Pound's Cantos declassified / Philip Furia.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Furia, Philip, 1943- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pound, Ezra, 1885-19720. Cantos.

Pound, Ezra.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (164 pages)

Place of Publication:

University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [1984]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

By using his Cantos for storing, ";making new,"; and transmitting historical documents, Pound was returning the epic to its ancient function as a tribal archive for the ";luminous details"; of history that define a culture's past and shape its future. So argues this book, which does not overlook the poem's brilliant lyrical passages but for the first time focuses on those vast stretches of Pound's epic composed not of literary touchstones but of that most unpoetic of literary forms, historical documents.Pound's task as epic poet was complicated by the fact that the documents he wished to renew and transmit to his culture were largely unknown, often because in his mind they had been suppressed by a widespread conspiracy throughout the ages which he termed the ";historical black-out."; His Cantos therefore, he believed, must be a counter-conspiracy to rescue vital documents from that black-out, renew them, and then recirculate them to combat the economic and political forces behind the black-out.Drawing on recent research by numerous scholars, Furia traces the arcane documents Pound unearthed from libraries around the world and shows how he transmuted this documentary mass into poetry, first by framing passages of prose to highlight their poetic texture and then by weaving these shards and fragments into a collage of intricate structure. Among the documents Furia ";declassifies"; are Chinese edicts, Italian bank charters, British factory commission reports, Byzantine guild regulations, American Presidential papers, municipal records, judicial writs, parliamentary statutes, legislative codes, contracts, deeds, mandates, treaties, diary entries, and correspondence by such diverse figures as Lorenzo de' Medici, Martin Van Buren, Napoleon, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Mustapha Kemal, and Kubla Khan.Pound's Cantos Declassified traces the poet's struggle to shape the content of the epic poem that absorbed most of his creative life.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

I Lines of Transmission

II Malatesta's Post-Bag

III The Printing House of Hell

IV Civic Accounts

V Presidential Correspondence

VI Sienese Bank Charters

VII Chinese Mirrors

VIII The Adams Papers

IX The Pisan Black-out

X A Memorial to Archivists and Librarians

XI Final Documents: Coke and Rock

Notes and References

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780271071817

0271071818

9780727071811

0727071815