When A Draft of XXX Cantos appeared in 1930, William Carlos Williams remarked with characteristic insight: "A criticism of Pound's Cantos could not be better concerned, I think, than in considering them in relation to the principal move in imaginative writing today—that away from the word as symbol toward the word as reality." (p. 91)

To understand Pound's gradual shift from what Williams called "the word as symbol toward the word as reality," we might profitably consider Pound's debt to the late nineteenth-century French poet who, in the words of Delmore Schwartz, "tried out the whole century in advance"—Rimbaud. (pp. 91-2)

In referring us back to his A Study in French Poets of 1918, Pound reminds us that his initial interest in Rimbaud coincided with the first burst of activity on the Cantos, which got under way, after the abortive First Draft of Cantos 1-3 in 1917, with the publication...