Kenneth Rexroth, godfather of the various renaissances of San Francisco and Northern California poetry in the years after the Second World War, was one of the inspirations for diving into the Cantos.

It is impossible to overlook Ezra Pound’s influence on Rexroth. Those great and sometime sprawling efforts to incorporate all his vast corpus of knowledge into poetry. The deep relationships with and advocacy on behalf of other poets (though perhaps no poet can truly match Pound in the tirelessness, efficacy, and importance of his advocacy of other writers). Each was very political and deeply influenced by their politics, yet neither is particularly known for their politically tinged poetry.

But Rexroth, with his liberal politics (veering in anarchism and communism – famously saying, ‘I write poetry to seduce women and to overthrow the Capitalist system. In that order.’)could not countenance Pound’s politics at all.

Regarding the Cantos, he once said:

“Oh, the Cantos! Everybody thinks it’s modern art. But the Cantos are a very specific thing. They are a long survey of history and the point to them is that what is wrong with the human race is usury. And who practices usury? The Jews! the Cantos are the longest anti-Semitic diatribe in literature.”

Of course that’s not true. But sometimes there is something to the third sentence – ‘They are a long survey of history and the point to them is that what is wrong with the human race is usury.’

I have seen something almost Rand-ian about the Cantos thus far, but instead of ‘Producers’ versus ‘Looters,’ it is ‘Producers’ versus ‘Financiers.’

One can also feel the seduction of that. Not the Anti-Semitic undertones which infected so many discussions of the financial system in the twentieth century. Those are unforgivable.

But the anger, the mistrust towards the financial system. After the financial collapse of 2008, who can fail to feel angry towards Wall Street financiers? Nor fail to see the correspondences between the 1929 financial collapse (which Pound lived through) and the recent one that still holds our economy in thrall?