Beschreibung:

POUND, Ezra. A Draft of XXX Cantos . Paris: Hours Press, 1930. 8 o. Initials designed by Dorothy Shakespear Pound. Original red-orange morocco, gilt-lettered on front cover and spine (a few small scuffs, spine lightly sunned, generally fine). FIRST EDITION, DELUXE ISSUE, ONE OF ONLY 10 COPIES SIGNED BY POUND, printed on Texas Mountain Paper and specially bound, this copy number 10. The entire edition was 212 copies, comprising the present issue of 10 copies; 2 on vellum; and 200 on Canson-Mongolfier Soleil velin M.R.V. paper. A Draft of XXX Cantos incorporates Pound's two previous sections, and adds three further Cantos to make "a closed loop within the Renaissance, with modern extrapolations" (Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era , Berkeley, 1971, p.423). The book was published by Nancy Cunard, who had purchased William Bird's printing press from the Three Mountains Press. This edition, under Cunard's Hours Press imprint, was the last installment of the Cantos issued by private press; hereafter the Cantos were published, in both the U.K. and the U.S., by trade publishers. Pound was not overly desirous to find a wide readership. "Ford Madox Ford tried to interest British and American publishers, but Ezra gave him small encouragement, and when Archibald MacLeish recommended the book [ XXX Cantos ] to Farrar & Rinehart of New York Ezra snarled at him for his pains..." Despite MacLeish's continued efforts, Pound "remained ungrateful, only letting Farrar publish A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1933 because by then he wanted a big readership for the next section of the Cantos, which propagated Social Credit [ Eleven New Cantos , 1934]" (Carpenter, A Serious Character , p.476). With the publication of this summarizing volume, critics, and Pound's literary contemporaries, debated over whether there was any structure to Pound's ambitious work. In response, Pound variously explained a structure founded on that of a fugue, or an alphabetical scheme which represents emotions or archetypal events. But the "truth," if there is one, was revealed by Pound in a candid moment to James T. Farrell in 1932: "the first 2/7ths" of the poem had been filled with "ANY bloody thing to xcite curiosity" (quoted in Carpenter, p.478). Hugh Kenner finds structure in what he describes as the "subject-rhyme" ( The Pound Era , p.423). Whatever one's perspective, Pound's influence in these first thirty Cantos was immense, leading Hemingway to write: "Any poet... who can honestly say that he has not been influenced by or learned greatly from the work of Ezra Pound deserves to be pitied rather than rebuked. It is as if a prose writer... should not have learned from or been influenced by James Joyce." Or as Cyril Connolly remarks, noting his preferance for these earlier Cantos: "One enters them like a sunlit church with a service going on in a dark corner and suddenly the music pierces: 'There is a wine-red glow in the shallows A tin flash in the sun-dazzle...'" (Connolly, The Modern Movement 66). William Carlos Williams perhaps captured it best when he wrote: "It is in the minutiae--in the minute organization of the words and their relationships in a composition that the seriousness and value of a work of writing exist-- not in the sentiments, ideas, schemes portrayed... [ The Cantos are] not by any means a synthesis, but a shot through all material--a true and somewhat old-fashioned analysis of the world" ("A Draft of XXX Cantos by Ezra Pound," in Selected Essays , NY, 1954, pp.107-110). Gallup A31b. A FINE COPY OF THIS VERY SCARCE ISSUE.