The Thirty-Eighth Canto moves  back to Europe – primarily to Italy – and also moves to more contemporary times.

It’s not a particularly poetic section, but it does add something to Pound’s “thesis” (if we can call it that) with what could be considered a sort of comparison between making money via financial/banking instruments and making money via manufacturing.

I’m not sure when this Canto was written, but we read a lot about war and the profits that can be made from war (though not necessarily talking the unethical practice usually called “war profiteering”), with a lengthy digression into Krupp and his arms. I would guess, too, that this one was written at least as late as the days leading up to the Second World War, with its references to Japan, as well as references to war that lack the anachronistic ring of the days leading up to the First World War I (when folks could not yet fathom that war in the twentieth century would be so different and so much devastating than most nineteenth century conflicts).

I took the liberty of taking a glance at the next Canto and, artistically speaking, it looks much more promising than any of the ones we’ve read recently.