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This chapter argues that Ezra Pound's multiple invocations of China were bound to his American ambitions. Pound struggled with Whitman to take on the mantle of American bard, but he turned to the Orient as a means of disciplining the homeland he had fled. Reading both Pound's early interest in Tang Dynasty verse in his Imagist poetry and his later devotion to Confucianism in the China Cantos, this chapter unveils an underlying desire to speak for and to America via the Orient that runs the length of Pound's career.

This chapter looks at Ezra Pound's collection of poems about Venice, the place he credited with awakening his interest in “civilization.” His first collection establishes an archaeological process that would inform his entire work: the “mingled chords” drawn “from out the shadows of the past.” The antique cosmopolitan city of Venice offers an archive for these “mingled chords” that remains productive for the duration of Pound's career, although he never settles on a single meaning of the place. From his first collection through multiple phases of The Cantos, Venice appears as a repository of material histories that motivate Pound's open historiography. The chapter examines how Venice inspires Pound to poetic reanimation that challenges both backward- and forward-looking teleological approaches to time—approaches manifested in Gabriele D'Annunzio's restorative nostalgia, Futurism's projected obliteration of the past, and the instrumental historicism of the Fascist ventennio.

Chapter 3 argues that changes in Pound’s approach to music track changes in his politics. The early Pound is interested in music’s ability to communicate emotions, but as his allegiance to fascism, hierarchies and ‘certain truth’ intensifies in the 1930s, his approach to music becomes coldly rational. This chapter builds towards a reading of the musical score in Canto LXXV – the second of the Pisan Cantos – by investigating the political implications of Pound’s shifting approach to music, and those who shaped his musical thought, including Remy de Gourmont, Florence Farr, George Antheil, and Théophile Gautier. Attending to Pound’s long study and varied uses of music – an art form so often considered a domain apart from daily life and politics – can illuminate how his politics inform his aesthetic judgements, and how his aesthetics affect his politics.

Ezra Pound’s humor promotes unorthodox intimacies between readers and writers. His portraits in The Pisan Cantos catch Henry James and James Joyce laughing, emphasizing their human peculiarities and Pound’s personal knowledge of them. These scenes suggest how unsatisfactory he finds traditional notions of poetic immortality. Instead, his portraits of jesting writers make literary texts contain the artist as both heroic figure and human individual, doing the work of high art and personal interaction simultaneously. Pound loves the Romantic figure of the poet-hero, but his laughter emphasizes that artist’s fallible humanity, and highlights modernism’s concern with creating accurate models of imaginative sympathy. As Pound’s laughter becomes more intimate, however, it is also more troubling: humor in The Cantos seeks to enlist his reader not just in his poem but in his hierarchical vision of art and his fascist politics.

The first chapter uses the famous play, Hagoromo (The Feather Mantle), to explore noh dramaturgy and performance technique. Pound received a version of Hagoromo along with other draft translations of noh plays by Ernest Fenollosa and Hirata Kiichi, and it had a surprising impact on his theories of imagism and The Pisan Cantos.

Michael Coyle revisits the work of the now almost forgotten Harold H. Watts, who in 1947 was the first to give Pound’s work “professional attention.” Even before the uproar over awarding the first Bollingen Prize for Poetry to The PisanCantos in 1949, there appeared the first academic study of Pound’s work. But the 1951 appearance of Hugh Kenner’s astutely designed book, The Poetry of EzraPound, with its expressly aesthetic reading of Pound, undermined Watts’s criticism, eventually relegating his work to obscurity. Watts took the doomed position that, as Coyle puts it, “in order to understand Pound better we need to leave Poundian locutions behind,” while in “dramatic contrast,“ he notes, “Kenner strove wherever possible to adhere to Pound’s own figures and formulations.” Not only did Kenner manage “practically to obliterate” Watts’s work, but he became the architect of the foundation of the academic discussion of Pound ever since.

Ferreccio applies to both Pound’s The Pisan Cantos (1948) and H,D,’s Trilogy (1944-46) Jonathan Culler’s deconstructive concept of the lyric poem which (as Ferreccio defines it) “highlights the performative character of lyric verse and explores . . . the peculiarity of their linguistic acts.” Ferreccio also identifies an important distinction in their technique. Beside his collage method, she describes what she calls Pound’s “Forms of Ritual Address,” evident in his “recurrent, most notable lyrical outbursts,” as well as in his ritualization of memory. These devices contrast H.D.’s more “assertive and inspired” speaker, whom the poet places “in a transitional space” aligned with “the convention of devotional poetry.” Ferreccio argues that the main difference between these two long poems “lies precisely in the status of the lyrical I”: While Pound “offers resistance to that semantic linearity,” for H.D., the “individual voice is forever there in the present tense” and “conducted not by an impersonal mediator but by a priestess figure.” Despite these differences, Ferreccio acknowledges that both poets draw heavily on cross-cultural sources, so that for both the lyrical is situated “in the tension between context and utterance, repetition and creation.”

