The Pisan CantosEzra Pound's The Pisan Cantos was written in 1945, while the poet was being held in an American military detention center near Pisa, Italy, as a result of his pro-Fascist wartime broadcasts to America on Radio Rome. Imprisoned for some weeks in a wire cage open to the elements, Pound suffered a nervous collapse from the physical and emotional strain. Out of the agony of his own inferno came the eleven cantos that became the sixth book of his modernist epic, The Cantos, themselves conceived as a Divine Comedy for our time. The Pisan Cantos were published in 1948 by New Directions and in the following year were awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry by the Library of Congress. The honor came amid violent controversy, for the dark cloud of treason still hung over Pound, incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Yet there is no doubt that The Pisan Cantos displays some of his finest and most affecting writing, marking an elegaic turn to the personal while synthesizing the philosophical and economic political themes of his previous cantos. They are now being published for the first time as a separate paperback, in a fully annotated edition prepared by Richard Sieburth, who also contributes a thoroughgoing introduction, making Pound's master-work fully accessible to students and general readers. |
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1949 Faber edition Adams African-American altar American Analects Aphrodite Book broadcaster cage Canto 74 Canto 81 Cavalcanti's Charles Olson Chinese CHTHONOS cloud Confucian Confucius Cunizza Cythera Dante daughter death Dionysus Dorothy Pound earth emperors English Erigena evokes eyes Ezra Pound Fasa Fascist French Frobenius George German goddess Greek green Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Henry Ideogram Italian Cantos Italy John Kuanon later Latin Letters in Captivity London lynx memory Mencius moon mountain Mussolini nekuia Odysseus Olga Rudge painter painting paradise Paris periplum Pisa Pisan Cantos poem poet poetry prisoner Pull down thy radio rain Rapallo Roman rose Salò Sant'Ambrogio Senate Sigismundo Malatesta Sirmio song Speare stone T.S. Eliot Taishan tent thee thou thru thy vanity tower trainees translated by Pound treason typescript Venus verse Wagadu Washington wife William wind Wörgl Yeats Yeats's young Zoagli Κύθηρα