The Pisan Cantos

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 192 pages
• Published by: New Directions Publishing Corporation October 2003
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 081121558X
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0811215589
• Book Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Weighs: 11.2 ounces

Product Review
It is in The Pisan Cantos that we can approach Pound most closely as a person. -- James Laughlin, Pound As Wuz

Sieburth has done a strikingly good job.His introductionis a model of its kind, a serious work of criticism. -- Clive Wilmer, Times Literary Supplement [London], 4 June 2004

The introduction is one of the best short essays I have read on the great memory poemThe Pisan Cantos. -- Marjorie Perloff, Boston Review, April/May 2004

Product Description
At last, a definitive, paperback edition of Ezra Pound's finest work.

Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos was written in 1945, while the poet was being held in an American military detention center near Pisa, Italy, as a result of his pro-Fascist wartime broadcasts to America on Radio Rome. Imprisoned for some weeks in a wire cage open to the elements, Pound suffered a nervous collapse from the physical and emotional strain. Out of the agony of his own inferno came the eleven cantos that became the sixth book of his modernist epic, The Cantos, themselves conceived as a Divine Comedy for our time.

The Pisan Cantos were published in 1948 by New Directions and in the following year were awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry by the Library of Congress. The honor came amid violent controversy, for the dark cloud of treason still hung over Pound, incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Yet there is no doubt that The Pisan Cantos displays some of his finest and most affecting writing, marking an elegaic turn to the personal while synthesizing the philosophical and economic political themes of his previous cantos. They are now being published for the first time as a separate paperback, in a fully annotated edition prepared by Richard Sieburth, who also contributes a thoroughgoing introduction, making Pound's master-work fully accessible to students and general readers.

Reader Reviews
This superbly edited volume makes Pound's "Pisans" readily available in an attractive and affordable paperback edition. This is some of the most important American poetry of the post-War period, with intelligent and helpful annotations to make the work fully accessible even to those not versed in Poundian arcana. Indispensable!