Colin's Critical Essay

The Second Heave: Breaking the Epic

Introduction
In the Western world, poetry—and long poem in particular—is often divided into lyric and epic. Indeed, until the modern era, these categories sufficed to delineate the distinctions between these modes of poetry. They have been with us since ancient Greek times—Sappho and Homer, writing in the 7th century BC virtually defined the lyric and epic modes respectively. In the 20th century in particular, however, this genre binary can no longer suffice.

In The Pisan Cantos, Pound writes within the epic tradition yet in a mode decidedly outside of the “epic” as such. If “To break the pentameter, that was the first heave” (81.55),1 surely the second heave is the breaking of the epic. In my sense of the term, breaking means to “make it new!” which I see, as do Rosenthal and Gall, as not meaning “kill it!”2 The epic, with all of its prerequisites can exist no more. In its stead, he creates a new genre—a “modern verse epic” as Bernstein would have it3 —which as various critics have noted is infused with not only the epic tradition but also with the lyric sequence, the autobiography, and even the (lyric) pastoral elegy, the fugue and the fresco. Thus, in this paper, I will argue that while many critics have rightly noted that “taking claim” to the epic tradition, in The Pisan Cantos, Pound radically alters the epic by infusing in it a variety of other modes and genres, thus creating a new genre.

Before I go about arguing this, I should first like to note that I have organized this paper in a manner similar to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with a set of nesting propositions (or more rather in my case sections) each one dependent on its parent.4 Additionally, throughout this analysis, I will use various critical motifs to guide through the sometimes indeterminate world of genre. In examining this genre, I shall use what Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations called “family resemblance,”5 which I am thankful to Bernstein for inspiring me to use, which he somewhat paradoxically calls “family likeness.” Extending on this, I will use Kenneth Burke’s concept of the “representative anecdote,” which I shall explain in further detain in §3.2. And a final note: given the extraordinarily large amount of scholarship on Pound, I have tried to be a through as possible, but invariably I have misses some sources that would, perhaps, serve to provide a clearer picture on this topic.

Background
As I have said, I will argue that The Pisan Cantos create a new genre: the “modern verse epic.” I have taken this term from Bernstein and I intend to build upon his argument. For Bernstein, the modern verse epic and the classical epic exist more or less on a continuum; the modern verse epic is not a new genre. It seems that for him, “modern” is a temporal marker rather than a spatial one. In other words, the modern verse epic is a verse epic written in modem times. In my estimation, the closest he come to defining a spatial relationship between the modern and classical is when he writes, “I suppose that which distinguishes a modern verse epic from its classical predecessors is the necessity, in a society no longer unified by a single, generally accepted code of values, of justifying its argument by the direct appeal of the author’s own experience and emotions.”6 Even here, he is only supposing. This method makes sense, however, given his argument of a continuity between the modern and classical. One would be hard pressed to argue that there is a complete discontinuity between the two, however, I believe and will attempt to show a more disjunct relationship.

Moving Beyond the Tribe
For Bernstein, the epic is, borrowing the words of a lesser fascist poet,7 “the tale of the tribe”8 While this offers an excellent description of the modern verse epic’s ends, what I shall examine is the means by which this is accomplished. While the ends may be similar for the classical and modern verse epics, the means are decidedly different and it is with this which I shall be concerned. While the tradition and the end of that tradition are continuous, the genre and its means are not. I shall further examine the genre in §4.1.

What are The Pisan Cantos
But first, before I may begin to examine the means of the poem and its relationship to the epic genre, I must examine the poem itself and the contexts it exists within. The Pisan Cantos are only part of Pound’s larger project in The Cantos. But as Pound lie in the American Disciplinary Training Center (DTC), a military prison camp, unsure if he will be hung for treason, he is alienated. He writes of “The enormous tragedy of the dream” (74.1), a tragedy that would see his political and economic views put into practice were defeated and “Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano / by the heels at Milano” (74.4-5). Not only were his ideas defeated “a Milano,” they were defeated when the “banker” (and we all know what Pound means by that) ruined the experiment by the mayor of Wörgl, Austria to implement his economic policies (74.551-67). Indeed, in part because of the intense emotion because of this experience, The Pisan Cantos are often the most celebrated of Pound’s works. Although Bernstein says, “I do not believe sequences like The Pisan Cantos or Drafts and Fragments constitute the poem’s major, let alone sole, success”9 (this, I should think is because these are the most lyrical parts of The Cantos).

