Ezra Pound
Restarting The Cantos

Twice the length of Paradise Lost and 50 times longer than The Waste Land, Pound's 800-page The Cantos ("Canto I" to "Canto CXVI", c. 1917–1962) became his life's work. His obituary in The Times described it as not a great poem, because of the lack of structure, but a great improvisation: "he exasperating form permits the occasional, and in the early Cantos and in The Pisan Cantos not so occasional, irruption of passages of great poetry, hot and burning lava breaking through the cracks in piles of boring scree."

I have brought the great ball of crystal; Who can lift it? Can you enter the great acorn of light? But the beauty is not the madness Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me. And I am not a demigod, I cannot make it cohere.

— Paris Review, 1962

The first three cantos had been published in Poetry magazine in June, July, and August 1917, but in 1922 Pound abandoned most of his work and began again. The early cantos, the "Ur-Cantos", became "Canto I" of the new work. In letters to his father in 1924 and 1927, Pound said The Cantos was like the medley of voices you hear when you turn the radio dial, and "ather like or unlike subject and response and counter subject in fugue ":

Alluding to American, European and Oriental art, history and literature, the work is also autobiographical. In the view of Pound scholar Carroll F. Terrell, it is a great religious poem, describing humanity's journey from hell to paradise, a "revelation of how divinity is manifested in the universe... the kind of intelligence that makes the cherrystone become a cherry tree." The poet Allen Tate argued in 1949 that it is "about nothing at all... a voice but no subject". Responding to A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), F. R. Leavis criticized its "lack of form, grammar, principle and direction". The lack of form became a common criticism. Pound wrote in the final complete canto, "Canto CXVI" (116, first published in the Paris Review in 1962), that he could not "make it cohere", although a few lines later, referring to the universe: "it coheres all right / even if my notes do not cohere." According to Pound scholar Walter Baumann, the demigod of "Canto CXVI"—"And I am not a demigod"—is Heracles of Sophocles ' Women of Trachis (450–425 BCE), who exclaims before he dies (based on Pound's translation): "SPLENDOUR, / IT ALL COHERES". "Canto CXVI" ends with the lines "a little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour."
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