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Poetry, Accountability and Forgiveness: Ezra Pound and the Pisan Cantos

This article offers a reading of the Pisan Cantos that responds to two related questions: First, does this volume of poetry offer a response to its critics' enduring desire to hold Pound accountable for his writing? Second, what are the promises and pitfalls of imagining aesthetic harmony as a vehicle for, or analog to, forgiveness? As the Pisan Cantos illustrate, when Pound is faced with evidence of his own errors of moral and political judgment, he consistently invokes the absolution that he believes his commitment to beauty can bestow on him. The article argues that by turning our focus from accountability to these gestures toward forgiveness, we can better understand the nature and consequences of the very refusal to subordinate the aesthetic to the moral that has led so many of Pound's readers to wish to indict him.