EZRA POUND'S "DRAFTS & FRAGMENTS": A STUDY IN COMPOSITION

This thesis is intended to be a groundwork study of the last volume of Ezra Pound's Cantos. The first chapter supplies in-depth biographical information for the years 1958 to 1961 (the period of composition), the history of the volume's composition, and the story of its publication. Most of the information for the textual and compositional history of Drafts & Fragments was obtained from a study of the manuscripts and typescripts of the relevant material at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. An Appendix to the thesis includes much of this material. Throughout the thesis it is used as evidence that Pound was extremely insecure not only about the publication of this material in separate canto form, but of its compilation in a "volume." The various stages of composition charted in the discussion of the composition process in Chapter 1 also reveal that he was experiencing great difficulty settling on the final form of each canto, and that the volume now known as Drafts & Fragments should not be viewed as a completed artistic product, but as notes towards a later, though not a final, volume.

The second chapter is a close source reading of the volume's opening canto, CX, and supplies sources for the references in the remainder of the volume. From this chapter it is evident that Pound is writing a personal autobiographical poetry, in marked contrast to Rock-Drill and Thrones. The third chapter investigates this tendency more thoroughly by describing the struggle Pound undergoes in trying to establish various personae in these cantos. Although he attempts to retain Odyssean, Dantean, Confucian, and even Heraklean voices and teleologies, the new introspective nature of his verse gradually forces him to relinquish these traditional voices for an explicitly personal one.

The final chapter is a theoretical examination of the problem of closure in the Cantos, informed by these previous findings. It is argued that Pound did not desire to cease the Cantos at all, but that he hoped to retain "open-endedness." The suddenly introspective verse, however, precluded such a possibility, and forced an end to the Cantos because it admitted the impossibility of sustaining Imagistic objectivity.