Rating: 
Summary: A stunning treasure
Review: "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" was the first Pound's poem I read and I fell in the net of the deep beauty of Pound's works becoming an enthusiastic student of him. A lot of stupidities has been told against his verses, but the authentic poetry provides itself the stunning evidence that can outlast all the poisonous criticism. Pound was a giant as one of the reviewers of this page has said.
It is true that Pound wrote some verses in Italian, Greek,... and used chinese ideograms as constructive elements of his "Cantos" (his great masterpiece) and this is not a shortcoming but a necessity. "Poetry" told once T.S.Elliot "can communicate before being understood". This is the case of Pound's poetry. Words and fragments in different languages are used not as superfluous ornaments but in order to articulate a strong feeling and providing pleasure to "the expert". The "non-expert" is attracted also by the surroundings of these elements and the imaginist grounds of each "Canto". It's just poetry! To convince of that I copy here some verses of the Cantos"nothing matters but the quality
of the affection
in the end"
(Canto LXXVI) "Pull down thy vanity.
Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail"
[...]
"What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage"
[...]
"The ant's a centaur in his dragon world"
(Canto LXXXI) "The valley is thick with leaves, with leaves, the trees,
The sunlight glitters, glitters a-top,
Like a fish-scale roof,
Like the church roof in Poictiers
If it where gold.
Beneath it, beneath it
Not a ray, not a slivver, not a spare disk of sunlight;
Flaking the black, soft water;[...]
Ivory dipping in silver
Shadow'd, o'ershadow'd
Ivory dipping in silver
Not a splotch, not a lost shatter of sunlight"
(Canto IV) The latter are only some few examples you can find in his work, where each word is always (almost) necessary and not superfluous.
Rating: 
Summary: Acknowledged Failure, Oscillating Between Song and Sputter
Review: A self-acknowledged failure, Pound's Cantos is the 20th-century's greatest mix of poetry and pedantic doggerel--unfortunately more doggerel than poetry, chocked with dry historical trivia which took on almost occult significance for Pound in his lunacy. (Though Pound's ravings have brought charges of madness, and his temporary confinement to an insane asylum, his rubbish philosophy compares favorably with Yeats' mysticism and Eliot's medievalism.) Pound threw disparate material together and tried to let it cohere on its own; ultimately, Pound admitted that he "botched" the Cantos as a unified work of art. Pound prefered verse intended to be sung or chanted, and so not surprisingly the famous libretto of LXXXI is the best; first chanting those lines brought tears to my reading eyes, though their message seems weak and incoherent. Ironically, Pound's most intense passages frequently employ almost Miltonic rhetoric, joining the arch-Modernist with his great poetic forebears: "Until our dust with Waller's shall be laid, / Siftings on siftings into oblivion"....
Rating:
Summary: The Daily Edition by Ezra Pound
Review: Ezra Pound once quipped, "literature is news that stays new." He couldn't have said a truer sliver of wisdom than had he stated I live in Victoria and rarely wear hats. Perusing through the Cantos it is easy to verify Pound's adage.
Canto LXXXI enriches us with the bulletin: "goat bells tinkle all night." It's a universal truth and remains relevant, especially in light of the situation in Iraq - and that they probably have goats there, milling under the crepuscular tones of an Arabian night, and then later become aggitated by increased military activity which causes their bells to tinkle as they flee. Later on in the same Canto, Pound insists we envisage the "green of the mountain pool." Remind you of a recent tide that brough tsunami water into the mountains? That last quote almost makes one want to rebuke Pound for his lack of tact in reducing the gravity of the situation in Asia with such a serene and peaceful image. And finally, line 10 from Canto XIII has a character asking "perhaps I should take up charioteering, or archery." Replace "charioteering" with yoga, and "archery" with pilates and the piece immediately transforms into an op-ed about fitness trends. This is timeless stuff, and reads pretty much like the Financial Times.
Rating:
Summary: "Make it new."
