Cantos V.

Italian Cantos (LXXII-LXXIII) was written in Italian in late 1944, when a devastated Italy was divided (the Allies and the Italian government controlled the south, the Germans and Mussolini's Republic of Salò the north) and Ezra Pound believed in its possible revival. Because of the content of these two songs, the Cantos set was published without them for many years (until 1987). In the English edition, we present them as the prologue to the Pisan Cantos, as an expression of the attitudes that informed Pound's imprisonment at Pisa and thirteen years of forced confinement in a mental institution in Washington.
The Pisan Cantos (LXXIV-LXXXIV) were written during Pound's internment in the U.S. Army disciplinary camp at Pisa in 1945. Its eleven long canticles (Canto LXXIV alone is over 800 verses) were written under the most difficult conditions: in a cage in the open air of the camp and in a medical tent after sixty-year-old Ezra Pound collapsed. They are a sequence of the many facts and images that Pound recalls at the moment when his life was upended and the world he believed in was falling apart (the circumstances are detailed in Eva Hesse's extensive essay, which is included in the commentary in this English edition). When Pisan Cantos was awarded the 1949 American Bollingen Prize for best poetry of the year, the storms in the press reached all the way to Congress.

Czech edition