Product Description

At last, a definitive, paperback edition of Ezra Pound's finest work.

Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos was written in 1945, while the poet was being held in an American military detention center near Pisa, Italy, as a result of his pro-Fascist wartime broadcasts to America on Radio Rome. Imprisoned for some weeks in a wire cage open to the elements, Pound suffered a nervous collapse from the physical and emotional strain. Out of the agony of his own inferno came the eleven cantos that became the sixth book of his modernist epic, The Cantos, themselves conceived as a Divine Comedy for our time.

The Pisan Cantos were published in 1948 by New Directions and in the following year were awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry by the Library of Congress. The honor came amid violent controversy, for the dark cloud of treason still hung over Pound, incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Yet there is no doubt that The Pisan Cantos displays some of his finest and most affecting writing, marking an elegaic turn to the personal while synthesizing the philosophical and economic political themes of his previous cantos. They are now being published for the first time as a separate paperback, in a fully annotated edition prepared by Richard Sieburth, who also contributes a thoroughgoing introduction, making Pound's master-work fully accessible to students and general readers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #617068 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Review
It is in The Pisan Cantos that we can approach Pound most closely as a person. -- James Laughlin, Pound As Wuz

Sieburth has done a strikingly good job....His introduction...is a model of its kind, ...a serious work of criticism. -- Clive Wilmer, Times Literary Supplement [London], 4 June 2004

The introduction is one of the best short essays I have read on ...the great memory poem...The Pisan Cantos. -- Marjorie Perloff, Boston Review, April/May 2004

About the Author
Richard Sieburth, a prize-winning translator and authority on literary modernism, is a professor of comparative literature at New York University. He is the author of Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont (Harvard, 1978) and edited A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound Among the Troubadours (New Directions, 1992).

Customer Reviews

Superb edition
This superbly edited volume makes Pound's "Pisans" readily available in an attractive and affordable paperback edition. This is some of the most important American poetry of the post-War period, with intelligent and helpful annotations to make the work fully accessible even to those not versed in Poundian arcana. Indispensable!

Gorgeously wrought
This magnum opus of one of the most celebrated and controversial figures in literature was written while he was being held in detention for treason. He was a fascist, and anti-Semite, but how the chicks, and Allen Ginsberg, dug him. And you should, too--politics aside. Pound's writings on poetry were monumental in the formation of greats like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and the aforementioned Ginsberg. The Cantos are gorgeously wrought, and range from exquisitely beautiful to fantastically erudite and opaque. And it's fun to watch him make up arbitrary meanings for Chinese ideograms because some posthumously debunked scholar misled him.

Ambition and madness
The Pantos Cantos takes us back to the days of Modernism when artists had heart and desired to experiment. These days, writers have to pander to illiterate readers, ambitious editors and know-nothing marketing departments. This is in-your-face art for art's sake, gloriously elitist, ugly, difficult, sprawling, all that good and high art should be. Who needs readers? Who needs post-modernist defence of the popular and accessible?