EZRA POUND
A few weeks after this advertisement appears New Directions will publish
two volumes of the
Cantos
of Ezra Pound. One of them, priced at $5, will
include all of the
Cantos
which Pound has completed to date, 1 through 83.
The other will include the
Cantos
completed since the last volume of them
which we published. These new ones are called
The Pisan Cantos
because
they were written during the time Pound was confined in a US Army
Prison Camp near Pisa.
The Pisan Cantos
costs $2.75.
Pound is at present confined as a patient in St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Wash–
ington. At the hearing on his case held in Federal Court a year ago, leading
psychiatrists, testifying as government witnesses, diagnosed Pound's illness
as "a paranoid state," and declared that he was not well enough to de–
fend himself in a trial. The doctors at St. Elizabeth's hospital do not be–
lieve that he will ever recover sufficiently to be tried on the charges of
treason brought against him for making broadcasts from Italy during the
War. These same doctors testified that they believed that Pound had been
ill for a period of ten years or more. This fact, we believe, should be
taken into consideration in making moral judgments about his political
actions.
In another sense, Pound's political actions do not concern readers or
publishers of poetry. New Directions has never judged the merits of a book
by the politics of its author. New Directions has published the great
Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, who was until recently a member of the
Chilean Senate as an avowed Communist,* and it has published the great
novel,
Death on The Installment Plan,
by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, now an
exile in Denmark because Leftist elements in France accuse him of tolerat–
ing the German Occupation. We have published the German playwright
Bertholt Brecht, whose position is about as far Left as you can go,** and
we have just published
The Marble Cliffs
of Ernst Juenger, who, before
he changed his heart, was writing in a vein philosophically akin to that of
the Nazis. In short: the editor of New Directions tries not to confuse
political and esthetic judgments.
We sincerely hope that readers and critics will approach
The Cantos
of
Ezra Pound with a £imilar objectivity. Judge them on their merits as
poetry, and enjoy them for their beauties as poetry.
New Directions also publishes these other books by Pound:
Polite Essays
(on literary subjects-$2.50);
Personae
(Pound's collected poems apart
from
The Cantos-$3.50); The Unwobbling Pivot of Confucius
(transla–
tion and commentary-$1:00). A
Selected· Poems
volume will be ready
in late summer, and at some future date there will be a
Selected Essays
volume (edited by T. S. Eliot) and a volume of Pound's translations from
the literatures of many languages.
*Residence on Earth.
Spanish texts
&:
English translations hy Angel Flores.
$3.50.
**The Private Life of The Master Race,
translated hy E. R. Bendey. $2.50.
The
Trial
of Lucullus,
translated hy H . R.
Hays. 50 cents.
New Directions Books, 500 Fifth Ave., N. Y. C.
