SOURCE: "'And Will the World Take Up Its Course Again?': Paranoia and Experience in the Pisan Cantos," in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 31, No. 4, Winter, 1989, pp. 536-53.

In the following essay, Bishop discusses Pound's effort to continue his epic historical vision in The Cantos after his traumatic imprisonment in Pisa and the demise of Mussolini. According to Bishop, "the jarring tonalities and circuitous associations" of his verse beginning with "Canto 74" "is the drama of Pound's recovery."

The relation between Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos and his alleged mental illness has not been satisfactorily explained. Some scholars ignore this complication entirely and explicate the Pisan Cantos without reference to Pound's certified mental incompetence. Others question the psychiatric verdict reached at Pound's trial, a verdict that might taint the literary value of those much-admired later cantos. This skepticism has been buttressed by claims that trial psychiatrists exaggerated Pound's...