“The MAIN AXIS of the Cantos is not your struggle against the economic and social corruption of your time – which you believe you ultimately lost. Your fundamental struggle, the one you realized in the end, is the one you ultimately won, rediscovering and acknowledging the value and power of compassion and love.

I do not claim that this recognition brought you peace. I see that you feel overwhelmed by the fact that for so many years you chose anger instead of compassion. You now blame yourself for not seeing more clearly in the past and recalling your wrong choices and views, you cannot free yourself from the idea that your life's work has been a failure. However, you could have abandoned this struggle, flooded with remorse, when you finally came out of the asylum, and allowed yourself to be led into despair.

But in these poems, I see a Pound who does not lose his determination and integrity. I know you are constantly tormented by doubts, but do you not see that this final, decisive confession of yours is a brave act that few would dare to undertake? In the perspective of time, your “mistakes” and “confusion” will seem secondary. Your epic, your vision, the discovery of self through the exploration of the past, humility through the defense of pride, truth through obsession with error, all these will appear deeply human and, in their passion, noble and grand.

“Indeed, you did not manage to offer a Dantean solution to the social and political diseases of your time. You were forced to acknowledge that the citta ideale you attempted to build exists only in the mind – “dove sta memoria.” However, what is astounding is not your failure to reach a corresponding vision, but the mere fact that you tried to touch it.” – From the introduction by Charis Vlavianos

From the wreck of time, these fragments were rescued from the crash.

• I brought the great crystal ball; who can lift it? Can you penetrate into the great acorn of light? Yet beauty is not madness, even as my mistakes and my wreckage surround me. And I am not a demigod, I cannot give it coherence. If there is no love in the home, there is nothing. The voice of hunger unheard. How did beauty find itself facing such darkness?

• Time, space, neither life nor death is the answer. And for the man who seeks good, doing evil. –E. POUND