Ezra Pound and the Mysteries of Love: A Plan for the Cantos

For more than a decade scholars have understood that Ezra Pound employed mystical concepts of love in his writing of The Cantos. In Ezra Pound and the Mysteries of Love, Akiko Miyake furthers this understanding by looking at The Cantos as a major work in the Christian mystic religious tradition. The author uncovers, in the five volumes of Gabriel Dante Rossetti’s Il mistero dell'amor platonico del medio evo, the crucial link between The Cantos and the traditions of mystical love established by the ancient Greeks at Eleusis and borrowed by the late medieval Italian and Provencal poets. Drawing upon this key five-volume work, as well as comprehensive research in both primary and secondary sources, Miyake brings the partial perceptions of other critics and commentators into an illuminating whole. Disclosing the deliberateness of The Cantos, Miyake provides new insight into Pound’s sense of culture and into the nature of his Confucianism. She sheds light on the disastrous path Pound followed into Fascism and anti-Semitism, and, in contrast to the image of a pagan Pound that has emerged in recent years, reveals a poet writing as a Christian from within the Christian mythical tradition.