EZRA POUND
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (Hailey, EE UU, 1885-Venecia, Italia, 1972) Poeta estadounidense. Tras graduarse en la Universidad de Pensilvania en lenguas románicas, se instaló en Londres en 1908; ese mismo año apareció A lume spento, con el que comenzó un período de intensa producción, como demuestra la publicación de Personae (1909), Provença (1910), Canzoni (1911), Sonetos y baladas de Guido Cavalcanti (1912), Cathay (1915), Lustra (1916) y Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920).
En 1925 se editaron en París, adonde se había trasladado pocos años antes, los dieciséis primeros Cantos, su obra más ambiciosa, que luego amplió y reeditó a lo largo de toda su vida, y entre los que se cuentan los Cantos pisanos (1949) y los Cantares (1956). En ellos incluye versos en diversas lenguas, y adapta y retoma materiales procedentes de otros autores y de varias tradiciones, incluso de China.
Enemigo del romanticismo y del discurso lógico, su obra resulta extremadamente compleja y difícil. Influyó, entre otros, sobre T. S. Eliot, su principal discípulo, y James Joyce, además de dirigir y aconsejar en sus primeros pasos literarios en París a su amigo Ernest Hemingway. Durante los años treinta publicó diversos ensayos sobre literatura y política, entre los que destacan Cómo leer (1931), ABC de la economía (1933), ABC de la lectura (1934).
EZRA POUND EN SU LABERINTO
Ezra Pound (Hailey, Idaho, 1885-Venecia, 1972) fue un poeta de la estirpe de los viejos colonos y conquistadores de los Estados Unidos de América, tanto en el sentido literal (sus antepasados llegaron inmediatamente después del Mayflower) como en el figurado: se internó en la literatura y la historia social y política de medio mundo como un aventurero que quisiera refundar (al darle un fondo lanzado hacia el futuro) su patria con los tesoros acaparados en sus apasionadas y no pocas veces confusas incursiones: tesoros formados de fragmentos, retazos de culturas y civilizaciones orillados a un canto inmenso y, tal vez, ilegible, quiero decir, un canto que no termina de revelar su rostro, si es que lo tiene. Pound fue esencialmente un poeta pero dedicó ímprobos esfuerzos a la crítica literaria y política, especialmente a ciertas ideas económicas relativas a la usura y el crédito social. No es muy seguro que de toda la obra ensayística pueda leerse con provecho más de un volumen de cierta extensión, y creo que el mismo T. S. Eliot lo vio así al publicar una antología de sus ensayos literarios que todavía hoy sigue reeditándose. En cuanto a sus miles de artículos sobre política y economía, sólo sirven para entender al personaje que los escribió, no a la realidad que tratan de designar. No se puede olvidar que fue, además, un animador cultural, en el mejor sentido de esta expresión: dio movimiento y alma a la poesía de lengua inglesa en un momento en que parecía estancada en el romanticismo tardío y el simbolismo. Y fue también algo poco habitual en el medio intelectual: un hombre generoso con muchos artistas y escritores. Esta generosidad tomó en ocasiones la forma de la colaboración, en el sentido mayéutico del término. Se recordará la frase suya relativa a su "lectura" de La tierra baldía: "Ezra Performed the caesarean operation". Alguien dirá que no puede olvidarse su tarea de traductor: lo fue en un sentido profundo; entendió que la cultura es, si quiere estar realmente viva, traducción, y buena parte de su poesía es una prueba evidente de esta idea: traducir en él es volver a hacer nuevo, y no sólo traduce de otras lenguas sino de la propia. De cualquier manera, ahí están (Translations, 1953) las versiones y recreaciones (lecturas interesadas, en suma) de Cavalcanti, Arnaut Daniel, el teatro Noh y la poesía china, Catulo, Bertrand de Born, Ventadour y muchos otros que muestran, entre otras cosas, algo precioso: traducir no es un acto nostálgico de un texto previo definitivo, originario en el sentido ontológico, sino una búsqueda de formas y de sentidos a través de una herencia que se abre paso en el tiempo: en las nuevas obras. "Las historias de la literatura inglesa —escribió Pound, y nosotros podríamos añadir: la española— siempre saltan sobre las traducciones (supongo que será por un complejo de inferioridad); sin embargo, algunos de los mejores libros en lengua inglesa son traducciones". Esta sugerencia fue recogida en 1980 por Charles Tomlinson —un poeta que, muy lejos de los modales de Pound, retomó con destreza varias de sus enseñanzas relativas al verso— al editar The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation.(...)
