The Cantos - LXXII–LXXIII (The Italian Cantos)

LXXII–LXXIII (The Italian Cantos)

Written between 1944 and 1945.

These two cantos, written in Italian, were not collected until their posthumous inclusion in the 1987 revision of the complete text of the poem. Pound reverts to the model of Dante's Divine Comedy and casts himself as conversing with ghosts from Italy's remote and recent past.

In Canto LXXII, imitative of Dante's tercets (terza rima), Pound meets the recently dead Futurist writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and they discuss the current war and the dangers of excessive love of the past (Pound's librarian friend, Manlio Torquato Dazzi) or of the future (Marinetti). Then the violent ghost of Dante's Ezzelino III da Romano, brother of Cunizza of Cantos VI and XXIX, explains to Pound that he has been misrepresented as an evil tyrant only because he was against the Pope's party, and goes on to attack the present Pope Pius XII and "traitors" (like King Victor Emmanuel III) who "betrayed" Mussolini, and to promise that the Italian troops will eventually "return" to El Alamein.

Canto LXXIII is subtitled "Cavalcanti – Republican Correspondence" and is written in the style of Cavalcanti's "Donna mi prega" of Canto XXXVI. Guido Cavalcanti appears on horseback to tell Pound about a heroic deed of a girl from Rimini who led a troop of Canadian soldiers to a mined field and died with the "enemy". (This was a propaganda story featured in Italian newspapers in October 1944; Pound was interested in it because of the connection with Sigismondo Malatesta's Rimini.)

Both cantos end on a positive and optimistic note, typical of Pound, and are unusually straightforward. Except for a scathing reference (by Cavalcanti's ghost) to "Roosevelt, Churchill and Eden / bastards and small Jews", and for a denial (by Ezzelino) that "the world was created by a Jew", they are notably free of anti-Semitic content, although it must be said that there are several positive references to Italian fascism and some racist expressions (e.g., "pieno di marocchini ed altra immondizia"—"full of Moroccans and other crap", Canto LXXII). Italian scholars have been intrigued by Pound's idiosyncratic recreation of the poetry of Dante and Cavalcanti. For example, Furio Brugnolo of the University of Padua claims that these cantos are "the only notable example of epic poetry in 20th-century Italian literature".