Editing Ezra Pound (section)

===Restarting ''The Cantos''{{anchor|The Cantos}}===
{{main|The Cantos}}
{{further|List of cultural references in The Cantos}}

Twice the length of ''[[Paradise Lost]]'' and 50 times longer than ''The Waste Land'', Pound's 800-page ''The Cantos'' ("Canto I" to "Canto CXVI", c.&nbsp;1917–1962) became his life's work.{{efn|name=Cantoslength|For around 23,000 lines, 800 pages, and the comparison to Milton and Eliot, see Beach (2003), 32; for 116 sections, see Stoicheff (1995), 6{{pb}}
For the years: the first cantos were published in 1917, and the final complete canto was first published in 1962. [[Peter Stoicheff]] regards the 1968 Stone Wall/New Directions/Faber & Faber volume as the first authorized edition.<ref>Stoicheff (1986), 78</ref>}} His obituary in ''The Times'' described it as not a great poem, because of the lack of structure, but a great improvisation: "[T]he exasperating form permits the occasional, and in the early ''Cantos'' and in ''The Pisan Cantos'' not so occasional, irruption of passages of great poetry, hot and burning lava breaking through the cracks in piles of boring [[scree]]."<ref name=LondonTimesobit>"Mr Ezra Pound: Poet who helped to create modernism". ''The Times''. Issue 58621, 2 November 1972, 18.</ref>

{{Quote box
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 | title=Canto CXVI
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 | quote=<poem>I have brought the great ball of crystal;
:::::::Who can lift it?
Can you enter the great acorn of light?
:::But the beauty is not the madness
Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,{{efn|name=demigod}}
I cannot make it cohere.
</poem>
 |source= — ''[[Paris Review]]'', 1962{{efn|For the earliest version (with a line missing), [https://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/7347/canto-116-ezra-pound Pound (1962)], 14–16. For more on Canto 116, Baumann (1983). For the publication history of the final sections, Stoicheff (1986) and Stoicheff (1995). Also see ''Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII'' (1969).<ref>Pound (1996), 815–816</ref>}}}}

The first three [[canto]]s had been published in ''Poetry'' magazine in June, July, and August 1917,<ref name=Threecantos>Bush (1976), 184; [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=13723 Pound (June 1917)], 113–121]; [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=13764 Pound (July 1917)] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220319074017/https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=13764 |date=19 March 2022 }}, 180–188; [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=13810 Pound (August 1917)] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200511145151/https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=13810 |date=11 May 2020 }}, 248–254</ref> but in 1922 Pound abandoned most of his work and began again.<ref>Terrell (1993), [https://books.google.com/books?id=Eok0KBk63z4C&pg=PR7 vii]; Albright (2001), 75</ref> The early cantos, the "Ur-Cantos", became "Canto I" of the new work.<ref name=ThreeCantos>[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13764/canto-iii "Three Cantos"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200804074823/https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13764/canto-iii |date=4 August 2020 }}. Poetry Foundation.</ref> In letters to his father in 1924 and 1927, Pound said ''The Cantos'' was like the medley of voices you hear when you turn the radio dial,{{efn|[[Richard Sieburth]] (''Poetry'', 1979): "As early as 1924, in a letter to his father, Pound was comparing his ''Cantos'' to the medley of voices produced by tuning a radio dial. The speakers did not need to be identified, he explained, for 'you can tell who is talking by the noise they make'—all the reader needed to do was listen attentively as one timbre cut into another, sometimes with clean edge, sometimes with a burst."<ref>Sieburth (1979), 292</ref>}} and "[r]ather like or unlike subject and response and counter subject in [[fugue]]":

<blockquote style="border-left: 3px solid #ccc;">
:A.A. Live man goes down into world of Dead.
:C.B. The 'repeat in history'.
:B.C. The 'magic moment' or moment of metamorphosis, bust thru from quotidien into 'divine or permanent world.' Gods., etc.<ref>Terrell (1993), vii; also see [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ezra-pound "Ezra Pound"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170816062615/https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ezra-pound |date=16 August 2017 }}. Poetry Foundation; Laughlin (1986), 13–14; Karachalios (1995), 95</ref></blockquote>

Alluding to American, European and Oriental art, history and literature, the work is also autobiographical.<ref>Beach (2003), 32–33; Bacigalupo (2020), 3</ref> In the view of Pound scholar Carroll F. Terrell, it is a great religious poem, describing humanity's journey from hell to paradise, a "revelation of how divinity is manifested in the universe&nbsp;... the kind of intelligence that makes the cherrystone become a cherry tree."<ref>Terrell (1993), viii</ref> The poet [[Allen Tate]] argued in 1949 that it is "about nothing at all&nbsp;... a voice but no subject".<ref name="Tate1955pp264–265">Tate (1955), 264–265</ref> Responding to ''A Draft of XXX Cantos'' (1930), [[F. R. Leavis]] criticized its "lack of form, grammar, principle and direction".<ref>Leavis (1942), 156</ref> The lack of form became a common criticism.<ref>Nadel (2001), 9</ref>{{efn|George Kearns wrote that Pound's love of its production is what held the work together; in his view, Pound is speaking to the poem itself in a final fragment: "M'amour, m'amour".<ref>Kearns (1989), 28–29</ref>}} Pound wrote in the final complete canto, "Canto CXVI" (116, first published in the ''[[The Paris Review|Paris Review]]'' in 1962), that he could not "make it cohere",<ref>[https://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/7347/canto-116-a-href-authors-3793-ezra-poundezra-pound-a Pound (1962)]; Pound (1996), 816</ref> although a few lines later, referring to the universe: "it coheres all right / even if my notes do not cohere."<ref>Pound (1962); Pound (1996), 817; Baumann (1983), 207–208; Nicholls (2001), 144; Dennis (2001), 282</ref> According to Pound scholar Walter Baumann, the [[demigod]] of "Canto CXVI"—"And I am not a demigod"—is [[Heracles]] of [[Sophocles]]' ''[[Women of Trachis]]'' (450–425 BCE), who exclaims before he dies (based on Pound's translation): "SPLENDOUR, / IT ALL COHERES".{{efn|name=demigod|Walter Baumann (''Paideuma'', 1983): "...&nbsp;Eva Hesse has informed us, presumably on Pound's authority, that the word 'demigod' alludes to the [[Heracles]] of [[Sophocles]]' ''[[Women of Trachis]]''. The prominence Pound gave to the moment in the play when Heracles finally&nbsp;understands the full meaning of the oracles concerning him—that he is to be 'released from trouble,' not by a 'life of comfort,' but by death—is far more a revelation&nbsp;of his state of mind when making his version of the ''Trachiniae'' than of Sophocles' intentions, and the ad-libbing he allowed himself at the crucial point in the Sophoclean text is literally a shorthand anticipation of Canto 116: 'SPLENDOUR, / IT ALL COHERES{{'"}}.<ref>Baumann (1983), 207–208; also see Stoicheff (1995), 142–144</ref>}} "Canto CXVI" ends with the lines "a little light, like a [[rushlight]] / to lead back to splendour."<ref name=Pound1996p817>Pound (1996), 817</ref>