Writing and reading history : a study of Ezra Pound's Malatesta, Jefferson and Adams Cantos

Abstract

This thesis examines Pound's claim that The Cantos are "a poem including history" (Pound's definition of an epic). The principal focus is on the three sequences usually referred to as the Malatesta Cantos (VIII-XI), the Jefferson Cantos (XXXI-XXXIV) and the Adams Cantos (LXII - LXXI). It is argued that in the first of these sequences, Pound generated a set of rhetorical and textual strategies, referred to here as pseudo-chronicle, that with modification and adaptation form the basis of historical narrative in the poem up to the Adams Sequence. Pseudo-chronicle, although inherently flawed, provided Pound with a working solution to the crisis of historicism to which, as a historiographer, he was heir, and also to the problems of writing a modern verse epic. From the beginning Pound's "poem including history" and his commitment to Fascism were inextricably linked thematically and formally: his modem epic corresponded to and celebrated Fascism and was sustained by it. The end of Fascism meant the end of Pound's epic as it had been conceived in 1922 and as it had developed up until Cantos LXll - LXXI beyond which point it could no longer be sustained.