The Design of the "Cantos": An Introduction

Abstract

An Introduction* Richard Sieburth for James Laughlin "I HAVE BEGUN an endless poem, of no known category," Ezra Pound writes to James Joyce in early 1917. "Phanapoeia or something or other, all about everything. 'Poetry' may print the first three Cantos this spring. I wonder what you will make of it. Probably too sprawling and unmusical to find favor in your ears. Will try to get some melody into it further on." Although the poem here referred to as Phanopoeia would eventually evolve into something called The Cantos of Ezra Pound, its title is not really helpful in identifying what "known category" the work be longs to, designating as it does an entity which, like the Bible (la biblia), is both singular and plural, both One and Many. If we try to classify Pound's work at all, we tend to place it under the rubric loosely termed "the long poem," and to situate it next to such texts as Williams' Pater son, Olson's Maximus Poems, or Zukovsky's A? as if the mere fact of length were sufficient to constitute an adequate criterion for the deter mination of poetic genre. Edgar Allen Poe, for one, considered the very notion of a long poem an aesthetic impossibility: "I hold that a long * Originally delivered as a lecture to the undergraduate members of James Laughlin's Pound/Williams course at Brown University, April, 1983. Since this is intended as an introductory essay rather than as a scholarly article, I have preferred not to clutter it with footnotes. But my debt to the community of Pound scholars, and particularly to the work of Bernstein,