Canto CVI turns to visions of the goddess as fertility symbol via Demeter and Persephone, in her lunar, love aspect as Selena, Helen and Aphrodite Euploia ("of safe voyages") and as hunter Athene (Proneia: "of forethought," the form in which she is worshiped at Delphi) and Diana (through quotes from Layamon). The sun as Zeus/Helios also features. These vision fragments are cross-cut with an invocation of the Taoist Kuan Tzu ( Book of Master Kuan). This work argues that the mind should rule the body as the basis of good living and good governance. Finally, Pound ends the canto by including a respectful dedication to Aphrodite. He uses the phrase “Cypria munimenta sortita est” which is Latin for “The citadels of Cyprus were her appointed realm,” suggesting that it’s only for love that a journey like this can be made. Without explaining why Pound felt like he needed to make a dedication to Aphrodite, the poem ends with “So that:”.

Canto LII opens with references to Duke Leopoldo, John Adams and Gertrude Bell, before sliding into a particularly virulent anti-Semitic passage, directed mainly at the Rothschild family. The remainder of the canto is concerned with the classic Chinese text known as the Li Ki or Book of Rites, especially those parts that deal with agriculture and natural increase. The diction is the same as that used in earlier cantos on similar subjects. Apart from a passing reference to Randolph of Roanoke, Canto XC moves to the world of myth and love, both divine and sexual. The canto opens with an epigraph in Latin to the effect that while the human spirit is not love, it delights in the love that proceeds from it. The Latin is paraphrased in English as the final lines of the canto. Following a reference to signatures in nature and Yggdrasil, the poet introduces Baucis and Philemon, an aged couple who, in a story from Ovid's Metamorphoses, offer hospitality to the gods in their humble house and are rewarded. In this context, they may be intended to represent the poet and his wife. Qian, Z. (1995). Orientalism and modernism: The legacy of China in Pound and Williams. Durham: Duke University Press. which read, in the translation by Charles Eliot Norton, "O ye, who are in a little bark, desirous to listen, following behind my craft which singing passes on, turn to see again Your shores; put not out upon the deep; for haply losing me, ye would remain astray." This reference signalled Pound's intent to close the poem with a final volume based on his own paradisiacal vision. The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. [1] Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered to present formidable difficulties to the reader. Strong claims have been made for it as the most significant work of modernist poetry of the twentieth century. As in Pound's prose writing, the themes of economics, governance and culture are integral to its content.Canto XCIII opens with a quote, "A man's paradise is his good nature", taken from The Maxims of King Kati to His Son Merikara. [10] The canto then proceeds to look at examples of benevolent action by public figures that, for Pound, illustrate this maxim. These include Apollonius making his peace with animals, Saint Augustine on the need to feed people before attempting to convert them, and Dante and Shakespeare writing on distributive justice, an aspect of their work that the poet points out is generally overlooked. Central to this aspect is a fragment from Dante, non fosse cive, taken from a passage in Paradiso, Canto VIII, in which Dante is asked "would it be worse for man on earth if he were not a citizen?" and unhesitatingly answers in the affirmative. Find sources: "The Cantos"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( August 2022) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) China’s Forbidden City.” [Documentary on Emperor Yongle of Ming]. Hazards and catastrophes, 31 October 2020. YouTube. After opening with a glimpse of Mount Ida, an important locus for the history of the Trojan War, Canto LXXVIII moves through much that is familiar from the earlier cantos in the sequence: del Cossa, the economic basis of war, Pound's writer and artist friends in London, "virtuous" rulers ( Lorenzo de' Medici, the emperors Justinian, Titus and Antoninus, Mussolini), usury and stamp scripts culminating in the Nausicaa episode from the Odyssey and a reference to the Confucian classic Annals of Spring and Autumn in which "there are no righteous wars".

Diocletian – Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus Augustus (244-312), Roman emperor from 284 to 305. In the Baedeker Pound was using (French edition 66), Diocletian is given credit for building the Arena, though newer evidence situates its construction in the Julio-Claudian period (14-54 AD). The Arena of Verona is older than the Colosseum in Rome, which was built on the same principle and finished in AD 80 (Bolla 14). It has nothing to do with Diocletian.Cantos XLII, XLIII and XLIV move to the Sienese bank, the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena and to the 18th-century reforms of Pietro Leopoldo, Habsburg Arch Duke of Tuscany. Founded in 1624, the Monte dei Paschi was a low-interest, not-for-profit credit institution whose funds were based on local productivity as represented by the natural increase generated by the grazing of sheep on community land (the "BANK of the grassland" of Canto XLIII). As such, it represents a Poundian non-capitalist ideal.