Juan Malpartida
EZRA POUND
CANTARES COMPLETOS
A pesar de la fecha del copyright, es ahora cuando aparecen en el mercado los cuatro volúmenes de la obra máxima de Pound, terminando así un secuestro al que nos han sometido, si mi noticias son ciertas, durante más de treinta años. Más allá de cierto dudoso criterio, que acepta una traducción ajena en la que no deja de encontrar faltas (hasta un servidor las encuentra), hay que felicitar al editor por la abundante y pertinente información que, verso a verso, va desvelando el sentido de un poema que durante tanto tiempo se ha antojado un galimatías pedante o el delirio de un loco borracho de sí mismo. Pero no. La intuición advierte que en las largas tiradas en las que se confunden lenguas distintas, escrituras ideográficas, siglas, suspensiones, motes, recuerdos casi secretos y fragmentos de toda índole, late, acechante, la libertad, llevada hasta el último extremo; que más allá de las claves, los versos de Pound son por ellos mismos, no por su referente, que importa en ellos la posiblidad de ser signos, autónomos de los signos que los forman. Ritmo e imagen del ritmo. Consecuencia de una idea e idea. Relato histórico e historia del propio relato. Americano, veneciano, erudito, loco, fascista inaceptable, sórdido, humorista, poeta de todos los ismos, traidor. El hombre que forzó la publicación del Ulises y corrigió el manuscrito de La Tierra Baldía hasta llegar a la versión que hoy conocemos. En la pista central de nuestro asombro, Ezra Pound.
Traducción de José Vázquez Amaral
Ed. Cátedra, Madrid 1994
POUND´S LIFE AND CARRER
Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, but grew up and was educated mainly in Pennsylvania.
In 1908, when a projected academic career was cut short, he set sail for Europe, spending several months in Venice and finally settling in London, where he was befriended by his hero, W. B. Yeats. Between 1908 and 1911 he published six collections of verse, most of it dominated by a passion for Provençal and early Italian poetry. This is filtered through the medievalizing manner of Browning and the Pre-Raphaelites. Under the influence of Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme he modernized his style, and in 1912 launched the Imagist movement, advocating concreteness, economy, and free verse. The oriental delicacy of his brief Imagist lyrics (e.g. 'In a Station of the Metro') soon gave way to the more dynamically avant-garde manner of Vorticism. Association with Vorticist visual artists (e.g. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Wyndham Lewis) helped him to see how poems could be made up, like post-Cubist sculptures, of juxtaposed masses and planes. These lessons were reinforced by his work on Ernest Fenollosa's literal versions of classical Chinese poems, which he turned into the beautiful free-verse lyrics of Cathay (1915). Fenollosa had argued that Chinese written characters were ideograms--compressed and abstracted visual metaphors. In this interplay of concrete signs Pound saw the model for a new kind of poetry, dynamic and economical, which juxtaposed not only images but diverse 'facts’--allusions, quotations, fragments of narrative. Such a method, soon to be tried out in his major work The Cantos (on which he tentatively embarked in 1915), would permit the use of quotations from other languages and even gobbets of prose.