Review: Harold Bloom observes in his book, "The Western Canon," that for literary heavyweights, Dante tends to be the role model. (Joseph Campbell observes as much regarding James Joyce: "The model for Joyce's life was Dante.") Dante felt strongly that educated people have a duty to assist practically in the betterment of humanity. Being a mere aesthete, for Dante, was burying one's talents at best, and moral cowardice at worst. Pound's Cantos is modeled clearly on Dante's "Divine Comedy," and Pound felt a responsibility to "shout from the rooftops" what he felt was threatening the family as an institution, world culture, the environment, and American democracy. The Cantos thus are very much a personal record of Pound's own odyssey through the tumult of the early 20th century. The Cantos commence with the Ulysses quest of Canto I, then time-travel through European culture by presenting the paratactic history of heroic individuals who resisted vice and championed virtue. In this sense, the Cantos are a modern-day "Plutarch's Lives" - history interpreted by a poet. Pound's first personal crisis was after the First World War, (in which many of his own friends died). "I sought to discover what causes war," Pound stated. His conclusion, after years of historical research, was that wars are fomented by elite power groups: royalty, militarists, industrialists. It was at this time that both the Cantos' character, and Pound's character, changed (somewhere around Canto 45, the famous-infamous "Usury Canto"). Pound found in his historical researches that rates of interest are an accurate gauge to the civilized state of a culture: high levels of interest, "usury," correspond to levels of philistine barbarism in which the weak are devoured by the powerful. Pound's equation, then, was that social Darwinism, political economy, rampant capitalism, debasement of currency, are destroyers of people's families, personal lives, and therefore, of culture. It was natural, given this view, for Pound to be attracted to Confucianism, with its accent on the family as the hub from which all things virtuous radiate. A large part of the Cantos is taken up with Pound's presentation of Chinese wisdom and virtue. In the thirties, Pound crafted the American cantos, or "Adams Cantos," as they usually are called. Clear from this section of the Cantos is Pound's immense respect for American democracy. Pound foresaw the coming of the Second World War and engaged in a vigorous letter-writing campaign with several US senators, urging avoidance of foreign entanglements. During the war, Pound, having failed to leave Italy before his visa expired, and thus finding himself trapped in fascist Italy, engaged in a series of polemical and rather idiosyncratic radio broadcasts, depicting the war as the latest historical example of the economically powerful preying upon the politically weak. While Pound wrote only two cantos during this time, the "Italian Cantos," the sense of the broadcasts is already clear in those cantos preceding the war. This was Pound's second crisis. Once the war ended, the sixty year-old Pound found himself incarcerated in a gorilla cage, lying on cold concrete, left to the open air, with a nighttime spotlight shining on him as he tried to sleep. Pound had made powerful political enemies, and his incarcerators were not sadistic fascists but the victorious US Army in Pisa, Italy. It was here, while incarcerated in Pisa, that Pound wrote the "Pisan Cantos," that section of the Cantos which would earn him the first Bollingen Prize of 1948. By then, however, Pound was become a political prisoner in St. Elizabeth's in Washington, D.C. Based on subsequent assertions of Pound's attorney, Pound was in no danger of the government's treason charge. Nevertheless, Pound's wife opted to have Ezra committed rather than face a possible capital charge of treason for his wartime radio broadcasts. It was during his twelve-year stay in St. Elizabeth's that Pound would write the "Rock-Drill" and "Thrones" sections of the Cantos, and St. Elizabeth's became a site of pilgrimage for poets and authors the world over. Asked to say what is most central to the Cantos, I think Pound would say with considerable self-respect, were he here, that he foresaw the very problems American democracy is reeling under now: endless wars and fiscal mismanagement impoverishing the lives of millions of Americans. It is topical to think of Pound as a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Yet Eisenhower's farewell address, the observations of USMC general Smedley Butler on the robber baron nature of US gunboat diplomacy, F.D.R.'s now-proven foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack, the six million deaths caused by the US paramilitary since 1947, the daylight assassination of the only American president to oppose and attempt to abolish the Federal Reserve Bank, the faked Gulf of Tonkin Incident used to justify the Vietnam War, the Saturday Night Massacre, the "Wag the Dog" spectacle of modern US politics, the infiltration of the US media in Operation Cointelpro, the proposed fake terror of Operation Northwoods, the current "war for peace": these are the very things Pound would understand, and which he presciently railed against. Pound is an unpleasant reminder for many literary types, that, at least by Dante's standard, they are mere aesthetes lacking political and economic acumen. This perturbs the literati, and thus they find Pound infuriating or irrelevant. The Cantos - which I have indeed read - are beautiful and diaphanous. Even the boring sections are impeccably crafted. What really moves me in reading Pound is how he seemed to mean every word he wrote. You cannot help but sense Pound's profound sincerity in his views. As such, the Cantos, like Pound's life, are a document of personal courage. That said, the Cantos aren't for everybody. You simply *must* familiarize yourself with Eustace Mullin's "Secrets of the Federal Reserve" to grasp how far Ezra Pound's understanding of economics outstrips his modern-day nay-sayers. I once described Pound's economic ideas to a neighbor, an economist, and his immediate reply was, "That's right. He's exactly right." Good luck on your odyssey.
