Posthumous Cantos by Ezra Pound (review)

Part extraordinary lyrical beauty, part cantankerous political mania, part historical vignette, part reverie, and part dark imprecation, its elements immiscible and its organizing compass rendered unusable almost as soon as the project got underway, Pound’s Cantos exists as one of the great high-minded disasters of literary modernism. As the patient, caretaking, and devoted editor of this volume rightly says, “the only continuous and irreversible story that we can make out in its turbulent pages is the poet’s own life, his travels and sudden departures, his pitfalls and misadventures, his aesthetic youth, his maturity increasingly occupied by economic projects, the day of reckoning of his incarceration, the relatively serene twilight of his final years.” Sifting through the mass of jottings and fragments that Pound left upon his death in 1972, Bacigalupo has assembled a portfolio of items, long and short, that served Pound either as drafts of the cantos that were published, as notes to himself, or as poetic gestures bearing little specific connection to anything in the “finished” poem. But of course the poem never was finished, the proposed one hundred cantos, à la Dante’s Divine Comedy, sputtering on to 116 and then, as Bacigalupo says, exhausting itself as a “volcano which had not stopped throwing out sublimities and fatuities over sixty years.”

The editorial sympathy that Professor Bacigalupo extends to Pound, a sympathy exemplified by the helpful explanatory notes that he supplies for each fragment, is tempered by his recognition that the Cantos do not constitute a successful poem. Yes, Pound possessed “genius,” but by the time of his incarceration (1945–58) in St. Elizabeths Hospital, the genius was a “crumb of folly” that had grown to “full-scale paranoia.” Yes, Carlo Izzo described Pound to T. S. Eliot as “the greatest living creator of language” (and Eliot apparently concurred), but that language by the end came embedded in obscurity, malice, and confusion. The value of this collection is owing, then, not only to the solicitude that Professor Bacigalupo brings to his editorial labors but also to the way in which it gives evidence that Pound’s poetry, the whole of it, is essentially fragmentary: bits and pieces, moments of grandeur and moments of pathos, instigations that wander far from home, enormous learning bent to unworthy purposes, and noble ambition descending into incoherent turbulence.