The range and brilliance of Pound's contacts in all the arts convinced him that London was to be the centre of a new Renaissance. He cast himself in the role of impresario, editor, and advocate, contributing to Yeats's mature style, discovering and promoting Joyce and Eliot, advising an American businessman on the modern works of art to buy in London. But his hopes foundered in the waste of the First World War, and the consequent disappointment was to colour the rest of his life's work. In the short term it provoked his first major poems, Homage to Sextus Propertius> (1919) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1921). These two ironic sequences represent a contrast. The free-verse Homage, an ironic persona poem based on the lyrics of the first-century Roman poet, is a defence of the private and erotic in poetry against the imperialistic jingoism promoted by war. Mauberly, in tautly rhymed satirical stanzas, depicts the war as the Götterdammerung of an emasculated and philistine culture, condemned by the limitation of its own horizons. The poem is also evidence of Pound's close working relationship with Eliot, whose taste it reflects (cf. the Sweene poems of the same period). The relationship was to culminate in the crucial part played by Pound in cutting The Waste Land (1922).
Mauberley has been described as Pound's farewell to London. In 1920 he left, spending four years in Paris then moving on to Italy, where he settled in Rapallo in 1924. He was now concentrating on The Cantos, his 'poem including history', and the first section was published in 1925.
As The Cantos shows, he was now preoccupied with economics. The war, as he saw it, had been caused by the rivalries of international capitalists. He thought he had found a solution to the evils of unchecked capitalism, one especially favourable to the arts, in the Social Credit theory of Major C. H. Douglas, who argued that a system of state credit could increase purchasing power in the population at large, thus promoting creativity and removing power from bankers and financiers. Attracted to Mussolini by his energy and his promises of monetary reform, Pound naïvely assumed that the Italian leader could be persuaded to put Douglas's theory into practice. At first, the main target of Pound's attacks is 'usury', which he depicts (e.g. in Canto 45) as an unnatural force that pollutes the creative instinct in humanity. By about 1930 the usurers he condemns are usually Jews, and his language is vitiated by virulent anti-Semitism.
A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930) presents the poet as wandering Odysseus, travelling among the dead. Through juxtaposition, he uncovers repeated patterns in history and experiences moments when the world of time is transfigured by the eternal world of the gods. The mainly Mediterranean emphasis of the first thirty Cantos then gives way (in Cantos 31-70, published 1934-40) to the economic policies of early US presidents and the governance of ancient China. Despite an increase in prosy didacticism and much consequent turgidity, these sections contain some of Pound's finest poetry (e.g. Cantos 36,45, 47, and 49).
In the later 1930s Pound devoted much of his energy to defending fascism and trying to avert war. When war broke out, he embarked on a series of fanatical addresses to American troops, which were broadcast on Rome Radio. As a result, he was arrested by partisans in 1945 and handed over to the US forces, who held him for six months at a Disciplinary Training Centre near Pisa, pending trial on a treason charge. It seems likely that the inhuman conditions he endured there for the first three weeks accelerated the breakdown in rationality already to be glimpsed in his writings. Repatriated to the United States to stand trial, he was found unfit to plead on grounds of insanity and incarcerated in St Elizabeths Hospital, Washington DC, from 1946 to 1958.
His imprisonment brought about an artistic recovery. The Pisan Cantos (1948), drafted in the DTC, are the most directly personal poems he wrote. In adversity, and conscious of the tragedy of Europe, he contemplates his own past in that context, especially the water-shed years of the modern movement. Suffering and retrospection induce a new humility, exemplified in his care for the life around him--the insects, the animals, the camp guards. In St. Elizabeths he completed two rather more cryptic sections of the poem--Section: Rock-Drill (1955) and Thrones (1959)--as well as a programme of translations from the Confucian classics.
On his release he returned to Italy, dying in Venice in 1972. Despite moments of defiance, his last years were overshadowed by self-doubt and consciousness of his 'errors and wrecks'. In rare public utterances he condemned The Cantos as a failure, a view he seems not consistently to have held; but the poem was never completed. In 1969 he concluded its publication with Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII: thirty-two pages of verse, mostly serene but poignant in its fragmentation.
