Ezra Pound\u27s City: The Total Light Process

Ezra Pound became infatuated with the beauty of Venice when he traveled through Europe with his Aunt Frank as a young man of twelve. The sensibility ex­pressed by the stones of Venice became an inspira­tion to which he gravitated for the rest of his life: I first saw Venice in 1898 and have always wanted to go back. It has never disappointed me. This love of Quattrocento architecture conflicted, however, with a contempt he felt for the decadence visible in Venice, To Pound the decadence symbolized a decline in Western culture.. As he gazed at the physical beauty of the Venetian art forms, he yearned to find a modern city which preserved tradition in the arts and encouraged new art as a healthy outgrowth of the old. The Cantos are the story of active man the speaker of the poem — searching for his city: The early interpreters of The Cantos tended to see the poem as a study of the man of willed and directed action, as a persona of Odysseus. It is now clear that the poem rests most firmly in a deeper, stiller sense of humanity, the city and its continuity, symbolized by the goddess of field and citadel wearing the sanctuary of her people as a crown. The purpose of this paper is to explain Pound\u27s search for a city: to distinguish between his outer and inner search for a city, to define his concept of city as seen in images of The Cantos, and, finally, to analyze his inner search for a city as seen in the Venice ideograms of The Cantos