An Epic of Motives
Now, if I am to go about arguing that The Pisan Cantos creates a new genre, I must confront the quandary of how a poem (or sequence thereof) can define a genre. To that end, I will use the technique of the “representative anecdote,” which is a concept created by Kenneth Burke in his A Grammar of Motives. In that book, Burke defined drama as the representative anecdote of human action.10 Here, however, I am following Paul Alpers's lead in extending this concept to defining a genre or mode.11 While his article is otherwise misguided, Alpers uses representative anecdotes to define the pastoral mode in poetry. Definitions of the pastoral carry many of the same problems that definitions the epic and many other genres do—they can be either too broad or too narrow. Here, though, I am extending on Alpers, in that he takes an existing “mode” and examines past “anecdotes,” while I assert The Pisan Cantos are a “representative anecdote” of sorts to define the modern verse epic.

A Brief Overview
The Cantos as a whole and The Pisan Cantos exist within the epic tradition. To argue otherwise would be farcical. The poem starts with the Odysseus myth, which he takes makes it his own. In the DTC, he is the “ΟΎ ΤΙΣ,” like Odysseus confronting the Cyclops: “As thou demand’st, I’ll tell thee my name, do thou / Make good thy hospitable gift to me. / My name is No-Man; No-Man each degree / Of friends, as well as parents, call my name”12 I shall not attempt to list the many other elements that make The Pisan Cantos exist within the epic tradition—those should be clear enough to the reader. But in this paper, I have tried to make a distinction between the epic tradition and the epic as such (or the epic genre). The epic tradition derives from the epic but is not it. What then is the epic? Newman defines the epic as “a long narrative poem that treats a single heroic figure or a group of such figures and concerns an historical event, such as a war or conquest, or an heroic quest or some other significant mythic or legendary achievement that is central to the traditions and belief of its culture.”13

But in this modern era, the epic has lost some of its “clout.” Bakhtin writes that “categories [such as “epic style” especially] and the very philosophical discourse on which they are grounded, are too narrow and cramped, and cannon accommodate the artistic prose of novelistic discourse.”14 And indeed, the term carries less weight than it used to. I could for instance, call this paper an “epic undertaking” (which it most certainly is). Reshaping that tradition for a new age is Pound’s goal and he does it quite marvelously.

The Importance of the Term
One could quite possibly argue that quibbling over the terminology of the generic classification of The Pisan Cantos is akin to medieval scholarly and theological argument over the number of angel that can fit on the head of a pin. Given all of the debate and inadequacy of any given definition of a genre, one is tempted to define a given genre as Justice Stewart defined pornography: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it […]”15 Indeed, this, in a sense is the argument of the poststructuralists. Derrida said of the “Law of Genre,” “The law is mad,” as “Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging [. . .] because of the effect of the code and of the generic mark. Making genre its mark, a text demarcates itself. If remarks of belonging belong without belonging, participate without belonging, then genre-designations cannot be simply part of the corpus.”16 Genre, then for Derrida, is indeterminate—adding a new text changes the genre. Given our ancient and modern penchant for “tedious concern with irrelevant details,”<span id="_ftnref17">17 what relevance does quibbling over the question of Pound’s (dis)continuity of the epic genre serve?

This—“form remembers.”<span id="_ftnref18">18 By “claiming” a tradition, yet altering a genre, Pound carves a space within the history of the West that is entirely his own.

Breaking the Epic
How, then, does Pound “break the epic?” In this section, I will outline several important artistic methods he uses to remake the epic.

