Canto I Comments

I think that this is one of the best of Pound's Cantos, from its opening line, 'Then went down to the ship, '. What an image 'Souls out of Erebus' is now, after the DC10 crash there in 1979.

The Cantos was initially published in the form of separate sections, each containing several cantos that were numbered sequentially using Roman numerals (except cantos 85–109, first published with Arabic numerals) Pound had been considering writing a long poem since around 1905, but work did not begin until sometime between 1912 and 1917, when the initial versions of the first three cantos of the proposed poem of some length were published in the journal Poetry. In this version, the poem began as an address by the poet to the ghost of Robert Browning. Pound came to believe that this narrative voice compromised the revolutionary intent of his poetic vision, and these first three ur-cantos were soon abandoned and a new starting point sought. The answer was a Latin version of Homer's Odyssey by the Renaissance scholar Andreas Divus that Pound had bought in Paris sometime between 1906 and 1910.

Whoever punctuated this poem should be shot, please learn how to use the possesive apostrophe- Pounds' poetry really does deserve it.

The first Canto is among Pound's greatest Cantos, but as in all the Cantos the reader gets frustrated tripping over literary and other allusions, Latin & other foreign language phrases, etc. If you read (aloud) the first 30 lines of Canto I and find them WONDERFUL-even without knowing the Homeric context or recognizing the Homeric characters' names; if you find these wonderful but are put off by the poem's erudition, then you are a Cantos lover who only needs the help of footnotes. For that help, I strongly suggest you buy Carroll Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Exra Pound (pbk,1993) . Terrel makes CLEAR everything in every Canto that is puzzling.