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David Trotter

  • The Pisan Cantos by Ezra Pound, edited by Richard Sieburth  Buy this book
  • Poems and Translations by Ezra Pound, edited by Richard Sieburth  Buy this book

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.

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David Trotter is a professor of English at Cambridge and the author of The English Novel in History, The Making of the Reader and, most recently, Cinema and Modernism.