The texts of the cantos and theories of literature

The textual history of Pound’s Cantos is among the most complex of any work commonly (or indeed uncommonly) associated with Anglo-American modernism. Notwithstanding the intricate problems facing any scholar keen on tracing the development of Pound’s poem through its stages of composition and revision, the record of published texts alone presents serious obstacles. As Lawrence Rainey notes, written over a period of almost fifty years, published discretely in more than twenty-five magazines and at least as many different collected volumes across seven countries, ‘no reader other than Pound could ever have traced all the parts of The Cantos’, nor even does any library in world contain copies of every published version. For numerous reasons owing both to the poet’s personal temperament and to the social nature of literary production, non-identical changes were made to different in-print versions.