The Cantos

A long modernist poem by the American poet Ezra Pound, published as 109 canonical sections along with a number of drafts and fragments added as a supplement at the request of the poem's American publisher, James Laughlin. Pound had considered writing a long poem since around 1905, but did not begin work on it until 1915, and continued adding to it for the rest of his working life, ranging without a fixed narrative across history, economics, Chinese philosophy and Italian politics and mixing multiple languages and quoted documents. He never brought the poem to a planned conclusion: its last short fragment, a coda dated 24 August 1966, was gathered with the rest of the drafts and fragments and published together only in 1987, fifteen years after his death, and the poem is generally classified by its own publishers as a Modernist epic rather than a finished, closed work.