Readings in the Cantos: Volume I [Paperback]

This book will be required reading for any serious Pound scholar but also for those who work in the area of modernist poetry. Many of the book' s contributors (and its editor) are affiliated with the Ezra Pound Society, which will provide a built-in audience and mechanism for promoting the work. Although the book will be of interest to any library containing a copy of Pound' s Cantos, it will also be attractive to individual scholars who may not want to wade through the considerable scholarship but are looking for entry into specific cantos.This is a three-volume project of readings of individual sections from the central modernist long poem,The Cantosof Ezra Pound. The project as a whole represents a landmark publication for modernist studies, bringing together, in a ground-breaking format, a number of critical readings of The Cantos by the world's leading Pound and modernist scholars.

In each chapter a contributor approaches either a single Canto or a defined small group of Cantos in isolation, providing a clear, informative, and interpretive 'reading' that includes an up-to-date assessment of sources and an idea of recent critical approaches to the work. Most importantly, each essay offers guidance to those wishing to understand the works while contributing to the creation of a new manner of reading The Cantos as a remarkably diverse but coherent work. This first volume illuminates the gestation of the Cantos-technique and includes essays on the most important Cantos and groups of Cantos from the Ur-Cantos (early, discarded versions of the beginning of Pound's poem), A Draft of XVI Cantos (1924),A Draft of the Cantos 17-27 (1928), and Eleven New Cantos XXXI-XLI, also known as Jefferson-Nuevo Mundo (1934). The essays are clearly written and will be helpful both to those making their initial approach to The Cantos and to those who have lived with Pound's poems for some time. -- G. Grieve-Carlson, Choice

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