Ship River

Ezra Pound referred to The Cantos as, variously, ‘an epic including history’ and, with more muted self-praise, a ‘ragbag’. Yet although it is undeniably a ragbag, there are a number of key themes running through The Cantos. Pound has started out with Imagism, in 1912, and the idea of ‘superposition’: placing, as it were, one image on top of another, so that in his most famous early poem, the two-line ‘In a Station of the Metro’, the faces of the commuters in the Metro station are placed next to the image of petals on the wet, black bough of a tree. In a sense, The Cantos sets out to apply such a principle, not to individual images, but to whole epochs and systems: capitalism, history, politics, economics, art, poetry, and the relation between these various disciplines and institutions. For instance, art and finance are connected through a theme that is glimpsed at several points in The Cantos, namely the relationship between an artist and his patron.