Collapse and Recall: Ezra Pound's Italian Cantos

The two Cantos which Ezra Pound published in Italian have proved puzzling to the few critics who have studied them because they are so unlike his other work. In pointing out that Pound may have used them to legitimize his right to speak politically to Italians, Massimo Bacigalupo comes closest to implying what I would suggest: that they may have been composed expressly to promote the Fascist cause. These poems, written in a time of terror and confusion, are interesting for their political, philosophical, and aesthetic relation to the larger work; they may be considered as important for their poetic failings as the Pisan Cantos are for their merits, for despite those failings, they bring Pound back to poetry after a long hiatus, and the ethical and aesthetic collapse which they represent makes the exquisite recovery that occurs in the Pisan Cantos both necessary and possible.

The notebooks in which Pound worked out the Italian Cantos attest to the fact that he was making notes and drafts for poems, but no poetry appeared between 1940 and the first publications of these Cantos in 1945. Perhaps he was suffering a dry spell or expending most of his energy on his political writing, ¹ but he may also have been experiencing a period of doubt. As Robert Casillo points out, by the time the Italian Cantos were written, Pound’s circle of intimates was limited to his family and Italian friends. He was almost entirely isolated in a Fascist world, but the Fascist dream was evaporating: Mussolini, in exile in Salò, was no longer Duce of the Republic; the Nazis had taken over Rome; the armistice had surrendered to the Allies an Italy occupied by the Germans; and the Fascist movement itself seemed to be failing.

In January 1945, lines 9–35 of Canto LXXII appeared under the title “Presenza: F.T. Marinetti” in La Marina Repubblicana, a small Fascist newspaper. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Pound’s rival in the early days of Futurism and Vorticism but later a Fascist friend, had died a month earlier. Ubaldo degli Uberti, undersecretary of the navy in the Salò government as well as editor of the paper, was an old friend of Pound’s from his Radio Rome days. ² According to Lawrence Rainey, Uberti had learned that Pound was about to publish a new segment of The Cantos and, because paper was at a premium and poetry almost impossible to publish, he offered Pound a place in the journal. ³ But there is no evidence that Pound had any significant body of poetry finished at this time. The piece could well have been solicited—or offered—as an homage to Marinetti, a parable for the cause, for the poem certainly glorifies the Fascist effort and Marinetti’s part in it. In the segment published in the Marina Repubblicana, the only spirit who visits Pound is Marinetti. It is therefore plausible that Uberti might have requested the poem and that Pound, out of both loyalty and need, may have complied. Ironically, it is conceivable too that such a request may have helped Pound to return to poetry and, afterwards, to his more familiar style, for he modeled this poem on Dante.

The following month, the full text of Canto LXXIII appeared in the same Fascist newspaper under the title Canto LXXIII: Cavalcanti—Corrispondenza Repubblicana. It is plausible that this work, too, could have been solicited, since it is a version of a Fascist propaganda fable earlier published in the Corriere della Sera. ⁴ Although Cavalcanti was known to have written some political poems, the connection to him in this Canto is only partly thematic. It is, however, a stylistic homage in its attempt to imitate the formal aspects of Cavalcanti’s “Donna Mi Priega,” one of Pound’s poetic talismans.

Both of these poems, however, are oddly simplistic in theme, structure, and language, and are thus uncharacteristic of Pound’s style both before and after this period. Considering the extraordinary sophistication, complexity, and beauty of the Pisan Cantos, completed the following summer under much worse conditions, it is more likely that he...