Abstract

“Forms of Havoc: The Malatesta Cantos and The Battler” demonstrates Ezra Pound’s exploration of boxing as an aesthetic practice through the use of boxing terminology and images in The Malatesta Cantos (1925), reframing the text as a meditation on the constituent properties of aestheticized violence, and suggesting boxing’s impact on the formal features of the text itself. The article recovers Pound’s circulation in Parisian boxing subculture during the early 1920’s, and argues that the hectic style of boxing Pound practiced, known as battling, provided a contemporary vocabulary to make legible Malatesta’s life as a condotierro, as well as the conceptual terminology for aesthetic violence in The Malatesta Cantos.

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