In the light of cantos written later than this letter, it would be possible to add other recurring motifs to this list, such as: periploi ('voyages around'); vegetation rituals such as the Eleusinian Mysteries; usura, banking and credit; and the drive towards clarity in art, such as the 'clear line' of Renaissance painting and the 'clear song' of the troubadours. The core meaning is summed up in Pound's footnote to the effect that the History Classic contains the essentials of the Confucian view of good government. In the canto, these are summed up in the line "Our dynasty came in because of a great sensibility", where sensibility translates the key character Ling, and in the reference to the four Tuan, or foundations, benevolence, rectitude, manners and knowledge. Rulers who Pound viewed as embodying some or all of these characteristics are adduced: Queen Elizabeth I, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, as are Napoleon III, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Dexter White, who stand for everything Pound opposes in government and finance. With the outbreak of war in 1939, Pound was in Italy, where he remained, despite a request for repatriation he made after Pearl Harbor. During this period, his main source of income was a series of radio broadcasts he made on Rome Radio. He used these broadcasts to express his full range of opinions on culture, politics and economics, including his opposition to American involvement in a European war and his anti-Semitism. In 1943, he was indicted for treason in his absence, and wrote a letter to the indicting judge in which he claimed the right to freedom of speech in his defence. This section of the cantos is, for the most part, made up of fragmentary citations from the writings of John Adams. Pound's intentions appear to be to show Adams as an example of the rational Enlightenment leader, thereby continuing the primary theme of the preceding China Cantos sequence, which these cantos also follow from chronologically. Adams is depicted as a rounded figure; he is a strong leader with interests in political, legal and cultural matters in much the same way that Malatesta and Mussolini are portrayed elsewhere in the poem. The English jurist Sir Edward Coke, who is an important figure in some later cantos, first appears in this section of the poem. Given the fragmentary nature of the citations used, these cantos can be quite difficult to follow for the reader with no knowledge of the history of the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Miscellaneous Recordings, San Ambrogio and Venice, 1962-1972

Rainey documents that Pound, Eliot, and Bride Scratton watched a variety show in the arena, “with clowns, dancers,/ performing dogs” which is referred to in the earliest drafts of the Malatesta Cantos ( MC 238-39). The Cantos was initially published in the form of separate sections, each containing several cantos that were numbered sequentially using Roman numerals (except cantos 85–109, first published with Arabic numerals). The original publication dates for the groups of cantos are as given below. The complete collection of cantos was published together in 1987 (including a final short coda or fragment, dated 24 August 1966). In 2002 a bilingual edition of “Posthumous Cantos” ( Canti postumi) appeared in Italy. This is a concise selection from the mass of drafts (circa 1915–1965) uncollected or unpublished by Pound, and contains many passages that throw light on The Cantos. [5] I–XVI [ edit ] Published in 1924/5 as A Draft of XVI Cantos by the Three Mountains Press in Paris. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta "built a temple so full of pagan works" (Canto XI). Portrait by Piero della Francesca. Tang, Y. F. (2014). Translating across cultures: Yii jing and understanding Chinese poetry. Intercultural Communication Studies, 23(1), 187–202.

Eliot, T. S. (2014). Ezra Pound: His metric and poetry. In The complete prose of T.S. Eliot: Apprentice years, 1905–1918 (Eds., J. B. Spears & R. Schuchard) (pp. 626–647). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Alliteration is another common device in poetry, one that involves a very specific type of repetition, the use, and reuse of the same consonant sound at the beginning of multiple words. For example, “stretched sail” in line nine of the first stanza and “bloody bever” in line five of the third stanza. Canto LXIX continues the subject of the Dutch loan and then turns to Adams' fear of the emergence of a native aristocracy in America, as noted in his remark that Jefferson feared rule by "the one" (monarch or dictator), while he, Adams, feared "the few". The remainder of the canto is concerned with Hamilton, James Madison and the affair of the assumption of debt certificates by Congress which resulted in a significant shift of economic power to the federal government from the individual states. Mead, H. (2018). Canto 4. In R. Parker (Ed.), Readings in the cantos (pp. 57–72). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. As The Cantos Project is numbering the lines of The Cantos, references to cantos already glossed will be by canto number and line(s), as standard with classical works. Example: III: ll.7–17.