The Cantos really has no plot. The poem consists of approximately 120 shorter poems (themselves called "cantos," after the sections into which Dante divided each book of his Divine Comedy), some of which tell unified stories and some of which are simply collections of musings, observations, memories, and exhortations. To summarize the "plot" of The Cantos, therefore, it is probably best to describe the poem in terms of sections.
Although the first draft of the first three cantos appeared in Poetry magazine in 1917, these three cantos were significantly changed for their first appearance in a book. This book, A Draft of XVI Cantos, appeared in 1925. Ten other installments followed, ending with Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII in 1968 (a publication that was prompted by an illegal "bootleg" edition of the.....
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