Personæ / A Draft of XXX Cantos

In 1926 Ezra Pound carefully sculpted his body of shorter poems into a definitive collection which would best show the concentration of force, the economy of means, and the habit of analysis that were, to him, the hallmarks of the new style. This collection, where Pound presented himself in a variety of characters or "masks," was called Personae.An epic of great vision and complexity, Pound's The Cantos addresses the profound human issues in history and in our time. Each of the nine groupings of poems can be seen as a fresh wave that swells out from and falls back upon the earlier cantos, extending them structurally, adding new layers of meaning. A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), which introduces the work, thus anticipates the essential themes of The Cantos and provides the surest entry into Pound's encyclopedic masterpiece.The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature a limited edition collection is published under the auspices of The American Revolution Bicentennial Administration