View 2 comments. Sep 10, AC Thanks all those who have refollowed! The 5-stars is for the meticulous and informed edition including detailed notes and commentary.
As to the content, I find poetry difficult and often tedious, and this text was particularly difficult. I can't say I understood much of it. Obviously, it requires far more time and effort than I have at present. Jan 26, Alex rated it it was amazing. Perhaps the most insightful view of the malaise which overtook the world in the first half of the 20th century.
Dec 23, Mat rated it really liked it Shelves: classics , experimental , highbrow , imagism , modern-classic , one-to-own , philosophy , poetry , revolutionary , something-out-of-the-ordinary.
The only reason I decided to dock a star from this book is because of how bloody difficult it was. Pound continues to both fascinate and frustrate me. However, when he is good, he is really on the money. The Pisan Cantos is probably the most well-known and celebrated and controversial section of Pound's masterpiece epic, The Cantos , but many scholars would also argue that it's one of his best.
My personal favorites were Canto 79 the lynx Canto , Canto 81 the most famous one with the well-known The only reason I decided to dock a star from this book is because of how bloody difficult it was. My personal favorites were Canto 79 the lynx Canto , Canto 81 the most famous one with the well-known "pull down thy vanity" section and Canto Pound was put in a 'death cell' or what he also calls a 'gorilla cage' completely open and exposed to the elements, and a bright light shining on his cell at night.
Eventually Pound had a nervous breakdown when like Odysseus his raft broke and the waters went over him. Pound was arrested for his radio broadcasts conducted while Mussolini was still in power. He was openly fascist in his political views but what probably got him in really hot water was his criticism of the American financial system and his scathing attacks on people like FDR. When The Pisan Cantos , finally published in the late s went on to win the very first ever Bollinger Prize, it caused a great amount of protest, outcry and downright indignation.
How could a fascist or traitor be awarded such a prize for literature? Well do you judge a poet on his controversial political beliefs or just on the quality of his poetry? Some say the two can never be separated, that they are invariably intertwined. I disagree. I am not a fascist, in fact I probably lie at the opposite end of Pound's political spectrum. Nonetheless, I did enjoy this book for the most part. It was not easy, I struggled, as most people do when they read Pound, with his incredibly dense esoteric references to Confucius, Homer, Plato, Dante, Cavalcanti, Yeats and the list goes on and to make it even more difficult quotes famous writers, poets and philosophers in their original language, which means sometimes ancient Greek, Latin, Provencal, Chinese, French, medieval French, German and so on.
However, this edition by Richard Sieburth contains excellent endnotes, which admittedly are not exhaustive i. While I admire Pound's poetry and writing and high level of esoteric knowledge, it annoys me how he makes the text deliberately difficult for the average reader, which is probably why he is often considered as pretentious.
And this assessment is not exactly wrong I would say. However, as one Yale professor said, the reason he doesn't offer us any references or notes himself is probably because he wants us to sit in the library and experience the same joy that he did uncovering various pieces of information, decoding ancient texts and coming to our own explications. This book is not for the faint of heart. It demands patience and commitment. But if you decide to read it, you will come out the other side a changed person, as is the case with any great art and it becomes addictive.
You will then want to pick it up again Ezra Pound - there is nobody quite like him in all of literature. Headstrong, hardworking, extremely prolific, extremely foolish to borrow a word WCW was wont to use to describe him in his political views but also someone you MUST one day confront if you are serious about discussing modern or modernist literature.
Aug 30, HM rated it really liked it. Oct 05, C added it Shelves: own. I wanted to simultaneously rate this book 1 star and 5 stars.
Though the poem is, at its heart, a narrative about deep personal crisis, it requires too much from its reader. On both the biographical and allusionistic not a word. If you're willing to give up the time or, in my case, are forced to for class credit , I think the poem can be incredibly rewarding. Struggling with Pound's audience, his anti-semitism, his language of crisis, etc.
But, in the end, Pound's goals for poetry are quite different than my own. I can appreciate this poem, but I will never like it. Jul 27, Chris Schaeffer rated it it was amazing. Would like to give two extra stars, if possible, for reading Sam Schild's used copy, which is filled with good notes and has many of the ideograms filled out to resemble funny faces in hats.
Mar 13, Michael rated it it was amazing Shelves: anglo-american , poetry. Schwierig zu folgen, keine leichte Kost, aber ergreifend. Sep 19, Dan rated it really liked it. First, the patient is highly intelligent and imaginative. The patient has granted me access to his journal which, though at first I found to be nearly incomprehensible, has provided valuable insight into his mind after a close and careful reading. For example, the patient is fluent in numerous languages, including ancient Greek, has a strong grasp of Chinese ideograms, and is able to maintain coherence of thought while abruptly switching from one language to the next.
The patient believes he has suffered great psychological trauma and is thus using this passage to express his pain through the image of a small, beautiful flower, which may represent himself, being tangled in a field of grass, which may be significant as he has been detained in cramped, exposed conditions.
If I may be as bold as to sound poetic, it is as if the patient were tuned into the radio broadcast of all human civilization across all time and space and wants to make sense of it all not only for himself, but for everyone alive. Lastly, the patient retains a firm sense of self in that he expresses very strong opinions about Jews, the economy, and has even requested a meeting with President Truman concerning the state of the Japanese campaign.
While this may sound alarming and does seem to reek of arrogance and the grandiose, his opinions remain consistent, strangely coherent, and while often reprehensible and perhaps even treasonous, do not seem to, so far, present an imminent threat to himself or others. Therefore, it is my professional opinion that Ezra Weston Loomis Pound is not insane, he is just an incredibly talented poet.
