The art of the early Cantos

Abstract

The first chapter of this thesis explores Pound's innovations with metre in the years up to beginning the Cantos, arguing for a kind of cross-hatching principle consistently attending to all parts of the poem at once and arresting the poem's insistent movement forewards. The second chapter details the perfecting of these innovations in the early parts of the Cantos, as well as arguing for the extension of the principle, from the organizing of the language into the organizing of the subject matter, so that each new item relates to the body of the poem. The third chapter notes a challenge to this principle in Canto VIII, that the poem can never again suppress, and which sets up a tension throughout the work. It offers speculative readings of the reasons for this challenge, not least an awareness of the precarious position of art and the artist in contemporary society. The chapter argues for art as a model of reform. The fourth chapter examines the middle cantos, in which Pound pledges himself to reforms that contradict the model established by his own artistic principles, and the cantos written during his imprisonment at Pisa, where the tension between art and society, and artist and society, is thrown into question once more. The method of investigation throughout is a technical analysis of the metre, set against an attention to the opinions set forth in the poem. Little reference is made to secondary texts, and extensive reference is made to the text of the Cantos, fourth edition, published by Faber and Faber, London, 1987.