One of the literary giants of the 20th Century, Ezra Pound is and was a figure of great controversy. As a modernist poet, critic, and editor, Pound exerted a large degree of influence on the writing and publishing of his day. An American expatriot working in London as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped discover and shape the works of contemporaries such as T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. This early reputation for fostering the literary talents of his day, however, is often overshadowed by the work Pound did during the Second World War to advance Benito Mussolini’s fascist government and to support fascism more broadly elsewhere. In 1945, when the US forces took control of Italy, they arrested Pound on charges of treason. The poet was deemed unfit to stand trial and was subsequently held in a psychiatric hospital until 1958. Pound began the writing of his Cantos during that initial incarceration in Italy and continued to work on them for the remainder of his days.
“For more than fifty years, Ezra Pound worked on his epic poem – the Cantos. It is a modern classic. To this revised edition of 1969 have been added the Italian Cantos LXXII and LXXIII as well as a 1966 fragment intended by Pound to conclude this work.” (flap copy)
- Title: The Cantos of Ezra Pound
- Author: Ezra Pound
- Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corp.
- Place: New York
- Year: 1986
- Length: 815pp
- Dimensions: 75” x 8.25” x 2.38”
- Condition: The dustjacket is in very good condition under a clear mylar protective cover. It has little to no wear and the bright orange color of the paper has only slightly altered with age and light exposure to be a shade lighter on the spine. The binding is tight. No pages are missing. The text block is clean and crisp—no folds or tears. There are some but not many pencil markings, and an inscription sits in the front endpapers.