His sense of formal structure in The Cantos evolved slowly, even as the river bed shifted and changed, but always congruent with his immediate thought and passionate involvement in public affairs. Anyone who writes that many letters a day and gives his life over, wholly, to writing poetry, is not only expressing himself, but also identifying/defining/establishing that ever-changing self. The Cantos are essentially a poem of personal experience.

The attempt to reconstruct a publishing history of ‘The Great American Epic,’ required total immersion in the text, itself, and its various versions, not to mention surviving correspondence, both published and unpublished – as preserved in public archives as well as publishers’ files and private collections. Taken together, such documentation sheds much light on the poet’s shifting objectives, developing technique, changing states of mind, and reactions to outside events (history itself). Charting the evolution of the poem(s) also leads to the recognition of differing structural frames and changing strategies which, in fact, reflect significant shifts in personal sensibility. Reading through thousands (and thousands) of unpublished letters raises awareness of the persistence with which the poet approached the notion of form in each published collection – the revisions and rearrangement of individual poems, until satisfying structures emerged.

There can be no doubt that the two European wars of imperial aggression (1914 – 1918 & 1939 – 1945), not to mention the interim economic depression, affected Pound greatly, as did his wide reading in historical and cross-cultural literatures. Before attempting to establish a wider context for the discussion of the poet’s mindscape (the shifting panorama of a mind’s landscape), subject matter, and sense of form, however, a brief digression – an ideological context –  must be allowed. In The Cantos Pound operates on a dichotomy between ‘emotional synthesis’ (poetry) and ‘intellectual analysis’ (prose) which supercede each other whenever their partial untruth in rendering the whole, is acknowledged. Operating, as he did, between antinomies, the intrusion of discord was inevitable. Adding to the problem, his thought and practice was profoundly unconventional, and included:

                  An ideogramic linking of ideas through interaction and juxtaposition,

      which creates meaningful networks rather than linear progressions; an

obvious evolution from the early technique of Imagism to the concept of ‘unity of image’, in which a cluster of images organizes itself around a single, signifying idea.

 
The ‘Omniformis’ principle – identity based on non-identity – the creative projection of ‘self’ into the ‘other’ which evolved from the ‘personae’ technique of the early translations. Writing outside a self-perceived personality displaces and distances the inner from the outer self.
Through aestheticism, the concern for psychic experience, so central to the earlier Mystical-Occult Revival, gave rise to psychological fictions which often address the author’s distress and even despair. | 2 |  

A break with traditional literary genres. The Cantos include epos, lyric poetry, and                   drama – epos as the collective voice, lyric as the individual, and drama mediating                   between them in the form of ‘personae’.

                  The simultaneity of past and present which comprehends archaic records as well
                  as the latest achievements in literature.

                  A break with – and criticism of – Western culture based on comparisons with the                   achievements of non-Europeans.

His goal, obviously, was to identify an ideal, social order – one that ‘holds’ by attraction and from within. As opposed to the earlier symbolist phase, but still in sympathy with its theoretical base, he wished to discover an underlying coherence in the self-evident chaos of human endeavor, history, and individual character. Images, narratives, personae, and dramatic vignettes become units which, when arranged aesthetically, constitute an anterior reality.

Having internalized the eclipse of class privilege for the scions of colonial stock by newly risen speculative capitalists and the dilution – even debasement – of traditional, Yankee values by immigrants from Ireland, as well as Eastern and Southern Europe, the poet fled the provincialism of America, but not without a sense of having been excluded/rejected. According to Alex Zwerdling, that perception also contributed to the expatriation of Henry Adams, Henry James, and T.S. Eliot. | 3 |

Pound also retained a high-minded sense of social responsibility; after all, he had grown up in a culture which prized Ralph Waldo Emerson’s humanistic idealism – “a transcendental ethic which gave mind a creative, primary, and active role” as well as a sense of wholeness. | 4 | Emerson was, after all, a prophet of bipolarity: “A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I yet behold two.” The Sage of Concord was both an idealist and an Antinomian, rebelling against formalism which stultifies intellection. He was nothing if not a speculative moralist and adherent of mystical experience.