The Cantos - Legacy

Legacy

Despite all the controversy surrounding both poem and poet, The Cantos has been influential in the development of English-language long poems since the appearance of the early sections in the 1920s. Amongst poets of Pound's own generation, both H.D. and William Carlos Williams wrote long poems that show this influence. Almost all of H.D.'s poetry from 1940 onwards takes the form of long sequences, and her Helen in Egypt, written during the 1950s, covers much of the same Homeric ground as The Cantos (but from a feminist perspective), and the three sequences that make up Hermetic Definition (1972) include direct quotations from Pound's poem. In the case of Williams, his Paterson (1963) follows Pound in using incidents and documents from the early history of the United States as part of its material. As with Pound, Williams includes Alexander Hamilton as the villain of the piece.

Pound was a major influence on the Objectivist poets, and the effect of The Cantos on Zukofsky's "A" has already been noted. The other major long work by an Objectivist, Charles Reznikoff's Testimony (1934–1978), follows Pound in the direct use of primary source documents as its raw material. In the next generation of American poets, Charles Olson also drew on Pound's example in writing his own unfinished Modernist epic, The Maximus Poems.

Pound was also an important figure for the poets of the Beat generation, especially Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. Snyder's interest in things Chinese and Japanese stemmed from his early reading of Pound's writings. and his long poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965–1996) reflects his reading of The Cantos in many of the formal devices used. In Ginsberg's development, reading Pound was influential in his move away from the long, Whitmanesque lines of his early poetry, and towards the more varied metric and inclusive approach to a variety of subjects in the single poem that is to be found especially in his book-length sequences Planet News (1968) and The Fall of America: Poems of These States (1973). More generally, The Cantos, with its wide range of references and inclusion of primary sources, including prose texts, can be seen as prefiguring found poetry. Pound's tacit insistence that this material becomes poetry because of his action in including it in a text he chose to call a poem also prefigures the attitudes and practices that underlie 20th-century Conceptual art.

The poetic response to The Cantos is summed up in Basil Bunting's poem, "On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos":

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?

They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,

jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,

et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.

Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?

There they are, you will have to go a long way round

if you want to avoid them.

It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,

fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!