POUND, Ezra. The Pisan Cantos. New York: New Directions. 1948.
8vo. Original fine-grained black cloth lettered in silver to the spine, in the buff paper wrapper lettered in green, with illustration of Pound in profile to front panel, also in green; the fragile wrapper partially split to upper area of front flap fold, small area of loss (c. 1 x 0.5 cm) to rear panel inner margin, minor edge wear; a near fine copy in like wrapper.
First edition, first printing.
Pound wrote the ten Pisan Cantos in 1945 while imprisoned in an American military detention centre near Pisa (for a series of pro-Fascist broadcasts addressed aired on Radio Rome). Exposed to the elements in Held in a wire cage, Pound suffered a nervous collapse from the physical and emotional strain. He was later moved to St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington D.C., where he remained, on grounds of insanity, until 1958.
The book was awarded, with attendant controversy, the 1949 Bollingen Prize for poetry, by a jury that included T. S. Eliot. Pound’s post-war reputation had, deservedly, taken a blow, but the ten Pisan poems contain some of his finest writing. The lack of access to books while in captivity may explain the significant autobiographical element of the poems, and their immediacy. The characteristic synthesis of literary, philosophical, economic, and political registers is deft, the balancing of personal and impersonal perfectly pitched.
Preceding the UK edition, issued by Faber the following year, the New Directions edition was published on 30 July 1948; 1525 copies were printed.
Gallup A60a.
SKU: 2122621