Pound was the central figure in the modern movement, personally responsible for the renewal of English poetry in the 1910s. Yet he remains a controversial figure. His brutal politics have been damaging to his lofty view of the artist and civilization; he is also condemned as an élitist, an obscurantist, and a charlatan—a man deficient in self-knowledge, with no real understanding of the modern world despite his avant-gardiste posturing. None of these charges quite shakes the substance of his achievement, which is fundamentally a matter of technical accomplishment to a point where refinement of skill becomes a moral quality. Such is the sensitivity of his verse movement that it seems to release independent life and otherness in his subjects, as if it had discovered them by chance. This is so whether he seeks to evoke the movement of olive leaves in the wind or the character of a Renaissance condottiere. The same quality lies behind his genius for translation, an art he has been said to have invented for our time: uncannily, he creates a language for each author which registers the remoteness of the author from our world while at the same time making his work available to us. If Pound is obscure, it is largely because of his wide frame of reference; he was also an educator, who used poetry to introduce his readers to works and ideas he had discovered for himself. It is hardly his fault that his syllabus has never been adopted.
Pound's poetry is collected in two volumes: Collected Shorter Poems (London, 1984)--the American edition is entitled Personae: Collected Poems (New York, 1971)--and The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York, 1972; London, 1981). The Translations of Ezra Pound, ed. Hugh Kenner (New York and London, 1953), is a large selection with major omissions. The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London and New York, 1954), suggests the scope of his criticism, while Selected Prose, 1909-1965, ed. William Cookson (London and New York, 1973), includes much of his polemical writing as well. The fullest biography is Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character (London, 1988), though it has been severely criticized.
(From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press.)
Clive Wilmer
EZRA POUND
Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and especially T. S. Eliot. His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry--stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome." His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos.
Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. He completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy and London, where, as the literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 and became London editor of the Little Review in 1917. In 1924, he moved to Italy; during this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during the Second World War. In 1946, he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award (which included a number of the most eminent writers of the time) decided to overlook Pound's political career in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948). After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, in 1972.
(Poets.org)
EZRA POUND
IL PRIMATO DELLA POESIA
Poeta tra i più grandi del Novecento, cresciuto all'interno di una famiglia di forte estrazione religiosa, l'enigmatico Ezra Weston Loomis Pound nasce il 30 ottobre 1885 a Hailey, nello stato dell'Idaho, stabilendosi fin da piccolo nei pressi di Filadelfia. Qui ha vissuto fino al suo trasferimento in età matura a Rapallo, nel 1929.
Già nel 1898 aveva compiuto un viaggio in Europa con la famiglia, tornando folgorato ed entusiasta per le meraviglie elargite dal Bel Paese.
Iscrittosi all'Università della Pennsylvania, studia le lingue romanze e scopre i poeti provenzali cui in seguito dedicherà numerosi studi e traduzioni. Nel 1906 ottiene una borsa di studio che gli permetterà di viaggiare nuovamente in Europa dove, oltre a tornare nuovamente nell'amata Italia, visita anche la Spagna.
Tornato in America lo attende una sgradevole sorpresa: la borsa di studio non gli viene rinnovata. Dopo quattro mesi di insegnamento come docente di letteratura spagnola e francese in un'Università dell'Indiana, è invitato a dare la dimissioni perché il suo stile di vita è ritenuto troppo fuori dalle regole.
Nel 1908 s'imbarca nuovamente per l'Europa con pochi dollari in tasca, una decisione dettata non solo dalla necessità ma anche da una precisa scelta di vita. Pound era dell'opinione che per dare il meglio fosse necessaria qualche restrizione e che per viaggiare dovesse stare tutto in non più di due valigie.
Una volta giunto in Europa visita tutti i principali centri culturali: Londra, Parigi, Venezia. Finalmente pubblica anche i suoi primi libri di poesia. Ma al vulcanico Pound questo non basta.
Conosce ed aiuta in tutti i modi artisti di tutti i settori, compresi i musicisti.
Pound è anche un assimilatore innovoro. Nel 1913 la vedova del grande filologo Ernest Fenellosa gli affida i manoscritti del marito, stimolo principale per il suo approccio al cinese che lo porterà alla trasposizione di numerose liriche di quel lontano paese.
