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.

The Thirtieth Canto is explicitly archaic in its language, for example:

Compleynt, compleynt I hearde upon a day,
Artemis  singing, Artemis, Artemis
Agaynst Pity lifted her wail:
Pity causeth the forest to fail,

After the first stanza, the levels of anachronism fall considerably, but never disappears.

Perhaps referencing his own creation and publication of literature, it ends with a fragment of a letter about the production of book of some kind (the implication is a religious book) in the early sixteenth century.

The Canto ends with this:

Explicit Canto
XXX

I enjoyed reading this, being pleasantly and slightly challenging, it also appealing the historian in me.

The Twenty-Nineth Canto contains our first little smidgeon of sex. Granted, nothing more than “lay with” and “begat.”

I’m reminded that Pound, despite his exhortations to others to “make it new,” had a conservative streak running through his poetry (read his older stuff -it’s pretty traditional). Despite this, we do see some avant garde and experimental streaks running through this Canto.

(Let us speak of the osmosis of persons)
The wail of the phonograph has penetrated their marrow
(Let us…
The wail of the pornograph….)
         The cicadas continue uninterrupted.

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.

The Twenty-Seventh Canto has a mournful, elegiac feel to it. Something of lost dreams to it.

The subject is the early part of the twentieth century, but with reference to Xarites (a Greek sounding name, but I don’t know it’s provenance) and the Phoenician prince Cadmus. But also to Italy, the Russia (many mentions of tovarisch – a kind of Russian calvary).

The Twenty-Sixth Canto opens promisingly:

And
          I came here in my young youth
                         and lay there under the crocodile
          By the column, looking East on the Friday,
And I said: Tomorrow I will lie on the South side
And the day after, south west.

But then Pound goes on to indulge in his habit of writing out epistolary Renaissance era logistics.