from Canto CXV

By Ezra Pound 1885–1972 Ezra Pound

The scientists are in terror

and the European mind stops

Wyndham Lewis chose blindness

rather than have his mind stop.

Night under wind mid garofani,

the petals are almost still

Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,

When one’s friends hate each other

how can there be peace in the world?

Their asperities diverted me in my green time.

A blown husk that is finished

but the light sings eternal

a pale flare over marshes

where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change

Time, space,

neither life nor death is the answer.

And of man seeking good,

doing evil.

In meiner Heimat

where the dead walked

and the living were made of cardboard.

Ezra Pound, "Canto CXV" from The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Copyright © 1993 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1993)

Biography

Of all the major literary figures in the twentieth century, Ezra Pound has been one of the most controversial; he has also been one of modern poetry's most important contributors. In an introduction to the Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot declared that Pound "is more responsible for the twentieth-century revolution in poetry than is any other individual." Four decades later, Donald Hall reaffirmed in remarks collected . . .

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