Bio: 1885 to 1972, married Dorothy Shakespear, who illustrated his first book of poems, had a child
Writer and critic, stayed to his morals, got his fellow writers out of jail & hospitals, introduced them to rich women, got them published, advocated for them: TS Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway.
He was banished from US for treason, lived in Italy. Unfit for trial, sent to jail, had a mental breakdown, was in mental hospital. Awarded an American award while in psychiatric hospital.
Style: imagism, derived from Chinese and Japanese poetry. He’s a utopian. Suspicious of centralized government. Advocate of impractical ideals. Advocate of just society brought about by reason.
Cantos: a steady stream from darkness to light. Structure: First 30 set the themes that he dips back into during the other cantos. Written over 20 year period.
Why write it? As with Aeneid, he wanted America to have a founding epic poem.
Confucius: not seen as divine, his ideas dictated not by a god, but by a reasoned trained thought, dealing with temporal matters (no afterlife). Believed in man creating order within himself, which brings order to family, then to clan, village, etc.
Values: strong family loyalty, ancestor worship, respect of elders by children, husbands by wives. Family as basic unit of society. Silver rule: don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you. Emphasized personal morality, hierarchy of respect, correctness of social relationships.
Confucius makes his first appearance in Canto XIII. VS Dante’s Divine Comedy, also prominently featured, a Judeo-Christian viewpoint where heaven and hell are real. Both are pinnacle works.
Pound is pointing the way to reaching paradise through the mind, reasoning our way to paradise. America founded on these ideals, the age of reason, exalting reason and questioning theology as it had been provided by the church.
Ref. American vs. French Revolutions. Both have a foundation of exalted reason, but in American it’s more Judeo-Christian or at least deist: “endowed by your Creator”. French leads to Napolean and an emperor, and it works in America much better.
Message: through the purgatory of this life we can get to the light of paradise through reason and ordering our lives. Dealing with injustices, etc. like Purgatorio. But this path is less linear.
His convictions were strong and narrow, he had a moral sense: people were judged in hell for doing wrong.