Respect to a man who, truly, could not shut the fuck up. Not to save his life. Not to prevent charges of treason. Perhaps this is a common platitude in an era of writing book reviews from a phone but Pound was, without a shred of doubt in my mind, the first Internet poster. Tormented by a brain that seems to have careened at full bore exactly 100% of the time, even isolation in a chain link cell exposed to the elements could do nothing to stymy the flow of information that must have swirled like a fiery tornado around the inside of his head.

I can’t imagine being in similar circumstances and doing anything other than just lying there, waiting to die. But then, I can’t imagine myself doing most of what Ezra Pound did in his life. Befriending essentially every modernist poet and author in the early 1900s, becoming a willing mouthpiece for Benito Mussolini, dying in an asylum. I guess it’s impossible to argue that this man didn’t wring life for all it was worth. But any partaking of Pound’s life always feels disturbing. There’s an odd feeling you get when you see a man who has demonstrated an inhuman level of processing power and recall cling to ideas that are so reactionary. Today I think it causes a guarded concern that maybe they’re being ironic? Like there’s some joke that they’re in on at the expense of everyone else on earth?

But this becomes hard to stick with in the face of how genuine much of The Pisan Cantos feels. There are deep threads that run through Pound’s entire life here. The history of modernist literature is splayed out in poetic grandeur. The Troubadour tradition of Manicheism is knotted into the mess. The Malatesta drama is overlaid onto modern politics and economic theory.

For now this whole thing is a mess to me. I’m going to get to the full Cantos at some point, but for now maybe I’m supposed to just be left in this puddle of multilingual confusion.