The Eighteenth Canto opens with Marco Polo describing the use of paper money and letters or credit in Kublai Khan’s empire, which reminds me of that wonderful book by Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.

The rest is dedicated to describing incidences of manufacturing – plus a funny little anecdote about Napoleon.

Though lacking in lines that are traditionally poetic, I very much enjoyed reading this Canto though I couldn’t tell you why or what it is that appealed to me.

The Seventeenth Canto is a beautiful poem. It opens with the wonderfully evocative line, “So that the vines burst from my fingers.” For the first time thus far, Pound has almost written a pastoral poem (not strictly speaking, “pastoral” as being about shepherds, but more like Wordsworth’s The Excursion or Virgil’s Eclogues). He even manages to write about man-made structures in the loving terms usually reserved for nature.

”                    There, in the forest of marble,
”                    the stone trees — out of water —
”                    the arbours of stone —
”                    marble leaf, over leaf,
”                    silver, steel over steel,
”                    silver beaks rising and crossing,
”                    prow set against prow,
”                    stone, ply over ply,
”                    the gilt beams flare of an evening”

The Sixteenth Canto has some shifts in tone and meaning within it. The section opens up with a continuation of the earlier focus on the degradation and infection of the body:

And I bathed myself with acid to free myself
                  of the hell ticks,
Scales, fallen louse eggs.

It then seems to return to a focus on Renaissance Italy (Sigismundo reappears), but then it becomes clear that the real subject has become the First World War. He name drops Wyndham Lewis and Earnest Hemingway and Pound’s friend, the sculptor Henri Gaudier who died in the war.

The put Aldington on Hill 70, in a trench
               dug though corpses
With a lot of kids sixteen,
Howling and crying for their mamas,

There are long stretches in French, including the tragic phrase: “Liste officielle des morts 5,000,000”.

The Fifteenth Canto continues in that same profane, jeremiadic style now associated with Ginsberg that we saw in the previous Canto.

The fragmented, angry lines are filled with images of the body in decline (“Infinite pus flakes, scabs of a lasting pox“). Again, the target is the financial, best expressed by the line crying “the beast with a hundred legs, USURA” (I take “USURA” to be a reference to “usury”).

This Canto does a better job of bringing the “traditional” Poundian form to than the last one. The language is more erudite and reference laden, and even at its most vulgar, remains more measured and does not sacrifice aesthetics for anger (nor did Ginsberg, by the way – in case my words might be interpreted that way).

The Fourteenth Canto is something very new compared to the earlier Cantos – an enraged jeremiad against aspects of the modern age.

The particular aspects are dealing with financial dealings. Knowing what we know now, it is obvious that Pound saw the source of the corruption caused by finance and banking as being connected with Europe’s Jewish community (particularly the Jewish banking family, the Rothschilds).

But reading it while trying to hold off preconceptions, you would not be surprised to be told that the author was Communist or Anarcho-Syndicalist.

In addition, as a jeremiad, this Canto seems to lead in a direct line to Ginsberg’s Howl (though I couldn’t say whether Ginsberg specifically read The Cantos, though he was a well read poet).

Who disliked colloquial language,
Stiff-starched, but soiled, collars
                   circumscribing his legs,
The pimply and hairy skin
                   pushing over the collar’s edge,
Profiteers drinking blood sweetened with s–t,

Please note, it was Pound himself (or at least my edition of him) and not me that wrote “s–t” for “shit.”

Ok. The Thirteenth Canto  consisted entirely of a conversation covering some small section of Chinese history. While mildly interesting, it was not particularly poetic nor particularly innovative.

The Twelfth Canto moves closer to modern times and certainly well away from Renaissance Italy. The focus is on finance (insurance, securities, speculation), specifically some speculation by a Manhattan firm in Cuba.

In one sense, this is enjoyable to read. Pound compares finance to more honest labor. But knowing what we know about Pound, this enjoyment is outweighed by a deep and nagging discomfort, knowing as we do that Pound’s bias against banking and finance was driven by a terrible and unforgivable commitment to anti-Semitism.

The Eleventh Canto continues with the fragments of Renaissance history. The recurring character we encounter is “Sigismundo.” Pound reflects on his career as a condotierre (mercenary), working for the various city states (including the Papacy) that vied for ascendancy in Italy.

Though not here, in the previous Canto, he was portrayed as a touch irreligious, but in truth, his life’s work was the reconstruction of a church in the town in Rimini.

Pound’s focus on things like the numbers of soldiers and mounted calvary on the various sides of the conflicts in which Sigismundo participated gives a nice touch of the quotidian to the whole matter. Not the grand sweep of history, but the logistical issues of a minor figure trying to get by in a land filled with great men.

I didn’t really get the Tenth Canto. You see some forms repeated: the appearance of lines and stanzas that resemble fragments from letters explaining one’s progress on a project; abbreviations (“wd.” for “would”) derived from telegrams; a mixture of Renaissance Italy and hints of the modern world. There’s also a touch of irreligiosity:

Empty the fonts of the chiexa of holy water
And fill up the same full with ink

This also seems to suggest a stance of replacing traditional religion with the god of literature, does it not?

The Ninth Canto is an improvement over the Eighth Canto, but still lacks (in my mind) any of the transcendent passages we sometimes saw earlier.

What makes it interesting is the impressionistic and broken construction of, not first person, but third person narrations limited to a single person at a time. Also, he uses (and he has used this before, but not to this extent) these broken and incomplete quotes, most of which read like fragments of progress reports (some read more as oral reports, other as written reports).

As in the previous Canto, the “setting” is clearly Renaissance Italy.

Also, and purely as a bit of trivia, at seven and a half pages, it is the longest Canto thus far (most of the others were just two or three pages).