Notes on the Cantos, pt 1

The Cantos: Pound attempting to update Dantes (100 Cantos) - to stand as the major figure of his age. He wanted to write the "epic of his age". He's possibly the only one to be able to conceive of such a thing (and one of the few to be able to do it).

Pisan Cantos: "scents and images come to him on the air" - like Italian sausages, apparently. Little touches that can haunt the imagination.

All this despite the fact that he seems to think it was a "botched" job.

Arrogance/ contrition//over-reached -> he wanted to do more than was possible...

Basil Bunting: "On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos":

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?
There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble! (130)

[Hugh Kenner: The Pound Era] - read for later

Pound started the project in 1904, but he wasn't "serious" about it until post WW1 - in the 1920s, he actually withdrew from his other projects (of which there were many). So he was rude about people who weren't sufficiently Modernist (of course), but he actually helped other.

See the Cantos as the logical outcome of Imagism - esp. the effect of juxtapositional montage: cf Whitman - it's a catalogue, a slideshow, not a movie. Pound generates an effect of movement - dynamic quality of cinema. (think: lights through a set of static images.)

So, the ideas of Vorticism are to be kept in mind when reading the Cantos, an "elephantine" poem that occupied the rest of Pound's life.