Rating:
Summary: Worth The Difficulties
Review: I have had the privelege of living and studying with Pound's daughter Mary de Rachewiltz at Brunnenburg castle. She taught her father's poetry well to a group of undergraduate students with basic knowledge of Pound and the Cantos. I'm not going to lie Pound's Cantos is probably the hardest thing I have ever read. His allusions range from the Odyssey to the most obscure Spanish tales to Chinese philosophy. However, the language and beauty of his words make up for the obscure refrences. I highly reccommend The Pisan Cantos, The Fragments. Most of the Cantos is pretentious and heavy handed but when finishing the Cantos with Mary we came across one of the last fragments written...when Pound was writing his Paradiso Terrestre...and this fragment more than made up for the pretentiousness.
"That her acts
Olga's acts
of beauty
be remembered.
Her name was courage
& is written olga These lines are for the
ultimate CANTO
whatever I may write
in the interim."
The Cantos are worth the difficulty, I recommend getting a good guidbook, however, because some of the refrences are very obscure.
Rating:
Summary: THE GREATEST EPIC POEM OF THE 20TH CENTURY
Review: It's a shame that great literature has become the domain of the critics and "professors". It is also a shame that our modern society has lost its sense of history. For that is what The Cantos are, a great historic and poetic epic.
T.S. Eliot wrote in his essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", that a poet should not fear to dig deep into the literary tradition of the past for his material. Not only that, but Eliot said we should learn from that tradition. Pound does this perfectly, not only digging into Western literary tradition, but into Eastern tradition as well.
One reviwer complained that The Cantos weren't written in English, so this disqualifies them from being considered as part of English literature. Really? Well, in that case we should forget Beowulf, because technically speaking, Anglo-Saxon isn't really 'modern' English now is it? Such nit-picking belongs to bored, pedantic scholars, who are ruining great literature with their 'criticism'.
The Cantos are hard going. They are demanding. But that is what great literature should do. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are not easy to read either, but one must take the patience and dedication to find the beauty. And those who do this with The Cantos will not be disapointed. But it also takes a knowledge of the tradition Pound is navigating. One doesn't have to be a scholar (thank God), to appreciate The Cantos, but one does have to possess some understanding of the tradition he's working in. Again, this requires patience and a little extra reading. A good guide is also helpful and I recommend Terrell's companion to The Cantos. They were indispensible and immensely helpful to me.
As for the Chinese, a good dictionary and a little patience and you will be rewarded. I was lucky enough to have lived in Taiwan for a year and brought The Cantos along. A Chinese friend helped me to translate many of the characters and she was amazed at Pound's translations and use of them throughout The Cantos.
Fortunately, great literature will out-live the critics. Pound's Cantos are a monumental achievement in literature, in any language and has few equals to it in terms of language, history, passion, and power. The Cantos remind us of the power of words and how they can change us. They are daunting on the first encounter. Don't give up. You will be moved by them. I carry a copy with me everywhere I go. I never get tired of reading them and being stirred by the words on the page. And isn't that what great literature is supposed to do?
Rating:
Summary: Pound is a GIANT!
