BK. Ezra Pound

108. Slatin, Myles. ‘A History of Pound’s Cantos I-XVI, 1915-1925’. American Literature 35 (1963): 183-95.

Carefully traces the process of composition and emerging design of the early Cantos, relying on references Pound made to the poem between 1915 and 1925. Slatin notes that in his search through Pound’s published work and the vast archive at Yale (90a) he found ‘no significant reference to the actual task of writing a long poem until after Pound had received . . . Ernest Fenollosa’s notes for the translations of the Japanese Noh plays’, and that these ‘first suggested to Pound a possible solution to the problem of constructing a long non-narrative, imagist poem’. Following this observation, Slatin summarises Pound’s own statements about the ‘unity of image’ he had found in the nô, and how the form had shown him that ‘a long vorticist poem is possible’ (see 12, 17f and 87), but Slatin’s work does not further describe or evaluate the effects of the nô on the structure and design of Pound’s work. See also 70.