Which poet wrote 'The Cantos'?

Ezra Pound wrote The Cantos, an ambitious modernist long poem that became his central literary work. Pound began developing it in the early twentieth century and worked on it for nearly five decades, drawing on history, economics, mythology, art, and multiple languages.

Rather than presenting a continuous story in a conventional narrative voice, The Cantos uses juxtaposition and collage. English passages appear beside Latin, Italian, Chinese, Greek, and other materials, while historical figures and episodes may appear with little transition. This difficult, allusive method reflects Pound’s modernist interest in compressing different times and cultures into a single poetic design.

The poem’s earliest sections appeared in 1917, and Pound continued revising and expanding it through the 1920s, 1930s, and postwar years. The Pisan Cantos, written after Pound’s arrest and detention in Italy in 1945, became its most acclaimed section and won the Bollingen Prize in 1949. Readers sometimes confuse Pound’s work with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, but Eliot was a fellow modernist whom Pound edited and supported—not the author of The Cantos.