The Cantos

[jenks]

@jenks and @woops have got Cantos notes. Will they chip in?

I will if @luka misses anything. This current exchange has made me hanker after the summer when I was deep into Pound.

 

[luka]

i'm using the same Cookson you were for the most part

 

[craner]

I think Kenner says Pound first read the Bible in the prison camp. it was one of a very few things he had available to read.

I forgot about that but it seems hard to believe.

 

[luka]

thats what he claims. Pound says he was the first man to translate Confucious before ever reading the Bible. you would have thought he'd have some forced down his throat as a child but who knows

 

[craner]

If it is true it does lend credence to Conquest’s claim that he was a massive blagger.

 

[catalog]

RAW on Pound. Lots of good stuff but this line

The beauty of Helen's breasts is what really matters

is the best line

 

[luka]

i never knew about the Emmet Till connection. that's crazy.

 

[luka]

'A time to be silent, a time to speak'. The phrase 'Tempus loquendi, Tempus tacendi' (with the terms reversed) was the motto of Sigismundo Malatesta and was inscribed by him on the tomb of Isotta degli Atti in the Tempio. It appears in this form at the opening of Canto XXXI. The source is Ecclesiastes 3.7

 

[Benny Bunter]

Craner has the giant Terrell guide to the Cantos which I was too cheap to fork out for so he's going to do half of this poem for us. I've got the much shorter Cookson guide. Also A student's guide and a guide to the selected cantos.

This morning I discovered I could screenshot the entire chapter of notes from the Terrell guide for this canto from Google books.

Shall I post them up or will that spoil the fun?

 

[luka]

Marjorie Perloff: On "Pound and Sigismondo Malatesta" | Modern American Poetry

modernamericanpoetry.org

 

[luka]

This morning I discovered I could screenshot the entire chapter of notes from the Terrell guide for this canto from Google books.

Shall I post them up or will that spoil the fun?

post them. it will spoil the fun in some ways but we can't go on like this forever in any case.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Yeah, there's 27 pages of notes here, it would have taken us all year to get through. I'll post em up in a bit.

Good sesh yesterday though

 

[luka]

the only real advantage of doing it like this is i actually take some of it in

 

[Benny Bunter]

Agree, but I think I underestimated how long it would take. Maybe we could do a shorter one another day, get more people involved.

 

[luka]

another says, and i don't know if this checks out yet

The canto moves almost imperceptibly through the early morning hours, as Venus and her stars give way to an "aureate sky" and finally to a light by which we can observe "the green world"

The canto moves almost imperceptibly through the early morning hours, as Venus and her stars give way to an "aureate sky" and finally to a light by which we can observe "the green world." Yet one hardly notices the movement of light and time, for the intensity of focus is on the mind within the tent. The shape of the canto dramatizes its own meaning, risking, for the first half, an imitative fallacy to do so. The three major sections (interior monologue, libretto, and final chant) mark a movement from egotism (me, my life), through participation in traditions of craft and song, to humility and a sense of the prisoner's true scale within nature.

After a prelude in which a natural world alive with mythological lovers emphasizes the prisoner's isolation (no Althea at his grates), we hear a rambling, prosy interior monologue touching on events of four-and-a-half decades, memories of Wyncote, Madrid, London, Paris, Frankfurt, and Italy. Toward the end, the monologue, which has at least moved from concentration to concentration, becomes deliberately thinned-out and chatty in the lines about George Horace and Beveridge, its discursiveness reflected in the image of the loose rabbit.

Suddenly - with the mysterious cry that forms the refrain of The Song of Roland, "AOI!" - he appears to understand what is happening to himself and to his verse: "a leaf in the current." Through the mediation of poetry, and with the help of Speare's Pocket Book of Verse discovered in the latrine, the canto makes its "turn." There is a kind of heroic gesture to it, as if by an effort of will (yet the results are artistically effortless) he draws on the deepest resources of his craft to compose a "traditional" lyric in which the history of song in reconstructed. For all his ill fortune, he is still il miglior fabbro.

It is this act, this homage to the marriage of words and music, more than the prayers and invocations beard in earlier cantos, that brings the spirits at last. The appearance of the eyes within the tent is the closest thing to a mystical moment in theCantos. The presence of the eyes, an event not willed by the prisoner, then releases the great moral-religious chant with which the canto ends. The chant, like the "libretto," draws on traditional poetic language, imagery, and sentiments (and is marked, as Kenner has noted, by the very iambic pentameter Pound has just boasted of breaking); yet it is unmistakably written in the twentieth century.
. . . .
The chant against vanity springs both from the presence of the eyes and from the demonstration that the finest poetry is produced through loss of oneself in tradition (though paradoxically, as Eliot intended, the libretto is a brilliant display of individual talent). The opening pages of the canto, by contrast, are ingenious modernism.

From Guide to Ezra Pound's Selected Cantos. Copyright © 1980 by Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

 

[Benny Bunter]

 

[Benny Bunter]

 

[Benny Bunter]

 

[Benny Bunter]

 

[Benny Bunter]