Beyond the Lyre
The word lyric is derived from the Greek λύρα—lyre.<span id="_ftnref19">19 In ancient Greek times until about 1400 AD, lyric poetry was thus poetry set to music.<span id="_ftnref20">20 This, indeed, was one of the main distinctions between the lyric and the epic. In The Pisan Cantos, we see a return, in a sense, to the combination of lyric poetry and music. We see this happen in two ways: (a) literally, with music as text in Canto 75; and (b) as a manner of “form,” that of the fugue. Indeed, the use of music in The Pisan Cantos is important in several respects. More than 100 years earlier, Beethoven in his masterpiece would feel the need to bring in Friedrich Schiller’s poetry because the traditional symphonic form could not suffice, writing “''O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! / Sondern lasst uns angenehmere / anstimmen und freudenvollere''” (“Oh friends, not these tones! / Let us raise our voices in more / pleasing and more joyful sounds!”).<span id="_ftnref21">21 For Pound, the opposite was true. Because words alone could not suffice, he felt he must bring in “tones.”

The Musical Score
The first and most obvious manner the “λύρα” figures into The Pisan Cantos is in Canto 75, which is almost completely a musical score. And as Pound notes in a handwritten note to the score is titled “La canzone da li ucelli” (“the song of the birds”) and was “Fatto del Violino” (“made for the violin”).<span id="_ftnref22">22 Pound specifically notes that this piece is for the violin, which is a descendant from the lira da braccio, which during the Renaissance was “regarded as the equivalent of the lyre of Apollo and Orpheus”<span id="_ftnref23">23 and was, of course, descended from the lyre. In addition, the lyric climax of Canto 81 (“What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross” [81.134-5]), starts in a section titles “Libretto,” suggesting the high lyricism of the passage and connecting it to its musical roots.

The Fugue
Some critics have also noted the similarities between The Cantos—both individually and as a whole—and the fugue “form.” This, however, is the subject of much critical debate. But certainly at points in The Pisan Cantos, Pound uses the fugue as a method of (dis)organization. As Davis and others note, the fugue is a process, not a fixed form and theoretically can go on forever.<span id="_ftnref24">24 She notes the fugal elements in The Adams Cantos, while Woodward notes the similarity of the opening of Canto 81 (which I have quoted in §5.2.1) to a fugue.<span id="_ftnref25">25 This similarity is quite fascinating and should be examined in greater detail.

Other Lyric Elements
There is an extraordinary amount of scholarship on lyricism in The Pisan Cantos, and I should not endeavor to attempt to locate every lyrical passage mainly because they have likely already been located. Instead, I shall focus on some particularly interesting and pertinent lyrical elements.

Pastoral Elegy
The pastoral trope also figures heavily in The Pisan Cantos, a trope dating back to Theocritus in the 3rd century BC. Primarily a lyric trope, it reaches the zenith of its power in the form of the pastoral elegy, which is a poem mourning the loss of person in the “pastoral” mode. The most stunning example of the form is of course Milton’s “Lycidas,” which begins:

Yet once more, O ye laurels and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forced fingers rude, Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear, Compels me to disturb your season due; For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer. Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.<span id="_ftnref26">26

If we examine the beginning of The Pisan Cantos, we have replaced John King with Benito Mussolini and moreover the Catholic Church and “corrupted clergy,” which is the true target of Milton, with the Allied triumph in the war and with usurers run amok. And like the shepherd in the pastoral trope, Pound writes of this “enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent / shoulders”:

Manes! Manes was tanned and stuffed, Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano by the heels at Milano That maggots shd/ eat dead bullock DIGONOS, Δίγονος, but the twice crucified where in history will you find it? yet say this to the Possum: a bang, not a whimper, with a bang not with a whimper, (74.3-10) I am inclined to agree with the various critics who have called this opening “elegiac.”<span id="_ftnref27">27 But unlike Milton, this opening is far from the pastoral veneer; Eliot was wrong, there is a “bang.” There are, however, other more properly pastoral moments in the poem. The beginning of Canto 78 is surely more pastoral:

By the square elm of Ida 40 geese are assembled (little sister who could dance on a sax-pence) to arrange a pax mundi Sobr’ un zecchin’! Cassandra, your eyes are like tigers, with no word written in them You also have I carried to nowhere to an ill house and there is                    no end to the journey. (78.1-10)

