The Cantos

The Cantos of Ezra Pound is one of the great landmarks in twentieth-century poetry. This Fourth Collected edition of 1987 includes two previously uncollected cantos, and some passages from other cantos, omitted from earlier printings, restored to the text.

Ezra Pound was born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho. He came to Europe in 1898 and settled in London, where he was to meet Yeats, Eliot, Ford, Hulme and Gaudier-Brzeska. In 1920 he moved to Paris, and later to Rapallo. His acquaintances by now included Joyce, Hemingway, Brancusi, Picabia, Cocteau, Antheil and C. H. Douglas. During the Second World War he broadcast over Rome Radio - for which, eventually, he was tried for treason in Washington. He was committed to a hospital for the insane, where he was held for thirteen years. He was released in 1958 and returned to Italy, dying in Venice in 1972. His main publications include The Cantos (I-CXVII), Collected Shorter Poems, Translations, The Confucian Odes, Literary Essays, Guide to Kulchur, Selected Prose and ABC of Reading.