Review: My! My! MY! So they can't make sense of Pound so that means Pound is nonsense. So they don't have even the beginning of an understanding of the money system and that makes Pound's economic theories crackpot. So they don't know a word of Chinese and are prepared to listen to obscure and envious 'scholars' (whose own work is riddled with errors and as arid as the Sahara) dismiss Pound's translations as rubbish. So Pound was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth's for disagreeing with the system and that means he must have been insane because anyone who disagrees with the system has to be insane. I guess Pound's 'critics' (overgenerous word) also believe that the official world and big business have their best interests at heart too. Wake up, folks! If Pound is too difficult for some to understand because they don't have one iota of his learning then they should be honest enough to say so. Personally I find much beauty, much meaning, and much significance in the Cantos. But when fools look in a mirror they will invariably see something foolish. My advice? Forget about them and read the Cantos along with Terrell's Companion. Pound is a giant and there are many who dislike giants.
Rating: 
Summary: Canto minimo.
Review: One could do worse than Pound, somehow.
Rating:
Summary: Worth the effort
Review: One thing is clear about Ezra Pound: his labors amounted to no more than a thousand dimly-lit candles burning in all the windows of an enormous mansion, whose ediface would then be that of twentieth-century poetry. Unlike his close friend Wallace Stevens, in whose deeply verisimilar narratives of New England life one finds profound and gorgeous truths on the natures of salt & love (literally), Pound's writing amounts, in the end, to just so much fluff. Unlike his progeny Billy Collins, Pound never writes anything from a persona of invitingness -- he comes across frankly as rather unlikeable, anti-sexual in a weird way, and perhaps in a sense almost even angry, if it is possible for poetry to be angry. The Cantos is a nightmare. It reads half the time like some kind of senseless communist propaganda, other times more like a Chinese take-out menu, and the rest of the time just plain meaningless. It's strange too since Pound certainly seems to have understood how to tie the delicate threads of language into something beautiful, like a ribbon, or bow-tie. But then he writes things like: "And these are the labors of Tovarisch"?! I'll take my Egg-foo-Young with a side of Stevens and Collins, please!
Rating:
Summary: Fury and Conviction.
Review: The Cantos are monolithic, and I think one of the most valuable pieces of literature to read from Western Civilization. Sure, they don't contain the secrets to the universe, but they do contain the thoughts of a genius who was trying to get his mind wrapped around truth. I do not think that Pound always speaks the truth in his works. But he is always trying to and is always fanatically convinced of what he is saying. For the conviction and emotional tonality alone this work is worth reading. Pound rages on the page and you can feel it. Reading it can be like getting shouted at for an hour. He also finds sympathy for some and you feel his description of them as a close friend relating a nostalgic tale. He can also be grim, and his words seem the perfect eulogy for Western Civilization. Reading it is like getting pummeled! Yet with each struggle one comes out feeling a desire to know more about the world and to search out truth.
When I first opened the Cantos, I felt that they were not well written, because the writing is choppy, in places it seems haphazard and sloppy. One can also read his `Guide to Culture' and find that it reads like a notebook; not for public consumption. However, Pound's power does not lie with his `technical' skill. There I would look perhaps to Louis Zukofsky, whose style and thought was similar, but whose technique is profound and impeccable. By contrast, Pound gives the impression of writing with incredible haste and bluster, as if fighting with his life to complete this work before his death. There is no real pattern to all of the cantos. It probably should be read more as a collection of poems on similar themes than in a Dantesque sort of way. But you see the unfolding of Pound's wild and weird life as the Cantos unfold, and his intellect and passions fight against the world that would ultimately defeat him. The cantos are not written to be accepted technically; they are about teaching life (Pound would say wisdom; APPLIED knowledge) and about truth, and not about words.
Reading Pound, one feels the weight of civic responsibility. Pound rages at what he sees rending Western Civilization from its roots. He discloses history by mentioning it, using events as metaphors, as expressions, as examples of his points, and in doing this he expects you to know them. Pound's poetry convicts one to read Dante, to read Homer, to read the Troubadours. And if you took nothing more away from that Cantos than that, that isn't bad. But you see in this work someone who is absolutely dedicated to how he felt the world should be. There is no apathy here. We can all stand to nod to Pound's conviction. I do not agree with him on many issues (although some I do), but I think that even if one disagreed on all counts with Pound, they could take from the Cantos the fervor and mission of a man dedicated to changing the world for what he saw as the better. You can still feel his intent and intensity on these pages. I think that as long as people read it, they will. Read this.
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