The Thirty-Sixth Canto moves far differently than the previous one. The style is archaic, though it strikes me as more recent than the Renaissance style of earlier Cantos. Seventeenth century perhaps. Though it ends with a discussion of medievalism, including what I take to be a reference to Charles I of Anjou, who was the King of Sicily and Naples and Count of Anjou and Provence (there is a long history of French adventurers seizing for themselves some duchy or the like in a very disjointed medieval Italy), so perhaps assigning a time period to what Pound is attempting is pointless?

Cometh he to be
                 when the will
From overplus
Twisteth out of natural measure,
Never adorned with rest  Moveth he changing colour
Either to laugh or weep
Contorting the face with fear
                    resteth but a little

The Thirty-Fifth Canto‘s first line ends with the wonderfully evocative and now word, Mitteleuropa.

There’s a lot going on here. The psychic wounds of the First World War. Sexual desire, which, as I have commented on before, does not usually figure prominently in Pound, appears here in conversation:

Mr Elias said to me:
                   ” How do you get inspiration?
” Now my friend Hall Caine told me he came on a case
” a very sad case of a girl in the East End of London
” and it gave him an i n s p i r a t i o n . The only
” way I get inspiration is occasionally from a girl, I
” mean sometimes sitting in a restaurant and
                   looking at a pretty girl I
” get an i-de-a, I-mean-a biz-nis i-de-a? “
                 dixit sic felix Elias?

The Thirty-Third Canto continues both the overall theme of history and the narrower and recent topic of the earliest years of the United States.

It opens with a fragment of a letter from 1815 by “Quincey” on how, though he says it in a roundabout fashion, democracies and representative democracies can be just as despotic as a tyrannical king. Though it’s never said, I wonder whether “Quincey” isn’t the artistocratic and idealistic John Quincy Adams?

The whole thing consists of these incomplete fragments of letters and diaries, seeming to chronicle a democracy’s corruption by “land jobbers and stock jobbers,” as he once writes. Clearly, part of this is directed at the United States, though not exclusively, as Bonaparte is mentioned, and virtually any reference to Bonaparte must always, to me, seem to entail the idea of a democratic revolution betrayed (not that he was the only betrayer of the better angels of the French Revolution, of course).

Also, there is mention of reading Marx and Das Kapital and I always appreciate a good reference to Marx.