These two conditions are easily confused. Ho letto recensioni molto severe di questo libro di Ezra Pound. I riferimenti alla storia, all'arte e all'economia sono sterminati. Bisogna avere solide basi per coglierli.
Ma non mancano momenti di rara bellezza lirica, aperti a tutti, che spesso si manifestano all'improvviso, come un satori giapponese un'illuminazione improvvisa. Quello di Pound era uno spirito tormentato e i Cantos possono essere visti anche come il tentativo di ricomposizione di un'anima, lacerata, ferita e ridotta in frammenti che si sono sparsi ovunque. Ognuno di questi frammenti, ogni verso, rimanda al tutto, all'opera complessiva, e viceversa. Nel Pound, mentre traduceva Confucio nella sua casa a Rapallo, fu arrestato dagli americani.
Venne accusato di alto tradimento per una presunta propaganda antiamericana durante un programma in una radio fascista e recluso nel campo di concentramento di Coltano, una frazione di Pisa.
Venne messo in una gabbia all'aperto, chiamata "cella della morte", che misurava un metro e ottanta per due metri. Il fondo era in calcestruzzo e le sbarre di acciaio con una rete spinata. Pound, allora sessantenne, era scalzo e aveva a disposizione solo due coperte per proteggersi dal freddo. Fu in quelle condizioni disumane, appeso in una gabbia all'aperto, con qualche coperta per proteggersi dal sole e dalle intemperie che Pound scrisse i "Canti pisani".
Dopo tre settimane, tuttavia, ebbe un crollo nervoso e venne trasferito in infermeria e poi reimpatriato in America. Dopo gli appelli degli intellettuali di tutto il mondo, venne rilasciato. Quindi decise di tornare in Italia, che amava molto.
Aug 10, Tristan added it Shelves: poetry , classic. I am not going to rate this book because I feel unqualified to give it a rating, not because it is a classic, but because I feel that my opinion of it as an experience and as a poem are not closely tied and the second largely unformed.
As a reading experience, The Pisan Cantos were, on the whole, extremely difficult and rather unpleasant. I found the Notes section of this edition to be necessary and frustrating. The poem has a note every few lines or so for the entire span of 10 cantos, necessary I am not going to rate this book because I feel unqualified to give it a rating, not because it is a classic, but because I feel that my opinion of it as an experience and as a poem are not closely tied and the second largely unformed.
The poem has a note every few lines or so for the entire span of 10 cantos, necessary if I am supposed to understand the large quantities of Greek, Latin, Chinese, Italian, and Spanish off the top of my head although I do speak Spanish, so that wasn't a problem for me personally scattered throughout the poem. These notes were not flagged in the poem--so I missed them for the first lines or so and had to be looking back and forth constantly to make sure I didn't miss one, instead of receiving an indication in the poem that here would be a good place to go to the notes, which would have interrupted my reading experience much less.
Furthermore, I have discovered that endnotes are a remarkably unfriendly formatting decision when the notes are this numerous and important. They could have been footnotes, or in the margins, or in a separate companion volume and been infinitely easier to use than flipping back and forth between the poem and the notes constantly.
The reason I am withholding judgement on the poem, as a read, is that I think that reading it with someone, either in a class or a book club or just a reading partner, so that I could talk about various elements of the poem as we went and possibly benefit from other people having a separate perspective on the piece would improve my reading experience more than average.
If I could have talked about why Canto 75 contains a piece of sheet music, or discussed how Pound's autobiographical turn might shape the references to myth and to literature even possibly just having someone in the room familiar with some of the cited work that I don't know would have allowed me to get much more out of Pound's sideways and pointed poem. Jan 14, Lola Sebastian added it Shelves: classics-and-lit , explicitly-intertextual , greek-mythology , not-quite-love-stories , united-states , unreliable-narrators , poetry , historical , modernism-and-the-occult , books-ive-covered-in-videos.
O lynx, to review the words of a madman Even one who is brilliant? Mar 22, Dim Ak rated it it was amazing Shelves: poetry. For someone in lock up, this was a very interesting piece of work that flies off into song and musicality, as well as memory, archival thoughts, and reportage.
Dec 16, Thomas added it. Prima venne il visibile, quindi il palpabile Elisio, sebbene fosse nelle dimore d'inferno, Quello che veramente ami e' la tua vera eredita' La formica e' un centauro nel suo mondo di draghi. Il casco verde ha vinto la tua eleganza. Sep 23, David rated it liked it. Since I've been reading T. Eliot lately, Pound has been on my mind also. I read The Pisan Cantos I think a year ago, and three stars is still about right. Pound, unlike Eliot, uses his learning and personal experience in such a way that, if you don't know what he knows or know what's happened to him, you're pretty much lost.
Being lost, of course, can be beautiful; it can also be a pain in the butt if you want to get somewhere. Pound, as the rating suggests, is both beautiful and a pain in t Since I've been reading T. Pound, as the rating suggests, is both beautiful and a pain in the butt. Jul 13, Michelle Llewellyn rated it it was ok. Contributors discuss the nature of many of the successive major blocks of work, allowing the Pound newcomer to experience the poem as an irregular progression, varying greatly in its qualities.
As a whole, the collection elucidates the personal and historical shifts that profoundly impacted Pound and consequentially produced the changing fusions of technique and matter in the Cantos. It also shows some of the huge variation in critics conceptions of the poem, or poetry itself, and of what it meant to be a poet and citizen of the West during the half-century in which the Cantos were written. It deals with the question of important critical issues, as well as of interpretation and understanding.
Students of modern poetry will derive great benefit from this vigorous and lucid analysis of Pound's masterpiece. Noel Stock's finding is radical: that The Cantos is not a really a poem at all, but rather notes towards a poem.
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