Canto XLV Analysis

As with many of his Cantos, Pound decides not to worry too much about unstressed syllables in Canto XLV. The only syllables he counts out for each line are the stressed ones, which is a type of met...

Knowing what we do about Pound's personal views on modern economics, it's really impossible to say that the speaker of Canto XLV is anyone other than Pound himself. In earlier Cantos, like I and II...

Seriously, this is a lyric poem, which means that its main purpose is to give us insight into the thoughts and feelings of a given speaker. In this case, we're getting access to the thoughts and fe...

There's no sugarcoating it, Pound blusters through this poem like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli. From the opening two lines, you can tell that Pound is getting totally Biblical on u...

At first glance, this is one of those titles that might make you go, "Um… what?" Don't worry. Shmoop's got your back.First of all, "canto" is the Italian word for "song." The word comes from clas...

As you probably know by now, Ezra Pound (and the Modernists in general) weren't shy when it came to telling their audiences that the modern world stank and that poets were the right people to help...

As with most modernist poetry, you're going to have a tough time following Canto XLV if you don't get all of Pound's references. But with that said, you can at least get a sense of how much this gu...

When Pound was young, he made a promise to himself to learn more about poetry than "any man living." Which makes sense once you've read a bit of his poetry. (Source.)Unfortunately for his fans, Pou...

Sure, Pound sort of mentions sex in this poem when he talks about how usura has "brought palsey to be" (45), but he only mentions sex for the sake of saying that the "young bride and her bridegroom...

Francois Villon, Grand Testament (6-7)Aristotle, Politics (47)Andrea Mantegna, Gonzaga, His Heirs and His Concubines (painting) (11)Pietro Lombardo, Italian sculptor (28)Agostino di Duccio, It...