Kent Su looks into The Cantos to examine how Pound’s reading of contemporary accounts  of Chinese history from a Confucian perspective helped to shape his method for Cantos 52–61, the sequence known as the Chinese Cantos or China Cantos. Following his own dictum in ABC of Reading, “DICHTEN = CONDENSARE” (which Su describes as a “principle of lean philosophical economy”), Pound in the 1930s used the approach of “condensing some historical facts” to capture the pith and gist of ancient Chinese history, an approach Pound also attributes to Mussolini. Readers know that for these Cantos Pound drew from the French text of Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla’s 11-volume Histoire  générale de la Chine, but Su demonstrates how Pound also made significant use of the two Chinese texts that served as the basis for de Mailla’s Histoire, namely, Sima Guang’s Zizhi Tongjian and Zhu Xi’s Tongjian Gangmu, the latter a condensation of Guang’s 20-volume history. Su further contrasts the influences of Greek philosophy and Confucianism on Pound, as he offers analyses the complex cross-cultural sources of the China Cantos.

Viorica Patea’s essay opens with an account of José Vasquez Amaral’s long struggle translating Pound’s Cantos into Spanish and the argument he and Pound had about the correct equivalent in Spanish of the term, “canto.” Pound refused to accept that the Spanish “cantar” was appropriate for the parts in El Poema del Cid, but never after that. Still after their debate, Pound insisted on using “cantares” for both Rock-Drill and Thrones because it tallied with his idea of The Cantos as the “tale of the tribe.” Patea then swivels to another revealing dimension of Pound’s work in translation: contrasting controversies involving translations of Pound’s poetry under communism. Whereas the authorities in Communist Romania suppressed the Pound translations of Nicolas Steinhardt and prosecuted him, in Nicaragua the poet and staunch Marxist Ernesto Cardenal openly celebrated Pound as a master. Patea’s investigation reveals that, while Pound is often read (and repudiated) as a political writer, more persistently, he is admired not for his politics, but for how his poetry resists ideological limits altogether.

John Beall’s essay treats Pound’s method in The Cantos, especially in Canto 16, as a result of his cross-genre work as an editor. As with his editing of Fenollosa’s posthumous texts, Pound famously edited two revolutionary modernist texts upon which he had a comparable impact, James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land. In contrast to his extensive editing of these two works, Beall observes, “Pound’s revising of Canto 16 is a relatively unknown monument of modernist polyphony, a jagged and atonal blending of disparate voices.” Applying ideas from “genetic criticism” to Pound’s  manuscripts of Canto 16, Beall finds evidence of Pound’s response to Joyce’s and Eliot’s seminal modernist texts, each distinguished by its technique of incorporating cross-cultural voices that led Pound to revise Canto 16 in similar fashion, as “he moved carefully from a monologue as an extension of the Hell Cantos 14 and 15 to a polyphony of multilingual voices.” Beall also compares the published text to the recording of Pound reading it at the Spoleto Poetry Festival in 1967, to reveal the Canto’s deadpan humor, as well as its cross-cultural polyphony in conveying the tragic dimensions of World War I.

Digital writers Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries claim that their work of Flash-based digital literature, Dakota, is “based on a close reading of Ezra Pound’s Cantos part I and part II.” The chapter close reads the digital work in relation to its proclaimed source material despite the fact that the speed at which Dakota flashes challenges efforts to do so. YHCHI brilliantly adapt Pound’s poetry at the level of content and form. For not only do YHCHI remix the language of the first cantos but they also use Flash to renovate Pound’s poetic technique of “super-position” or textual montage. This chapter examines the transformation of Pound’s formal technique into Flash to show how the poetic result illuminates connections between the modernist and digital modernist texts as well as the literary periods they represent.

John Gery takes Philadelphia as his starting point, but less for Pound’s ties to Jefferson than for his mostly unexplored associations with Benjamin Franklin’s sensibility. When looking for early American counterparts to the prominent figures who populate The Cantos, from Sordello to Confucius, Pound looked first to Jefferson, then to John Adams as his American icons, despite Franklin’s public prominence. Although Pound does refer to Franklin some twenty times in The Cantos, he underplays his role. “Given Franklin’s prominent reputation for his imagination, unorthodox manner, wily and sometimes scandalous behaviour, inventive spirit, public service, and political savvy,” he might well have a more formidable presence in Pound’s epic. After comparing Franklin’s views on education with Pound’s ideal of a formal education, and after contrasting both writers’ views on “civic economy,” Gery ends with a close reading of Franklin’s portrait in Canto 31, to determine what Franklin represents for Pound, what aspects of his American imprint has found its way into The Cantos, cross-historically, possibly evident as much as by what Pound omits as by what he incorporates.

