1—Poetry and/or Propaganda
David Barnes, “Fascist
Aesthetics: Ezra Pound’s Cultural Negotiations in 1930s Italy,” Journal of Modern Literature, 34.1 (autumn
2010), pp. 20–1:
For the purposes of this article, it suffices to say that there is some critical debate as to whether or not the two “Italian Cantos,” 72 and 73, represent an attempt at Fascist propagandizing by Pound. Patricia Cockram takes this view, seeing the Italian Cantos as esthetic [sic] failures on Pound’s part, driven by political and economic desperation (535). Bacigalupo, however, views these Cantos as both a return “to the ‘visionary’ structure attempted…in the ‘Three Cantos’ of 1917, and an anticipation of the autobiographical Pisan Cantos” (“The Poet at War” 71). Bacigalupo argues that the poems should not be seen as aberrations, but as crucial staging posts in the development of Pound’s writing.
Barnes’ references: Massimo
Bacigalupo, “Ezra Pound’s Cantos 72 and 73: An Annotated Translation,” Paideuma, 20 (1991), pp. 10–41; Patricia
Cockram, “Collapse and Recall: Ezra Pound’s Italian Cantos,” Journal of Modern Literature, 23.3–4 (summer
2000), pp. 535–44.