The Cantos

There is also wide geographical reference; Pound added to his earlier interests in the classical Mediterranean culture and East Asia selective topics from medieval and early modern Italy and Provence, the beginnings of the United States, England of the seventeenth century, and details from Africa he had obtained from Leo Frobenius.

In the light of cantos written later than this letter, it would be possible to add other recurring motifs to this list, such as: periploi ('voyages around'); vegetation rituals such as the Eleusinian Mysteries; usura, banking and credit; and the drive towards clarity in art, such as the 'clear line' of Renaissance painting and the 'clear song' of the troubadours.

Designed by Leon Battista Alberti and decorated by artists including Piero della Francesca and Agostino di Duccio, this was a landmark Renaissance building, being the first church to use the Roman triumphal arch as part of its structure.

A phrase from one of Sigismundo Malatesta's letters inserted into the Jefferson passage ("affatigandose per suo piacere o no") draws an explicit parallel between the two men – neither had the financial power of the Medici, yet assisted in the production of art even though they were of relatively modest means and far from the centres of culture.

Canto XL is a diptych: the first section is dedicated to a summary of J. P. Morgan's fraudulent financial career; this is followed by another periplus, a condensed version of Hanno the Navigator's account of his voyage along the West coast of Africa.

Cantos XLII, XLIII and XLIV move to the Sienese bank, the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena and to the 18th-century reforms of Pietro Leopoldo, Habsburg Arch Duke of Tuscany.

The canto is then concerned with the increasing European interest in China during the reign of Emperor Kang Xi, as evidenced by the Sino-Russian border treaty in 1684 and the founding of the Jesuit mission in 1685 under Jean-François Gerbillon.

Following a passage on the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, the canto returns to Adams' mission to France, focusing on his dealings with the American legation in that country, consisting of Franklin, Silas Deane and Edward Bancroft and with the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes.

The body of the canto consists of quotations from Adams' writings on the legal basis for the Revolution, including citations from Magna Carta and Coke and on the importance of trial by jury (per pares et legem terrae).

The remainder of the canto is concerned with Hamilton, James Madison and the affair of the assumption of debt certificates by Congress which resulted in a significant shift of economic power to the federal government from the individual states.

The canto then moves on to a longish passage of memories of the moribund literary scene Pound encountered in London when he first arrived, with the phrase "beauty is difficult", quoted from Aubrey Beardsley, acting as a refrain.

Canto LXXV is mainly a facsimile of the German pianist Gerhart Münch's violin setting of the 16th-century Italian Francesco Da Milano's transcription for lute of French composer Clément Janequin's choral work Le Chant des oiseaux, an ancient song recalled to Pound's mind by the singing of birds on the fence of the DTC, and a symbol for him of an indestructible form preserved and transmitted through many versions, times, nations and artists.

After references to politics, economics, and the nobility of the world of the Noh and the ritual dance of the moon-nymph in Hagaromo that dispels mortal doubt, the canto closes with an extended fertility hymn to Dionysus in the guise of his sacred lynx.

Canto LXXX opens in the camp in the shadow of death and soon turns to memories of London, Paris and Spain, including a recollection of Walter Rummel, who worked with Pound on troubadour music before World War I and of Eliot, Lewis, Laurence Binyon and others.

This heralds perhaps the most widely quoted passages in The Cantos, in which Pound expresses his realisation that "What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross" and an acceptance of the need for human humility in the face of the natural world that prefigures some of the ideas associated with the deep ecology movement.

This news is woven through phrases from a lament by the troubadour Bertran de Born (which Pound had once translated as "Planh for the Young English King") and a double occurrence of the Greek word tethneke ("is dead") remembered from the story of the death of Pan in Canto XXIII.

The world of nature, Pound's source of wealth and spiritual nourishment, also features strongly; images of roots, grass and surviving traces of fertility rites in Catholic Italy cluster around the sacred tree Yggdrasil.

This culminates in a passage bringing together Binyon's dictum slowness is beauty|golden ratio, a room in the church of St. Hilaire, Poitiers built to that rule where one can stand without throwing a shadow, Mencius on natural phenomena, the 17th-century English mystic John Heydon (who Pound remembered from his days working with Yeats) and other images relating to the worship of light including "'MontSegur, sacred to Helios".

Following a reference to signatures in nature and Yggdrasil, the poet introduces Baucis and Philemon, an aged couple who, in a story from Ovid's Metamorphoses, offer hospitality to the gods in their humble house and are rewarded.

An italicised section, claiming that the 1913 foundation of the Federal Reserve Bank, which took power over interest rates away from Congress, and the teaching of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud in American universities ("beaneries") are examples of what Julien Benda termed La trahison des clercs, contains anti-Semitic language.

Towards the close of the canto, the reader is returned to the world of Odysseus; a line from Book Five of the Odyssey tells of the winds breaking up the hero's boat and is followed shortly by Leucothea, "Kadamon thugater" or Cadmon's daughter) offering him her veil to carry him to shore ("my bikini is worth yr raft").

These include Apollonius making his peace with animals, Saint Augustine on the need to feed people before attempting to convert them, and Dante and Shakespeare writing on distributive justice, an aspect of their work that the poet points out is generally overlooked.

This focus on words ties in closely with what Pound referred to as the method of "luminous detail", in which fragments of language intended to form the most compressed expression of an image or idea act as tesserae in the making of these late cantos.

The canto closes with a passage that sees the return of the goddess as moon and Fortuna together with Greek forms of solar worship and the Flamen Dialis that is intended to integrate gold and silver as attributes of coin and the divine.

After an opening passage that draws together many of the main themes of the poem through images of Ra-Set, Ocellus on light (echoing Eriugena), the tale of Gassire's Lute, Leucothoe's rescue of Odysseus, Helen of Troy, Gemisto, Demeter, and Plotinus, Canto XCVIII turns to the Sacred Edict of the emperor K'ang Hsi.

This 11th-century philosopher and inventor of the ontological argument for the existence of God who wrote poems in rhymed prose appealed to Pound because of his emphasis on the role of reason in religion and his envisioning of the divine essence as light.

Canto CVI turns to visions of the goddess as fertility symbol via Demeter and Persephone, in her lunar, love aspect as Selena, Helen and Aphrodite Euploia ("of safe voyages") and as hunter Athene (Proneia: "of forethought," the form in which she is worshiped at Delphi) and Diana (through quotes from Layamon).

A reference to Marcella Spann, a young woman whose presence in the Tyrol further complicated the already strained relationships between the poet, his wife Dorothy and his lover Olga Rudge, casts further light on the recurrent jealousy theme.

After quoting two phrases from Bernart de Ventadorn's Can vei la lauzeta mover, a poem in which the speaker determines to abandon love because he has been rejected, the fragment closes with the line "To be men, not destroyers."

Much critical discussion of the poem has focused on the relationship between, on the one hand, the economic thesis on usura, Pound's anti-Semitism, his adulation of Confucian ideals of government and his attitude towards fascism, and, on the other, passages of lyrical poetry and the historical scene-setting that he performed with his "ideographic" technique.