The Twenty-Eighth Canto is rather interesting. Mostly, it is brief histories of Americans whose shared connection is some travel in Italy, some of the histories containing their rather bourgeois ends back in America. Stylistically, I thought of Gertrude Stein (who hated Pound), but I also couldn’t help thinking of the nattering Charlotte Bartlett in chaperoning her cousin on a trip to Rome in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View.

2 thoughts on “Ezra Pound: Canto XXVIII

  1. All this dwelling on history is marked of Pound, though Joyce and Shakespeare did it, too. Do you think a poet can be exempt from any field, even history, when considering their application of knowledge through verse? Or must we know a little of everything, including history, in order to comprehend and develop new ideas? The ontology of omniscience is what keeps me awake at night, as a creative mind.

    1. It is impossible to know everything, but it seems that poetry’s subject, one way or another, is human experience and perceptions of their world (internal and external).

      Plenty of poets focus on science, others on politics or history of nature. I wouldn’t worry about what one “should” do.

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