Ezra Pound's Washington Cantos and the Struggle for Light

The Washington Cantos by Ezra Pound were written during his incarceration in Washington after the Second World War and were meant to be a Paradiso for his epic. They express his struggle to reconcile his striving for justice with his extreme Right politics and integrate themes and ideas that remain central to American far-right ideology today. The book also celebrates his passion for his muse and lover, Sheri Martinelli, and his legal defence against treason charges. Alec Marsh explores the way the political ideas revealed in Pounds correspondence manifested themselves in his later poetry.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 17 November 2022
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Ezra Pound's life-project, The Cantos, composed during his incarceration in Washington after the Second World War, was intended to be a Paradiso for his epic. These poems are beautiful, tormented, enigmatic, and irascible, expressing 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 Reading the poetry alongside correspondence and unpublished archival writings, Ezra Pound's Washington Cantos and the Struggle for Light is an important new work on a poet who stands at the heart of 20th-century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.

Weight: 464g
Dimension: 155 x 235 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350187443