Dominant Themes In Ezra Pound's 1930s And 1940s Cantos

Ezra Pound's Cantos (comprised of 117 separate cantos), which took him half a century to complete, covers no less than eight hundred pages of poetry. Various social, ideological, and literary views are interwoven in the fabric of his prose-like cantos, which are replete with typically complicated allusions, translations, ideograms, figures, places, and historical events. That is why quite a few fragments of his cantos are completely incomprehensible for laymen. This book studies a substantial section of The Cantos, namely cantos thirty-one through eighty-four (written in the dramatic decades of the 1930s and 1940s) to shed light on some of these complexities; it concentrates on Pound's economic and political views, his pessimism and optimism after the war, and his instructions and recommendations for the reconstruction of Europe. In the main course of discussion, cursory references are also made to a number of Pound's famous poems and essays, but the focal poems for analysis remain to be Pound's 1930s and 1940s cantos.