But here, the imaginary pastoral landscape of yore becomes the harsh realities of the DTC. Even there, however, Pound finds a pastoral voice, in for instance as Sieburth notes, he “map[s] his immediate surroundings as a pastoral locus amoenus, each of whose tiniest inhabitants […] deserves grateful attention.”<span id="_ftnref28">28 In this vein, the song of the Lynx, too, is commonly taken as a lyric passage,<span id="_ftnref29">29 and indeed, we can see the pastoral elements in it:

Therein is the dance of the bassarids Therein are centaurs And now Priapus with Faunus One cannot, hopefully see “Faunus” and “centaurs” without thinking of the pastoral trope. We also see the quotation of Theocritus Idyll 2 (81.65) and we additionally see pastoralism in lyric climax in Canto 81:

casting but shade beyond the other lights sky’s clear night’s sea green of the mountain pool shone from the unmasked eyes in half-mask's space. What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross (81.129-35)

And a bit further down:

The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, (81.144-6)

Here, then we see the world around Pound at the DTC “mapped” onto a pastoral landscape. The effect of this, in addition to the elegiac aspects of the poem, adds an interesting dimension to the lyrical elements and help to remake the epic form.

The Lyric Sequence
While Nassar focuses on the disparate element of lyricism in The Cantos and their repetition and “flowering” from earlier later Cantos,<span id="_ftnref30">30 he does not examine the elements of lyric sequence. Rosenthal and Gall argue that The Pisan Cantos constitute a “modern poetic sequence,” but their analysis leaves much to be desired.<span id="_ftnref31">31

Sequencing Terminology
If I am to argue that there are elements of the lyric sequence in The Pisan Cantos, I first must define what I am talking about when I say “lyric sequence.” Lyric sequence is not “modern poetic sequence,” a term used to describe The Pisan Cantos in Rosenthal and Gall’s disappointing essay on the subject. Rather, a lyric sequence is simply that—a sequence of lyric poems, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. While this definition is most certainly not perfect and raises the risk of being overly inclusionary (i.e., it would include Plath’s Ariel, which is more properly a “shapely volume” of poetry than a lyric sequence, and also include a sequence not sequenced by its author; Wittgenstein’s concept, however, can be helpful here, especially in the first case: Ariel would more closely resemble the “shapely volume” family than the “lyric sequence” family), it provides us a foothold from which to examine the elements of lyric sequence in The Pisan Cantos.

Elements of the Lyric Sequence
Returning to Wittgenstein’s concept (presuming we ever left), I can examine how the disparate elements of lyricism in The Pisan Cantos can be together, as in a lyric sequence. The scholarship on the lyric sequence elements of The Pisan Cantos is surprisingly sparse, especially given the amount of scholarship on the lyric elements in The Pisan Cantos.

Some of the scholarship that does exist denies that the term “lyric sequence” should be used in describing The Cantos: Perloff asserts, “What Vendler calls the ‘massively solid structure’ of the lyric sequence has little in common with the serial mode of the Cantos, a form which is, in Kenner’s words, ‘a gestalt of what it can assimilate,’ or as I have put it elsewhere, a running transformer, constantly ingesting incoming unprocessed data.”<span id="_ftnref32">32 When it comes to Pound studies, Perloff is, like Eliot said of Johnson, “a dangerous person to disagree with,”<span id="_ftnref33">33 especially given that she is the critic many would say is most responsible for Pound’s current reputation as a poet. And while one would be rightly incorrect to call The Cantos in their entirety a lyric sequence, I think it wrong to say that they “have little in common.” Others, however, seem to take for granted that The (Pisan) Cantos are a sequence of sorts. Bush opens an essay on Pound’s politics with, “The Pisan Cantos, the poetic sequence that Pound wrote [. . .].”<span id="_ftnref34">34 He later notes the “pull toward open lyric progression.” Bacigalupo and Dickie among others treat the Pisans as a “sequence,”<span id="_ftnref35">35 seemingly in passing.

So, with that critical background in mind, I will now turn to what makes The Pisan Cantos a sequence; that is, how do we tie the disparate lyrical elements into a whole that is a sequence. Traditional sequence requires some manner of formal structure, which beyond the possibility of the fugue, which I shall address more later, is clearly lacking.

