SOURCE: "Ezra Pound's American Book of Wonders," in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 92, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 387-415.

In the following essay, Lentricchia examines the modernist ideals and Emersonian influence behind Pound's ambitious innovation in The Cantos. According to Lentricchia, "The form he invented is at once the representation of a culture he thought to be in fragments and an offering of hope for a different kind of future, rooted in the narrative of common lineage and destiny."

As a social and literary critic Ezra Pound is a celebrant of the intensely peculiar: the apparently primordial, autonomous force which he believed stood under and propelled all expression: what rescues Homer or Dante, Chaucer or Shakespeare—his chief examples—from what would otherwise have been their certain aesthetic and political fate as rank imitators, the lackeys of someone else's mind. Pound's word for this substance of substances was virtu. In his...