Books: Pound Still Soaring

ELEVEN NEW CANTOS—Ezra Pound— Farrar & Rinehart ($1.50). When last year Publisher Farrar brought out the first U. S. edition of A Draft of XXX Cantos (TIME, March 20, 1933), by violent, obscure but famed Poet Ezra Loomis Pound, he did not expect it to land on a best-seller list. Acclaimed by many a critic and fellow-writer as foremost living U. S. poet, Pound is little conned by plain readers. But Publisher Farrar rightly considers him a feather in his cap, continues to publish him in the face of little comprehension, no popular applause.

Poet Pound’s magnum opus, the Cantos, is written in a form peculiar to him: a kind of poetic newspaper, its fragmentary comments ranging through half-a-dozen centuries, cast in as many languages, sprinkled with “unprintable” Anglo-Saxon terms whenever they come in handy. In Eleven New Cantos the interludes of recognizable poetry are rarer, the shorthand economic diatribes more frequent. Hopeful speculators who try to plot the curve of Poet Pound’s current issue will be sadly shaken as it zooms from the 18th Century to the 20th, bumps down to the 15th, changes its orbit as unpredictably as a wayward electron. Speculators may not get far with Poet Pound, but steady observers will note a contemptuously indignant attitude toward civilization in general, bigwigs in particular, will note also a powerfully satiric effect.

Poet Pound may be writing a newspaper, but he editorializes his reports:

. . . the King of Sardinia was, like all the Bourbons, a fool, the Portuguese Queen a Braganza and therefore by nature an idiot, The successor to Frederic of Prussia, a

mere hog in body and mind, Gustavus and Joseph of

Austria were as you know really crazy, and George

3d was in a straight waistcoat. . . .