Nel 1914 diventa segretario del poeta irlandese Yeats, altro gigante del Novecento e infaticabile sostenitore di James Joyce, e impone la pubblicazione delle prime poesie di Eliot. Intanto la sua attenzione poetica si concentra sull'elaborazione di quelli che diventeranno i leggendari "Cantos" (o "Canti pisani").
Nel 1925 si trasferisce da Parigi a Rapallo dove resterà stabilmente fino al 1945 dedicando le sue energie alla stesura dei "Cantos" e alle traduzioni di Confucio. Negli anni 1931 1932 intensifica gli studi economici e la sua polemica contro le manovre economiche internazionali.
Nel 1941 il suo rimpatrio viene ostacolato ed è dunque costretto a rimanere in Italia, dove fra l'altro tiene una celeberrima serie di discorsi alla radio, riprendendo spesso il tema di conferenze già svolte alla Bocconi di Milano nelle quali insiste sulla natura economica delle guerre.
Com'era prevedibile nel clima infuocato di quello scorcio di secolo, quei discorsi venivano apprezzati da alcuni mentre altri li osteggiavano. Il 3 maggio del 1945 due partigiani lo prelevano per conurlo al comando alleato e da lì, dopo due settimane di interrogatori, viene trasferito a Pisa nelle mani della polizia militare.
Per tre settimane è rinchiuso in una gabbia di ferro, esposto al sole di giorno e agli accecanti riflettori di notte. Trasferito poi sotto una tenda, gli viene concesso di scrivere. Finisce di comporre i "Canti Pisani".
Viene trasferito a Washington e dichiarato traditore; viene richiesta per lui la pena di morte. Al processo viene dichiarato infermo di mente e rinchiuso per dodici anni nel manicomio criminale di Saint Elizabeth.
Incominciano a circolare petizioni da parte di scrittori ed artisti da tutte le parti del mondo e si fanno sempre più insistenti le proteste contro la sua detenzione. Nel 1958 viene liberato, si rifugia presso la figlia a Merano.
In tutto il mondo si moltiplicano le edizioni dei suoi "Cantos" e partecipa invitato a numerose attività artistiche e letterarie, mostre, convegni a livello internazionale, accolto con tutti gli onori.
Il giorno 1 novembre 1972 Ezra Pound muore nell'adorata Venezia dove è tuttoggi sepolto.
— biografieonline
L'ÉPOPÉE D'EZRA POUND
«LE HALL DE L'ENFER»
À l'aube du XXIe siècle, au temps de la constitution de l'Europe, de l'établissement d'une nouvelle monnaie (l'euro), des questions sur la mondialisation, la lecture des Cantos engage plus que jamais un retour rétrospectif sur le siècle passé et sur ses classiques : Joyce, Céline, Pound.
Né aux États-Unis, à Hailey (Idaho) en 1885, mort à l'hôpital SS. Giovanni e Paolo, à Venise (Italie), en 1972, Ezra Pound, pour le meilleur et pour le pire, assumera dans son œuvre, et notamment dans Les Cantos, l'essentiel de ce qui constitue un siècle dont les bouleversements se réalisent expressivement dans la monstruosité des deux grandes guerres mondiales.
Si Les Cantos se présentent comme une sorte d'épopée, le récit poétique d'événements propres à l'établissement de la culture occidentale, et de ses fondateurs, ils n'en sont pas moins étroitement liés à l'aventure d'un homme, à la vie, à la sensibilité propre de leur auteur, et à son temps.
C'est significativement que, en 1962, lors d'un entretien, Pound déclare avoir commencé à écrire Les Cantos « vers 1904 », date à laquelle il a découvert La Divine Comédie de Dante, bien que l'on sache que le projet du poème ne commence à se réaliser qu'en 1915.