Recalling my discussion of the pastoral, I might turn to Marvell’s sequence “Upon Appleton House,” which bears some surprising similarities to The Cantos. Unlike many other sequences, Marvell’s aim is public, as is Pound’s. But, paradoxically, both were written for a quite limited audience: in Marvell’s case, for Lord Fairfax and in Pound’s for world leaders. At this stage this idea is promising; however, it lacks textual evidence, which I shall get to. In Blake, too, we can see a “resemblance” to The Pisan Cantos. Blake’s disparate lyrics constitute a sequence, serve a public aim (dealing with social justice in London); both contain “personas.” But shared topic is not shared form; I cannot say that since Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta is anti-Semitic, The Pisan Cantos are a drama because they share that trait.

So, where does that leave us? If we are to take the effect of sequence as unifying and continuum-establishing, we might look at the disparate lyrical elements across the sequence that seek to do this. Thus, if we take the recurrent image of “Mt. Taishan @ Pisa” (and I am sorry of the length of the quotations here, but I have tried to contextualize as best I can): paraclete or the verbum perfectum: sinceritas from the death cells in sight of Mt. Taishan @ Pisa as Fujiyama at Gardone (74.77-79)

and there was a smell of mint under the tent flaps especially after the rain and a white ox on the road toward Pisa as if facing the tower, dark sheep in the drill field and on wet days were clouds in the mountain as if under the guard roosts. A lizard upheld me the wild birds wd not eat the white bread from Mt Taishan to the sunset (74.120-8)

nox animae magna from the tent under Taishan amid what was termed the a.h. of the army the guards holding opinion. (74.431-3)

How soft the wind under Taishan where the sea is remembered out of hell, the pit out of the dust and glare evil Zephyrus / Apeliota (74.829-33)

With clouds over Taishan-Chocorua when the blackberry ripens and now the new moon faces Taishan one must count by the dawn star Dryad, thy peace is like water There is September sun on the pools (83.75-8)

Now, what do these disparate elements tell us? If course they speak to the unity of place—the DTC where Pound was imprisoned. But moreover, they serve a unity of time and a universalizing comparison. Similar to this is the recurrent image of crystal and the “progression”<span id="_ftnref36">36 of the crystal, from “jet” (74.826), to a “sphere” (76.220) and so forth. I shall not attempt to trace this progression or the meaning of these images, as that would be a dissertation unto itself. This image, like that of the mountain, serves to help unify the poems along a sequencing line. In a sense, these recurrent themes function like the leitmotifs in the Wagnerian opera, serving to create lyrical interest and emotion over long distances (Woodward touches on this point<span id="_ftnref37">37 ) and for all its fragmentariness, we might call this a modern Gesamtkunstwerk.

Before we move to the next section, I must continue on the musical theme and also not forget to mention the nexus of fugue and sequence, which, while I cannot examine in detail, certainly deserves further study.

The Fresco
In addition, the elements of the fresco figure in The Pisan Cantos. I shall not get in to as much detail in this regard as my knowledge of the fresco is rather limited. But, there is a certain amount of critical work on this element and I would be remiss to not include it.<span id="_ftnref38">38 This, too, can serve to help remake the epic.

Conclusion
Where, then, can we go from here? The topic of Pound’s relationship with the epic genre is certainly fascinating, and I can only have hoped to scratch the surface here. This area certainly deserves further attention.

Whereof One Cannot Cheat; Thereof One Must Remain Honest
I hereby declare upon my word of honor that I have neither given nor received unauthorized help on this work.

<span id="_ftn1">1 A note on citation conventions: While most Pound scholarship uses the Canto number followed by the page number in the 1975 New Directions edition of his Cantos, I shall use the Canto number followed by the line number as specified in the 2003 New Directions edition of the Pisan Cantos, thus affording me more granularity in citation at the expense of being out of step with nearly all other Pound scholarship.

<span id="_ftn2">2 M. L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall, The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 220.

<span id="_ftn3">3 Michael Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

<span id="_ftn4">4 I should like to blame my Wittgensteinitis on Dr. Kennedy.

<span id="_ftn5">5 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), §67,.

