The cultural politics of Canto 49 by Ezra Pound. A historical re-evaluation

The critical tradition on Canto 49 by Ezra Pound has consistently privileged its first half, sketching out a Chinese pastoral, whereas the second half has enjoyed much less attention, being treated as more of an appendage than an integral section of the poem. This tradition has thus been unable to reconcile the two sections and give a unified interpretation of the canto. The second half outlines a possible political and historical contextualisation of the first, by integrating the poem more firmly into the ideology of its volume, The Fifth Decad of Cantos XLII-LI. It suggests contemporary and impending events around the date of composition (1936), such as Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, the banking reforms in China during its Republican period, as well as the looming Second Sino-Japanese war, events which give the canto an underlying political armature. Detailing and clarifying these issues allows us to reintegrate the snapshot-like nature of our partial understanding into a more unified interpretation and reveals ways in which 49 works as a harbinger of the next section of cantos, devoted to Chinese history more generally (52-61), thus situating it more firmly within Pound’s personal investigation into the nature of the twentieth century.