Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos by David Ten Eyck

On September 30, 1938, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy signed the famous Munich Agreement, putting an end to the crisis over the Sudetenland and staving off another European war—or so it seemed. Sometime in early October, or perhaps even a little beforehand, Ezra Pound finished drafting ten new cantos, not on the escalating tensions of contemporary Europe, but on the history of China from 2837 BC to AD 1736. At the end of that October, the Chinese finally surrendered Wuhan to the Japanese after the longest battle in the Second Sino-Japanese War, but Pound turned from China to America, beginning a new sequence of ten cantos on the second president of the United States, John Adams. The Chinese Cantos and the Adams Cantos appeared together in 1940 as Cantos LII–LXXI, and they can seem hopelessly removed from the most urgent concerns of the day. They have also seemed to many readers a hopeless failure: dull exercises in a documentary poetics, most of their lines being culled, respectively, from Joseph de Mailla’s eleven-volume Histoire Générale de la Chine and from Charles Francis Adams’s ten-volume edition of The Life and Works of John Adams.

One of the most impressive features of David Ten Eyck’s excellent book on the Adams Cantos is that it shows how these problems are inseparable and so encourages a re-evaluation of both the poetry’s aesthetic merit and its historical significance. As Ten Eyck demonstrates, the Adams Cantos extend the documentary method of the famous Malatesta Cantos (Cantos VIII–XI), so that rather than incorporating historical texts into a larger narrative or field of poetic materials, a single historical text itself provides the poem’s narrative or map. Figure becomes ground. But at the same time the Adams Cantos are not merely a digest of The Life and Works, and their object is not simply the historical truth of John Adams, the myriad complications of his life and contacts. Instead, their object is what Pound called the “Adams paideuma”: a nexus of ideas about the natural, ethical, legal, and economic foundations of a just state. The gamble of Pound’s ideogrammic method is that this universal will emerge from the particulars he selects from The Life and Works, reframing and in many instances reinterpreting those extracts in the process. And at this level, as poetry that seeks actively to present a notion of constructive effort towards the good society, the Adams Cantos are urgently concerned with the crises of their own time.

Ten Eyck’s study is grounded in meticulous attention to the historical record, detailing Pound’s long-standing interest in Adams, from classes he took at the University of Pennsylvania in 1902 to unpublished materials drafted for his last finished volume Thrones (1959). When Ten Eyck turns to the archive in order to trace the composition of the Adams Cantos—from Pound’s first markings in his copy of The Life and Works, through successive drafts, to the final poem—the results are consistently illuminating. We find not hasty and confused jottings that assume the reader will fill in the blanks (a customary view of these poems), but the deliberate removal of attributions, glosses, and other explanatory materials, and the construction of new formal and thematic relations. To an extent that previous criticism has rarely recognized, the poem becomes an object in its own right. Building on this archival material, Ten Eyck’s account of the development of Pound’s documentary poetics involves a lucid meditation on the interpretative dilemmas that the Adams Cantos pose. What sort of reading does this poetry invite? (Or, better, what contradictory readings?) How does it reconfigure accepted notions of historical truth, of material documents, and of didactic poetry? What does the journey from A Draft of XXX Cantos to the late cantos look like when the Adams Cantos are taken to be more than a regrettable anomaly?

In this way, the introduction and the first three chapters of Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos examine Pound’s interest in John Adams, the compositional history of the poems, the history of their reception, and their technical innovations. The final three chapters turn to broader issues: the representation of history and law in the Adams Cantos, the relation between this poetry and Pound’s social criticism of the 1930s and 1940s (from his support for Italian fascism to his commitment to Confucianism), and the significance of the Adams paideuma for the late cantos. Ten Eyck thus moves ably across a range of critical approaches, from close textual analysis, through questions of literary history, to a text’s engagement with its historical moment. In each case, Ten Eyck’s criticism is a model of rigorous scholarship and clear, methodical argument. Finally, the book’s appendices helpfully reproduce Pound’s college notes on American history, notes he took while reading The Life and Works in Paris in 1931, summary tables he later drew up in his own copy of The Life and Works, an unpublished essay on Confucius from 1943, and the material on Adams from Pound’s notebook for Thrones.

In comparison with the cantos that came before and after, especially The Pisan Cantos, the Adams Cantos have been the victim not only of misunderstanding but also of sheer neglect. Without insisting that they are always as successful as the best of Pound’s other work, Ten Eyck shows that they are much more successful, and much more interesting, than they can seem. As such, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos represents an invaluable contribution to Pound studies. The book also opens up new opportunities for thinking about the poetry of the 1930s, modernist poetry more generally, and the histories of found poetry and documentary poetics. W. C. Williams was one of the few who enjoyed Cantos LII–LXXI when it appeared, and so Patterson (1946–1958) is an obvious comparison, but how do Pound’s innovations compare to the documentary methods of Charles Reznikoff in Testimony (1934) or Holocaust (1975)? Since for the most part Pound produced the Adams Cantos by cutting a single text, Ten Eyck suggestively compares them to the erasure poetry of Jen Bervin, and one could extend the comparison to a poem like Ronald Johnson’s RADI OS (1977). The Adams Cantos might emerge from these and other new contexts, building on Ten Eyck’s admirable study, looking much more significant than many of Pound’s most committed admirers have allowed.