River Moss River

Pound himself said that the structure of The Cantos could be analysed as follows: ‘Live man goes down into world of dead. “The repeat in history.” The “magic moment” or moment of metamorphosis, bust through from quotidian into “divine or permanent world.” Gods, etc.’ This structure can be observed in Canto I, which is an English rendering of a Latin translation of the ancient Greek poem The Odyssey, specifically that section which involves Odysseus and his crew travelling down to Hades, the Underworld. But Pound’s title for his epic, The Cantos, also suggests the medieval Italian poet Dante as a model: his Divine Comedy, comprising numerous ‘cantos’, is about the poet’s journey into hell, thence to purgatory before arriving in heaven. Pound’s Cantos might be regarded as a modern secular version of Dante’s spiritual journey, provided we don’t view it as solely that.