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.

The Twenty-Fifth Canto is almost entirely epistolary in nature. It opens with, frankly, one of those boring little re-enactments of historical logistical discussions, and then…

While giving lip service to the epistolary form, it becomes infected by stream of consciousness and half formed statements and thoughts – which are often gorgeous in their execution.

Lay there, the long soft grass,
                    and the flute lay there by her thigh,
Sulpicia, the fauns, twig-strong,
                                                gathered about her;
The fluid, over grass,
Zephyrus, passing through her,
                                                  ” deus nec laedit amantea “

The Twenty-Fourth Canto begins with one of Pound’s depictions of fifteenth century Italian record keeping and logistics. A little more interesting than usual (they are epistolary) and then followed by several pages of narrative and descriptive poetry:

And he in his young youth, in the wake of Odysseus
To Cithera (a. d. 1413)  ” dove fu Elena rapta da Paris “
Dinners in orange groves, prows attended of dolphins,
Vestige of Rome at Pola, fair wind as far as Naxos

The Twenty-Third Canto is a mixture of high and low art. Some irritating colloquialisms (mimicking uneducated language by spelling ‘Italian’ as ‘Eyetalian’). But also some beautiful stanzas:

Leaf over leaf, dawn-branch in the sky
And the sea dark, under wind,

This one also had the most lines and stanzas in foreign languages of any Canto thus far. I identified (if didn’t always understand) French, Latin, and Greek.

I had trouble with the Twenty-Second Canto.

It opened up with stanzas that seemed to discuss the intersection of finance and military and the costs of war. There’s also an interesting visual:

NO MEMBER OF THE MILITARY
OF WHATEVER RANK
IS PERMITTED WITHIN THE WALLS
OF THIS CLUB

The above stanza was within a cartouche designed to look like a sign hanging as if from a nail.

But then… a reference to a rabbi.

Knowing as one does Pound’s anti-semitic views, any mention of rabbis tends leave one feeling sick in the stomach.

The Twenty-First Canto is mostly another segment from Renaissance Italy, again with the obsession of accounting and financial relationships.

But then, he manages to insert something like this:

And the sea with tin flash in the sun-dazzle,
                                      Like dark wine in the shadows.
” Wind between the sea and the mountains”
  ‘The tree-spheres half dark against sea
                                      half clear against sunset,
The sun’s keel freighted with with cloud,
And after that hour, dry darkness
Floating flame in the air, gonade in organdy,
Dry flamelet, a petal borne in the wind.
Gigneti kalon.
Impentrable as the ignorance of old women.

Dazzling stuff. I notice that much of his most gorgeous writing is about the sea. Did he merely find it particularly inspiring or is there something more to it?

The Twentieth Canto is a beautiful piece of work. Along with gloriously and beautifully poetic passages, it is also rife with depictions of a man’s (Pound’s?) idyllic life in Europe, interacting with intellectuals, artists, and generally with a crowd of interesting friends. In between are references to Odysseus and to his lover Circe (are these metaphors for the journey of Pound and his contemporaries or “flashbacks” to the ancient world?).

In the sunlight, gate cut by shadow;
And then the faceted air:
Floating. Below, sea churning shingle.
Floating, each on invisible raft

The Nineteenth Canto is very odd. It revolves around a coal mining enterprise (as is Pound’s wont, the emphasis is not on the actual business of removing coal from the ground, but on the financing and upstairs activity) and an entrepreneur with a thick, uneducated sounding (to my ears) accent:

And he said: I gawt ten thousand dollars tew mak ’em,

There are also some references to Marx and what I think are references to the revolutionary tendencies of Russian immigrants. This being Pound, one has to wonder – are we to suppose these Russian immigrants are also Jewish?

Not terribly poetic, but one feels like it’s part of some important story about the evolution of the twentieth century, but that one can’t quite understand it or see the whole picture yet.