Ces deux dates n'en sont pas moins significatives. Les Cantos commencent avec la découverte de l'œuvre de Dante, dans une université américaine, et Pound s'engage dans leur rédaction, à Londres, l'année même où il apprend la mort dans les tranchées, de son ami le sculpteur Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
Très vite Les Cantos sont habités par les souvenirs de la guerre, les amis morts, la situation sociale : « le prix de la vie en Occident », le trafic des armes : « Mon travail m'avait conduit à ne plus voir les guerres l'une après l'autre comme de simples accidents, mais comme partie intégrante du système. » Pound n'en démordra pas, en 1962, à la suite d'une autre guerre bien autrement meurtrière, il déclarera : « J'écris pour m'opposer à cette idée que l'Europe et la civilisation sont damnées. »
«LE MUR DES SIÈCLES»
Il fallait sans doute venir d'ailleurs, l'Amérique, et être cet Américain-là, pour prendre la mesure, l'ampleur poétique, du désastre annoncé, et en assumer la perspective historique. Dès le premier « Canto », épigraphe, fronton à l'ensemble de l'œuvre, Pound annonce la couleur en traduisant, presque littéralement, l'épisode de la descente aux enfers et de la consultation des morts par Ulysse, aux chants X et XI de L'Odyssée.
Hommes, œuvres, monuments, documents, histoires, légendes, on pourrait faire figurer en tête des Cantos le célèbre vers de Hugo : « J'eus un rêve : le mur des siècles m'apparut. » Mais là où Victor Hugo suit « le grand fil mystérieux du labyrinthe humain : le Progrès », et projette ce qui en est attendu, de ce « progrès », Pound n'attend plus rien. L'expérience, la sienne et celles de ses aînés immédiats, l'ont convaincu : la vérité a déjà eu lieu et elle a été trahie. Dante, qu'il compare à Mencius, reste à penser. Et il s'en explique : « Ça a d'abord commencé comme ça : il y avait six siècles à empaqueter. Il fallait s'occuper de tout ce qui ne se trouvait pas dans La Divine Comédie. La Légende des Siècles de Victor Hugo ne constituait pas un bilan, mais une compilation de lambeaux d'histoires. Le problème était d'ériger un cycle cohérent, ramenant l'esprit contemporain à celui du Moyen Âge après l'avoir soigneusement débarrassé de la culture classique dont il était inondé depuis la Renaissance. »
Mais le Moyen Age lui-même est à repenser et le projet suppose implicitement l'établissement et la conquête d'une autre histoire. C'est donc le sens, la « valeur » des portées historiques d'une culture que, dans son effondrement guerrier, il faut reprendre et repenser, c'est-à-dire écrire autrement. De ce point de vue, le projet des Cantos est proprement monumental. Il participe dans sa dynamique, dans ses admirables réalisations, comme dans ses limites, d'une ambition, d'une force et aussi, disons le mot, d'une crispation musculaire et morale sans exemple dans l'histoire de la poésie du XXe siècle.
Il faut savoir qu'Ezra Pound a écrit et publié plusieurs volumes de poésies avant de se consacrer, pendant plus de cinquante ans, exclusivement à l'écriture des Cantos, qui ne voient le jour qu'à partir du moment où le poète trouve une forme susceptible d'assumer sa vision à la fois ponctuelle, fragmentée, discontinue et panoramique de l'histoire.
L'œuvre d'Ezra Pound s'impose, et produit un événement sans précédent dans l'aventure de la poésie moderne, le jour où le poète découvre l'étude de Fenollosa sur Le Caractère écrit chinois. Il en retient que, dans le procès de composition de l'idéogramme, « deux choses adjointées ne forment pas une troisième chose, mais suggèrent une relation fondamentale entre elles ». Fort de cette découverte, qui implique que « lire le chinois ce n'est pas jongler avec des concepts, mais observer les choses accomplir leur destin », Ezra Pound va s'employer à faire dialoguer entre elles, dans l'accomplissement actuel de leur destin, les figures fragmentaires et dispersées, des civilisations, des langues et des cultures. Et plus essentiellement la culture occidentale et la culture orientale, à travers Dante et Confucius. On doit ainsi comprendre que les pictogrammes chinois qui figurent dans les Cantos s'imposent comme manifestation essentiellement programmatique de l'œuvre.
[...]
— Marcelin Pleynet
