Ezra Pound, Italy, and the Cantos

Ezra Pound lived in Italy spanning six decades (1920s to 1970s) and composed here most of his ambitious American and international epic, The Cantos. He largely employed Italian materials: landscapes, artworks, politics, history, people. Bacigalupo’s study approaches Pound’s poetry through its principal physical and cultural background proposing a new and rewarding reading of The Cantos as an account of things seen and noted with a poet’s eye for the striking detail and telling phrase. We visit with Pound his favorite cities and landscapes (Rome, Venice, Rapallo) and encounter some of his foremost Italian peers, associates and translators. Bacigalupo offers readings of important and neglected writings by Pound and shows how he created an autobiographical myth out of his multifarious experience. We get to see the poet at work and are provided with new essential keys to a nuanced understanding of Pound’s lively, tantalizing and contradictory poetic world. This is the first time that so much material concerning a central aspect of Pound’s life and writing has been gathered in one volume.

Massimo Bacigalupo is professor of American literature at the University of Genoa, Italy, author of The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (Columbia University Press, 1980) and more recently the editor of Pound’s Posthumous Cantos (Carcanet, 2016). His articles and reviews have appeared in the Paris Review, Modern Language Review, Yale Review, Notes & Queries, The Wallace Stevens Journal, etc. He has edited and translated works by Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Dickinson, Melville, Eliot, Stevens, Faulkner, and Heaney. Bacigalupo grew up in Rapallo, in a family of doctors that knew Pound and his relatives as patients and friends. In 1985 he curated a centenary Pound exhibition in Rapallo. He has edited new editions and translations of the poetry, and is widely acknowledged as one of Pound’s foremost interpreters.