<span id="_ftn6">6 Bernstein, 180.

<span id="_ftn7">7 Orwell would describe this as a “shallow and familiar charge.” George Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling,” in Collected Essays of George Orwell (1942),.

<span id="_ftn8">8 See e.g. Bernstein, 13.

<span id="_ftn9">9 Bernstein, 181.

<span id="_ftn10">10 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives, (Berkley and Los Angles: University of California Press, 1969), 59.

<span id="_ftn11">11 Paul Alpers, “What is the Pastoral?” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 3 (Spring, 1982): 437-460.

<span id="_ftn12">12 Homer, The Odysseys of Homer, book IX, trans. George Chapman, ed. Richard Hooper (London: J.R. Smith, 1857; Bartleby.com, 1999), [www.bartleby.com/111/].

<span id="_ftn13">13 The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, et. al. (by J. K. Newman), s.v. “epic.”

<span id="_ftn14">14 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, in Leitch, et al. ed., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 1191.

<span id="_ftn15">15 Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964).

<span id="_ftn16">16 Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell in “On Narrative,” special issue, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (Autumn, 1980): 81, 66.

<span id="_ftn17">17 The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, 3d ed., ed. E.D. Hirsch, Jr., et. al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), s.v. “how many angels can stand (dance) on the head of a pin?” 4/howmanyangel.html.

<span id="_ftn18">18 Here, I am of course nodding to H.D., who wrote “so what good are you scribblings? / this—we take them with us // beyond death” against the “new heresy.” H.D., “The Walls Do Not Fall” in “Trilogy” in H.D.: Collected Poems 1912-1944 (New York: New Directions, 1983), 518-519, 517. “Form remembers” is from Claudia Emerson, “Poetic Sequence” (lecture, University of Mary Washington, VA, Fall 2006).

<span id="_ftn19">19 Oxford English Dictionary, 2d. ed, s.v. “Lyric.”

<span id="_ftn20">20 The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, et. al. (by James William Johnson) s.v. “lyric.”

<span id="_ftn21">21 German text from: Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 (1824). Translation from: New Jersey Symphony Orchestra,.

<span id="_ftn22">22 Transcriptions and translations are from: Carroll F. Terrell, 'A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound'' (Berkley and Los Angles: University of California Press, 1984), 2:389.

<span id="_ftn23">23 The Oxford Companion to Music, ed. Alison Latham, Jeremy Montagu, s.v. “lira da braccio” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), entry=t114.e4005.

<span id="_ftn24">24 Kay Davis, Fugue and Fresco: Structures in Pound’s Cantos (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation), 75.

<span id="_ftn25">25 Anthony Woodward, Ezra Pound and the Pisan Cantos (London: Routledge, 1980), 41.

<span id="_ftn26">26 Milton, “Lycidas,” ll. 1-11.

<span id="_ftn27">27 See, e.g. Bush.

<span id="_ftn28">28 Richard Sieburth, introduction to The Pisan Cantos, by Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 2003), xxxi.

<span id="_ftn29">29 Eugene Paul Nassar, The Cantos of Ezra Pound: The Lyric Mode (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press), ????.

<span id="_ftn30">30 Nassar, 6.

<span id="_ftn31">31 Rosenthal and Gall.

<span id="_ftn32">32 Marjorie Perloff, “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” in “Theory: Parodies, Puzzles, Paradigms,” special issue, New Literary History 13, no. 3, (Spring, 1982): 500.

<span id="_ftn33">33 T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Leitch, et al. ed., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 1105.

<span id="_ftn34">34 Ronald Bush, “Modernism, Fascism, and the Composition of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos,” Modernism/Modernity 2, no.3 (1995): 69.

<span id="_ftn35">35 Massimo Bacigalupo, “America in Ezra Pound's Posthumous Cantos,” Journal of Modern Literature 27, no. 1 (2003) 90-104; Margaret Dickie, “The Cantos: Slow Reading,” ELH  51, no. 4. (Winter, 1984): 829.

<span id="_ftn36">36 Terrell, 387.

<span id="_ftn37">37 Woodward.

<span id="_ftn38">38 Davis, ch. 6.