11 cantos

Pound, Ezra. A Draft of Cantos XXXI -XLI. First UK edition. London, Faber and Faber, 1935. 15 x 21cm. 62 pages. Original hardcover with unclipped dustjacket in protective Mylar. Very good plus condition with only minor signs of external wear, including small tear to dustjacket. The outer margin of the jacket slightly browned. Minor stain to titlepage. 1,500 copies were printed, of which 300 were bombed during the Second World War. The Cantos were Ezra Pound's most ambitious work. His original first Three Cantos had been published in Poetry (1917) and his Fourth Canto in 1919. Cantos V, VI, and VII appeared in the Dial (1921) and The Eighth Canto appeared in 1922, but except for limited editions, no new poems appeared in book form for the next decade. A Draft of XVI. Cantos (1925) in an edition of only ninety copies came out in Paris, and A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930; but commercial editions of the first thirty Cantos were not published in London and New York until 1933. The significance of Pound's undertaking was recognized early. In a 1931 review for Hound and Horn, reprinted in The Critical Heritage, Dudley Fitts called the Cantos without any doubt, the most ambitious poetic conception of our day. Reestablishing a poetic tradition traced from Homer's Odyssey and Dante's Divine Comedy, the Cantos are a modern epic. The Cantos are peopled with figures Pound considers heroic. Historical characters such as fifteenth-century soldier and patron of the arts Sigismundo Malatesta, Elizabethan jurist Edward Coke, Elizabeth I, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson speak through fragments of their own writings. [The Poetry Foundation]