Cantos Lii-Lxxi

WHEN Ezra Pound published his first Cantos, many critics believed that the work would develop into the major long poem of our times. Its plan was puzzling, but would emerge as the work progressed. There are still critics who believe this, some telling us that the structure is musical, and is built up of irregularly woven themes whose recurrence and juxtaposition establish the philosophical values of the whole; some that it is planned on the pattern of the Divina Commedia. But the average reader still finds it a collection of unrelated fragments, stories and themes from classical, Chinese, mediæval, and modern history, told in a polyglot vocabulary, with Pound’s own peculiar coloring of satiric comparison, suave slyness, and effective use of modern slang.

This group of the Cantos contains only two themes, the history of China, and the world perspective of John Quincy Adams, as revealed in his private papers during his European embassies. The method of approach is somewhat forbidding to the average reader, but the poems on China are full of that pervading irony which collective facts about government, economic practices, rulers, and political leaders of the past inevitably shed on the behavior of the present.