POUND (Ezra).
The Fifth Decad of Cantos.
Very good, spine of dust jacket sunned, upper edge also slightly torn and creased, otherwise bright and clean inside.
The dust jacket of this volume offers a typically Poundian summary of his own work: ‘This is the third instalment, ten cantos of “a poem of some length,” which is already the long poem of our time. It is an impertinence even to remark that this is the most important volume of poetry to be published in 1937’. The boldness of this claim notwithstanding, this is also the set of poems that commenced Pound’s decades-long tirade against ‘usury’, an ideological lynchpin which would go on to consume Pound’s worldview and undergird his vocal support of Mussolini. A run of Cantos that marks something of a turning point in the trajectory of Pound’s life, eventually leading him to imprisonment and institutionalisation.
