The New Cantos

The New Cantos is an epic meditation on modernism. Ezra Pound took the story of Ulysses and his other heroes as material for his Cantos; I’ve taken the life of Pound and his fellow artists, musicians and writers for my narra- tive. The poem’s structure is a coherence of fragments. Its free verse form is rooted in the oral prosody of William Blake’s prophetic poems, grafted into my style of writing as a journalist in the tradition of LIFE magazine. Gathering the material for this poem began in the 1960s when, as a LIFE editor, I discovered in the National Archives among a hoard of captured Nazi documents a first-hand account of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. In a sense, that document is the fulcrum of the epic, along with many accounts of the creative genius and madness that have made us modern. Throughout all these years Ezra Pound, as poet and fascist, has fascinated me as our Faustian figure, showing the new beauty within our grasp, and the ethical hell within our reach.