Word: pisans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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EZRA POUND IN ITALY: FROM THE PISAN CANTOS...
This book arrives like a packet of snapshots long lost in the mail. In 1968, some four years before his death, Poet Ezra Pound agreed to accompany an Italian photographer on a tour of the locales that had inspired him during the writing of the Pisan Cantos 23 years earlier. The freedom to roam was ironic, for when Pound had composed these poems he had not been free to travel anywhere. He was incarcerated in the U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Center in Pisa, charged with treason for making speeches over Rome radio in support of Mussolini's regime...
Next there are the accompanying excerpts and snippets from the Pisan Can tos, reproduced in Pound's handwriting. Good poetry should stand on its own feet, but Pound's presents a special case. Although as a young man he campaigned tirelessly for the sharpest possible image expressed in the fewest possible words, his later poems grew increasingly allusive, personal and cryptic. Images were still present but encoded. Seeing what Pound saw before it filtered through his mind helps break that code. Sometimes the pictures simply amplify the words. Two pages of dark, roiling skyscape follow lines on Pisan...
FINALLY THERE IS the uproar over the award of the first Bollingen Prize for poetry in the Pisan Cantos in 1949, a matter that hits at the very heart of the conjunction of poetry and politics in Pound's life. Heymann simply recounts the attacks, defenses and counterattacks on the committee for making the award, without ever proffering his own opinion. Karl Shapiro--who was on the Bollingen committee, and voted against the award--seems to have had the best idea--that a poet's moral and political philosophy could not be separated from his poetry. But then Shapiro, like...
Amnesty Movement. Poetry saved him. Recuperating slowly in a medical tent, he sat at the orderly's typewriter and pecked out his most personal and moving poems, the great Pisan Cantos. With eyes unsealed by shock, Pound finally saw himself as he was seen-a vain "beaten dog beneath the hail/ A swollen magpie in a fitful sun." He was flown back to the States to face trial for treason, but the case never came to judgment. Declared hopelessly insane. Pound was committed to a federal bedlam in the District of Columbia...