Canto 30
Canto 30
Building off critical gestures from Eva Hesse and Phillip Furia, we claim throughout this essay that Pound’s Canto 30 privileges ecology, an ecopoetics that situates human persons within their organic, natural connections with the “green world” and its cycles of life. Through inventive “translated” myths of two medieval couples (King Pedro of Portugal and his queen, Inês de Castro; Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, Italy and his queen, Lucrezia Borgia), Pound considers that art is analogous to nature’s cycle of rebirth. He is an aesthetic environmentalist ahead of his time, and Canto 30—rather than being limited by an eros/thanatos conceptualization—is constituted by, and interconnected through, a “green” theme, death begetting life. Always interested in not only the cultural conservation of art, but also the living quality of art, the liveliness—the fecundity, the “ecology,” of art—Ezra Pound is also driven to engender the renaissance of art as central to culture and the future of humanity.
Keywords: Ezra Pound, Canto 30, 20th Century American Modernist Literature, Ecopoetics, Environmental literature, eros/thanatos
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