This chapter considers ectoplasm in relation to the materiality of film, and ask what this materiality does to questions of mimesis. It looks at Ezra Pound's conflicted attitude to film, via both his critical writing and The Cantos, and compares it to the aesthetics and politics of Sergei Eisenstein, in particular in his writings on Disney. For both, the filmic and the ectoplasmic incarnate central questions of the relation between representation and the world, but to very different effect. The chapter argues that in the end the politics of each depend on the extent to which they allow representation to be ectoplasmic.

Ezra Pound was an important figure in W. B. Yeats’s imagination in the genesis, development, explication and dissemination of the system of A Vision. Beginning with the time that Yeats and his new wife, George, spent at Stone Cottage together (during which they began their automatic writing sessions), continuing through their travels in Italy and residence in Rapallo, and culminating in Pound’s role as the intended recipient of the “Packet” that opens the second version of A Vision, Ezra Pound’s presence is persistent. Drawing together many strands of Yeats’s and Pound’s literary and personal relationships (including Pound’s appearance in early drafts and versions of A Vision), as well as some examination of parallels between their work, this essay argues for the centrality of Pound to A Vision, further suggesting that A Vision and The Cantos are in conversation with one another, as different means of exploring modernism’s more esoteric aspects.

The conclusion considers the implications of the geopoetic method laid out in the book that seeks to historicize the spatial strategies of literary texts—even experimental poetic ones—in the context of the reigning geographic epistemologies of the day. The conclusion demonstrates the usefulness of this method by briefly considering environmental determinism in relation to another text, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, in addition to gesturing to the interplay between poetic modernism and two other geographic paradigms of the first half of the twentieth century: the possibilism and regionalism of Carl Sauer in relation to William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and the academic development of geopolitics (specifically, the Italian version of it, spazio vitale) in relation to Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos. In these brief considerations of modernist poetic texts, we can observe writers using geography and form together to generate political interventions along multiple scales of identification: for the individually authorized artist, for culture, and for larger collectivities of the nation, transnation, and globe.

This chapter considers the naturalization of inheritance in relation to the Tudor usurpation of the English throne and its Stuart aftermath. I examine the implication of a language of succession in various early modern discussions of the opposed values of constancy and change. In the literature of the Elizabethan succession crisis, in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and in the projects superintended by the seventeenth-century noblewoman Anne Clifford we see a variety of attempts to discover in practices of inheritance a ground of psychic stability and sociopolitical domination. In each case, however, these efforts at control find themselves confronted by a recalcitrant matter—encountered on the Gaelic-speaking peripheries of the British islands, in the medieval past, in women’s bodies, or in the changeable fabric of all created things—that resists full regimentation.

Jonathan Pollock’s essay links Ezra Pound’s Vorticist thinking to the influential poetics of French philosopher Henri Bergson via Wyndham Lewis’s 1927 book, Time and Western Man. In that book, Lewis gives considerable attention to Bergson’s metaphysics but also devotes two chapters to Pound, whose reality is, like Bergson’s, of a temporal rather than a spatial nature. Drawing from Bergson, especially from Matière et Mémoire, Pollock makes a case for Pound’s Bergsonian poetics in The Cantos and speculates that from the start Pound’s notion of the vortex “almost certainly had in mind the famous cone of memory – a cone balancing on its tip on a flat plane. . .” In The Cantos, as in Bergson, “the vortex of the past is not to be understood as chronological”; rather, “the whole of the past is contained within each level, layer, or stratum of the cone.” Still, Pollock points out a significant divergence between them, when he discusses Bergson’s image in L’Évolution créatrice (1907) of a human arm plunged into iron filings. With Bergson the filings remain dead matter, whereas with Pound there is energy which creates patterns, like the Rose in the Steel Dust.

Walter Baumann investigates the life and work of the relatively obscure figure of Rainer Maria Gerhardt, who was instrumental in translating and promoting Pound in Germany after World War II. Baumann recalls how, when he himself was first studying Pound, he discovered in Clark Emery’s Ideas into Action (1958), an extended quotation from Gerhardt’s 1952 German radio broadcast on The Pisan Cantos, a reference that inspired Baumann to search for this little-known source. It turns out the broadcast was by a German student of poetry who had committed suicide in 1954. Baumann investigates the extent of Gerhardt’s efforts to bring Pound’s work to German-speaking readers: “How Gerhardt managed to make contact with poets and academics specializing in poetry, ‘from under the rubble heap’ (Canto 90/626) that was Germany well into the 1950s, is a miracle,” Baumann writes, “most of all his obtaining the German translation rights to the works of Ezra Pound.” Baumann also tracks Gerhardt’s correspondence with Charles Olson, especially his letters commenting on Olson’s manifesto, “Projective Verse,” as well as Olson’s poem for Gerhardt. This essay demonstrates Pound’s cross-cultural impact on mid-century poetry, through both Gerhardt’s translations and his deeply personal reaction to Pound’s vision.