Tree Moss

The Cantos evolved into the huge tome it became, with various sections being published piecemeal over the decades, as Pound wrote them. Pound began work on The Cantos in 1915, and the first three Cantos were published in Poetry magazine in 1917. Over the ensuing decades, Pound would rewrite the beginning to the poem, and The Cantos would follow various threads. The most celebrated of these are the Pisan Cantos, which Pound began following his arrest in Italy in May 1945, and his detainment in the American Disciplinary Training Center just north of Pisa. For a short while, Pound slept on the ground in the open air, before being transferred to an open-air cage. He was denied access to his reading, but he continued to write – he appears to have drafted the first Pisan Cantos on toilet paper.