The Cantos
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The Cantos is a long modernist poem by Ezra Pound, written in 109 canonical sections in addition to a number of drafts and fragments added as a supplement at the request of the poem's American publish
Opening page of the first American edition, published 1933
Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta "built a temple so full of pagan works" (Canto XI). Portrait by Piero della Francesca.
Venice: "Flat water before me, / and the trees growing in water, / Marble trunks out of stillness, / On past the palazzi, / in the stillness, The light now, not of the sun" (Canto XVII)
Thomas Jefferson, who was, in Pound's view, a new Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta.
Leo Frobenius
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Leo Viktor Frobenius was a German self-taught ethnologist and archaeologist and a major figure in German ethnography.
The Cantos
…early modern Italy and Provence, the beginnings of the United States, England of the seventeenth century, and details from Africa he had obtained from Leo Frobenius. The Cantos can appear on first reading to be chaotic or structureless because the poem lacks an obvious plot. R. P. Blackmur, an early critic, wrote…
Leo Frobenius
Leo Frobenius in Africa (watercolour by Carl Arriens)
Cover of Expeditionsbericht der Zweiten Deutschen Inner-Afrika-Expedition (1907–09) Auf dem Wege nach Atlantis
Mask Tyi wara (Mali)