Cantos I.

The first part of Pound's life's poetic Cantos, the one hundred and seventeen songs of which he wrote over fifty years. In Cantos, Pound wanted to write the sum of our age, tradition and present after Homer, Virgil and Dante:
"On his adventurous journey to Ithaca, Pound arrives at a very different conception of time, in which he replaces the usual divisions of past, present, and future with a new range of values for earthly time. He captures what lasts, what returns, and what goes." (T. S. Eliot)
The first thirty Cantos were written between 1912 and 1929. They were published in book form as A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930 in Paris. In them, like Ulysses, Pound sails across the sea to Europe, finding the tradition of the troubadours and the grandeur and cruelty of medieval Italy. He juxtaposes all this, and the Far Eastern tones, with reminiscences of the former emergence of the "new world" in America and his own time of the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

Czech edition