The Nineteenth Canto is very odd. It revolves around a coal mining enterprise (as is Pound’s wont, the emphasis is not on the actual business of removing coal from the ground, but on the financing and upstairs activity) and an entrepreneur with a thick, uneducated sounding (to my ears) accent:

And he said: I gawt ten thousand dollars tew mak ’em,

There are also some references to Marx and what I think are references to the revolutionary tendencies of Russian immigrants. This being Pound, one has to wonder – are we to suppose these Russian immigrants are also Jewish?

Not terribly poetic, but one feels like it’s part of some important story about the evolution of the twentieth century, but that one can’t quite understand it or see the whole picture yet.