The Cantos of Ezra Pound
The Cantos of Ezra Pound is the most important epic poem of the twentieth century.
The Dream Songs
The Dream Songs is widely seen as Berryman's masterpiece, an impressively vast and varied collection of poems that is in itself a single, sprawling, ever-shifting poem. The songs in this great work are thus offered in many different tones, moods, and guises, although their form, Berryman's idiosyncratic reworking of the sonnet, remains more or less constant. Combining all of Berryman's earlier 77 Dream Songs (which won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (which won the 1969 National Book Award), this one-volume edition contains no fewer than 385 entries in what the critic Denis Donoghue has called Berryman's "dream diary." The book also has an index of first lines, an index of titles, and a note by the author.
Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound
This selection from the Cantos was made by Ezra Pound himself in 1965. It is intended to "indicate main elements" in the long poem -- his personal epic -- with which he was engaged for more than fifty years. His choice includes, of course, a number of the Cantos most admired by critics and anthologists, such as Canto XIII ("Kung [Confucius] walked by the dynastic temple..."), Canto XLV ("With usura hath no man a house of good stone...") and the passage from The Pisan Cantos (LXXXI) beginning "What thou lovest well remains / the rest is dross," and so the book is an ideal introduction for newcomers to the great work. But it has, too, particular interest for the already initiated reader and the specialist, in its revelation, through Pound's own selection of "main elements," of the relative importance which he himself placed on various motifs as they figure in the architecture of the whole poem. Book jacket.
Ezra Pound, Italy, and the Cantos
Ezra Pound spent most of his life in Italy and wrote about it incessantly in his poetry. Only by following his footsteps, acquaintances and composition processes can we make sense of and enjoy his forbidding Cantos. This study provides for the first time an account of Pound’s Italian wanderings and of what they became in his work. After this study we will be able to read Pound as a guide to the places, people and books he loved, and we will share his the poet traveler’s joys and discoveries.
The Pisan Cantos
At last, a definitive, paperback edition of Ezra Pound's finest work.
