexual bond itself. It is deliberately archaic and it is, as sheer rhetoric, close to perfect.

It is also the hinge on which everything unforgivable turns. Pound's economics came from Major C. H. Douglas and the Social Credit movement, a real if minor interwar current holding that the banking system structurally starves the economy of purchasing power. That analysis is arguable. What Pound did with it was not. He identified usury with a people, worked backward from an economic theory to an ethnic conspiracy, and by the late 1930s was writing and speaking in the vocabulary of the worst material of the period.

The Broadcasts and the Cage

Pound had moved to Italy in 1924 and become an open supporter of Mussolini, whom he met once, in 1933. From 1941 he broadcast on Rome Radio, in English, addressed to American and British listeners. The broadcasts are a mixture of literary criticism, monetary theory and abuse. In 1943 he was indicted for treason in absentia.

He was taken into custody in May 1945 and held at the US Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa. For the first weeks he was kept in an open steel cage in the yard, lit at night, before being moved to a tent after a physical collapse. He was fifty-nine.

Brought to Washington in November 1945, he was found mentally unfit to stand trial and committed to St Elizabeths Hospital, where he stayed for twelve years. The indictment was dismissed in 1958 after a campaign by writers including Robert Frost, and he returned to Italy, where he lived until 1972 in long periods of near silence.

In 1949 the first Bollingen Prize, awarded by a jury of Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress, went to The Pisan Cantos. The public row over honouring a man under a treason indictment for broadcasting on behalf of the Axis was severe enough that Congress removed the Library of Congress from the prize entirely. It remains the sharpest test case anyone has for the question of whether literary merit can be judged apart from what the writer did.

In 1967 Allen Ginsberg visited him in Venice. Pound, by then mostly mute, called his anti-Semitism "that stupid, suburban prejudice" and named it his worst mistake. Biographers have quoted the line ever since as evidence of remorse. It is worth noting that a number of critics regard the phrase itself as an evasion, since "suburban prejudice" is a very small description of what he actually broadcast.

Why the Pisan Cantos Are the Best Part

Cantos 74 to 84 were drafted in the detention camp, largely from memory, with almost no books. Pound had a Confucian text, a Bible he found in the latrine, and whatever forty years of reading had left in his head.

The loss of the library is what saved the sequence. Without documents to quote, Pound had to write from what he remembered, and what he remembered was people: Ford Madox Ford's laugh, Yeats composing aloud, the faces of the guards, a wasp building a nest by his tent. The compression that the earlier cantos apply to historical records is applied here to a life, and the poem acquires something it had been missing, which is a person inside it who can be hurt.

Canto 81 contains the passage that even readers who despise Pound tend to concede, beginning "What thou lovest well remains." It is a meditation on vanity and on what survives loss, and it is written by a man in a cage who has just watched his politics collapse into rubble. Whether the humility is real or performed has been argued for seventy years. The lines work either way.

I Cannot Make It Cohere

The final published sections, Rock-Drill (1955), Thrones (1959) and Drafts and Fragments (1969), get progressively more private. The Na-Khi material near the end, drawn from Joseph Rock's accounts of a people in southwestern China and their ritual texts, is beautiful and almost entirely opaque without notes.

Canto 116 contains the admission. Pound writes that he cannot make it cohere, and then, a few lines later, that it coheres all right even if his notes do not. Both halves matter. He is conceding that the architecture failed while insisting that the thing the architecture was pointing at is real.

Readers split here. One camp takes the line as the honest end of a fifty-year project and the most moving thing in the poem. Another takes it as a last refusal to accept responsibility, converting a failure of design into a mystical claim that cannot be checked. The reading you prefer will probably track what you already think of him.

What is not in dispute is that Pound stopped. In his last years he told interviewers that his work had been botched and that he had been wrong. For a man whose entire public character was certainty, that is worth registering.

How to Actually Read It

Do not start at Canto 1 and proceed. Almost everyone who tries that stops somewhere in the Chinese history around Canto 55 and never returns.

A path that works: Canto 1 for the descent, Canto 2 for the Dionysus and the metamorphosis, Canto 13 for the Confucian scene, Canto 17 for the light, Canto 36 for the Cavalcanti, Canto 45 for usura, Canto 47 for the fertility material which is the closest the poem comes to stating the Eleusis theme outright, Canto 49 for the quiet Chinese lyric, then the whole Pisan sequence, then Canto 116. That is roughly a hundred pages and it contains most of what is worth having.

On texts, the New Directions Cantos of Ezra Pound is the standard complete edition and the one everyone cites. It has no annotation whatsoever. Carroll Terrell's two-volume A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound identifies sources line by line and is the reference work; use it on a second pass, not a first, because looking up every name as you go destroys the reading. Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era is the best book about the period and makes the poem's ambitions comprehensible. For the esoteric line specifically, Surette and Tryphonopoulos are the two to read.

Who Should Read It

Read it if you already care about Dante, about the survival of pagan material inside Christian Europe, or about how the mystery schools were understood by early twentieth-century writers who half believed in them. Read it if you want to see what happens when a poet tries to build a scripture and documents his own failure inside it.

Do not read it as an introduction to modernist poetry. Start with Eliot, or with something like Rilke's Duino Elegies, which reaches for a comparable altitude and is a tenth the length. Do not read it expecting a stable teaching; the poem's philosophy is assembled from fragments and contradicts itself. And do not read it if you need the author to be a decent person, because he was not, and the poem does not let you forget it.

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