The Pisan Cantos: 977 (New Directions Paperbook) - Softcover

Pound, Ezra; Sieburth, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081121558X ISBN 13: 9780811215589

Publisher: New Directions, 2003

Synopsis

Paperback. Pub Date: November 2003 Pages: 192 Publisher: New Directions Publishing The Book of Ezra Chapter Pound's The Pisan Cantos was written in 1945 while the poet the WAS being held in an American Military detention Center near Pisa. Italy AS a Result of HIS pro -Fascist wartime oadcasts 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 Liary of Congress. The honor came amid violent controversy. for the dark cloud of treason still hung over Pound. incarce...

About this title

Review:

"It is in The Pisan Cantos that we can approach Pound most closely as a person. He has had his turn of fortune and he is fearful of the future, but he isn't giving up. Birds perched on his telephone wires remind him of notes of music. He enjoys the humor of the prisoners and guards. The gods of Greece are with him in his dark hour."

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

Sieburth has done a strikingly good job....His introduction...is a model of its kind...a serious work of criticism.--Clive Wilmer

The introduction is one of the best short essays [on Pound] I have read.--Marjorie Perloff

About the Author:

New Directions has been the primary publisher of Ezra Pound in the U.S. since the founding of the press when James Laughlin published New Directions in Prose and Poetry 1936. That year Pound was fifty-one. In Laughlin's first letter to Pound, he wrote: "Expect, please, no fireworks. I am bourgeois-born (Pittsburgh); have never missed a meal. . . . But full of 'noble caring' for something as inconceivable as the future of decent letters in the US." Little did Pound know that into the twenty-first century the fireworks would keep exploding as readers continue to find his books relevant and meaningful.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 081121558X
• ISBN 13: 9780811215589
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192