The Cantos

Delmore Schwartz said about The Cantos: "They are one of the touchstones of modern poetry." William Carlos WIlliams said "[Pound] discloses history by its odor, by the feel of it-in the words; fuses it with the words, present and past, to MAKE his Cantos. Make them."
Since the 1969 revised edition, the Italian Cantos LXXII and LXXIII (as well as a 1966 fragment concluding the work) have been added. Now appearing for the first time is Pound's recently found Eglish translation of Italian Canto LXXII.

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.