Saved by the Ant’s Fore-Foot

David Trotter

  • The Pisan Cantos by Ezra Pound, edited by Richard Sieburth
    New Directions, 159 pp, US $13.95, October 2003, ISBN 0 08 112155 5
  • Poems and Translations by Ezra Pound, edited by Richard Sieburth
    Library of America, 1363 pp, US $45.00, October 2003, ISBN 1 931082 41 3

In the years since their publication in 1948, Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos have given rise to interpretative bad faith on a scale unusual even by the lofty standards of literary criticism. The reason for this is not some special failing on the part of Pound’s adherents, but rather the burden of expectation laid from the outset on a sequence of 11 poems written in the US Army’s Disciplinary Training Center in Pisa in the summer and autumn of 1945.

You are not Logged In

  • If you have already registered login here
  • If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
  • If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
  • If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
  • If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions

[*] Vincent Sherry is the most recent critic to try to make sense of this and other statements by Pound about the British Empire’s imbecility, in The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford US, 416 pp., £15.50, May 2004, 0 19 517818 1). Sherry argues that in poems such as ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’, Pound developed a ‘poetics of critical mimicry’. The object of that critical mimicry was the logic – and the ‘idiom’ – of Liberal policy, as articulated in Britain in the years immediately before and during the First World War. Sherry’s hypothesis, established by meticulous readings of a wide variety of texts by Pound, Eliot, Ford, Stein and Woolf, is that Liberal war policy was the provocation to an ‘experimental verbal art’.