Albright, Daniel2009-10-261999Albright, Daniel. 1999. Early Cantos I-XLI. In The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel, 59-91. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.052164920X9780521649209http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:3355470Here begins the great unwieldy poem, all light and mud, to which Ezra Pound devoted much of his life. It was the work of a poet too ambitious, too afraid of being cramped, to work according to a plan. Instead of a plan, Pound devised a strategy for creating a self-scrutinizing text, continually extending itself, ramifying outward, as it groped to comprehend its own prior meanings, to improvise new networks of connection, and to assimilate new material: a text shaped like a developing brain. New Cantos form themselves out of schemes to make sense of old Cantos: so the story of The Cantos comprises two intertwined stories, one concerning Pound's writing of the poem, the other concerning Pound's interpretations of what he had already written.en-USMonograph or Book2009-10-2610.1017/CCOL0521431174.004