A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, Revised Edition

Rating:
Summary: An excellent introductory guide.
Review: The highly allusive nature of Pound's 'Cantos' makes them, as everyone knows, difficult to understand. Only when extensively annotated do they become comprehensible, and we are still waiting for the variorum edition that would provide us with an ideal text of the 'Cantos,' a fully annotated text that would clarify every allusion and obscurity, and that would provide sources and translations for Pound's numerous foreign quotations. In the meantime one is extremely grateful for books such as the present excellent introductory guide.

Basically the book consists of useful and occasionally extensive commentaries to each block of cantos, with briefer commentaries to individual cantos, followed by glosses to lines which require explication or are likely to cause puzzlement. Cookson's aim has been to provide the _minimum_ help a new reader requires.

The glosses are helpful and very well done, and Cookson's book will be found indispensable by new readers who are looking for a less intensive treatment than that found in the similar but much fuller guide by Terrell, details of which are as follows:

A COMPANION TO THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND. By Carroll F. Terrell. 791 pp. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1993 (1980). ISBN 0-520-08287-7 (pbk.)

Although Cookson borrowed many of his annotations from Terrell, and admits that his book is not so comprehensive, his guide does contain much useful material that will not be found in Terrell, and his canto-by-canto commentaries provide just what the new reader needs. Strongly recommended.