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Full Description
The instalments of Ezra Pound's life-project, The Cantos, composed during his incarceration in Washington after the Second World War were to have served as a "Paradiso" for his epic. Beautiful and tormented, enigmatic and irascible by turns, they express the poet's struggle to reconcile his striving for justice with his extreme Right politics. In heavily coded language, Pound was writing activist political poetry. Through an in-depth reading of the "Washington Cantos" this book reveals the ways in which Pound integrated into his verse themes and ideas that remain central to American far-right ideology to this day: States' Rights, White-supremacy and racial segregation, the usurpation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court, and history as racial struggle.
Pound's struggle was also personal. These poems also celebrate his passion for his muse and lover, Sheri Martinelli, as he tries to teach her his politics and, in the final poems, mount his legal defence against the unresolved treason charges hanging over his head.
Reading the poetry alongside correspondence and unpublished archival writings, Ezra Pound's Washington Cantos and the Struggle for Light is an important new work on a poet who stands at the heart of 20th-century Modernism. Building on his previous book John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (Bloomsbury, 2015), Alec Marsh explores the way the political ideas revealed in Pound's correspondence manifested themselves in his later poetry.
Contents
Forward
Chapter One: The Washington Cantos: Anagogy, Metapolitics and the Warren Court
The Washington Cantos: Section: Rock-Drill de los Cantares and Thrones
Metapolitics and Politics
"Four Steps to the Bughouse"
The Warren Court
Chapter Two: Obstacles to Understanding the Washington Cantos
Aesopian Language and Its Problems
Pound's Reading and the Poverty of Philology
Trobar Clus
Pound's "Late Style"
The "Cleaners Manifesto"
Chapter Three: Two States' Rights Fables: John Randolph of Roanoke and Canto 103
John Randolph
Canto 103
Chapter Four : The Aryanist Vortex: Pound's Metapolitics and White Supremacy
Pound's Taxonomy of Human Types
"Freedom Now or Never"
Chapter Five: Raising Cain: The Aryan Origins of Civilization
"Alfalfa Bill" Murray's Adam & Cain
Waddell, Egypt and the Aryan Makers of Civilization
Pound's 'Egyptian Problem'
Chapter Six: Sheri Martinelli and the Paradise of Venus
Ezra Pound: "a great stud..."
Trobar Clus
Chapter Seven: Sheri Martinelli: Right Wing Muse
Chapter Eight: Apollonius of Tyana
Chapter Nine: Pound and Sovereignty: Canto 97, "nummolary theory" and the Sacred Ratios.
"REAL Ideology"
Chapter Ten: Pound's Agrarian Bent: Physiocracy Against Degradation
Chapter Eleven: The Coke Cantos as an Argument for the Defense
The Connecticut Charter
Pound and Catherine Drinker Bowen
Four Acres
Chapter Twelve: Pound at Colonus: The Poet as Oedipus
Afterword
Appendix A: A Primer of Poundian Economics
Appendix B: "Homage to Grandpa" by Sheri Martinelli
Bibliography
Index
