Ezra Pound’s Washington Cantos and the Struggle for Light

The instalments of Ezra Pound’s life-project, The Cantos, composed during his incarceration in Washington after the Second World War were to have served as a Paradiso for his epic. Beautiful and tormented, enigmatic and irascible by turns, they express the poet’s struggle to reconcile his striving for justice with his extreme Right politics. In heavily coded language, Pound was writing activist political poetry. Through an in-depth reading of the Washington Cantos this book reveals the ways in which Pound integrated into his verse themes and ideas that remain central to American far-right ideology to this day: States’ Rights, White-supremacy and racial segregation, the usurpation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court, and history as racial struggle.

Pound’s struggle was also personal. These poems also celebrate his passion for his muse and lover, Sheri Martinelli, as he tries to teach her his politics and, in the final poems, mount his legal defence against the unresolved treason charges hanging over his head.

Reading the poetry alongside correspondence and unpublished archival writings, Ezra Pound’s Washington Cantos and the Struggle for Light is an important new work on a poet who stands at the heart of 20th-century Modernism. Building on his previous book John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (Bloomsbury, 2015), Alec Marsh explores the way the political ideas revealed in Pound’s correspondence manifested themselves in his later poetry.