Draft of XXX Cantos

An epic of great vision and complexity, Pound's Cantos addresses the profound human issues in history and in our time. Each of the nine groupings of poems can be seen as a fresh wave that swells out from and falls back upon the earlier cantos, extending them structurally, adding new layers of meaning. "A Draft of XXX Cantos" (1930), which introduces the work, thus anticipates the full Cantos' essential themes and provides the surest entry into Pound's encyclopedic masterpiece.

New Directions has been the primary publisher of Ezra Pound in the U.S. since the founding of the press when James Laughlin published New Directions in Prose and Poetry 1936. That year Pound was fifty-one. In Laughlin's first letter to Pound, he wrote: "Expect, please, no fireworks. I am bourgeois-born (Pittsburgh); have never missed a meal. . . . But full of 'noble caring' for something as inconceivable as the future of decent letters in the US." Little did Pound know that into the twenty-first century the fireworks would keep exploding as readers continue to find his books relevant and meaningful.