A TOUCH OF RHETORIC: EZRA POUND'S MALATESTA CANTOS

This work is the first full-length study of Ezra Pound's preoccupation with the figure of Sigismondo Malatesta, the fifteenth-century lord of Rimini who was also a condottiere, poet, patron of the arts, and builder of the magnificent Tempio Malatestiano. Though historians of the Renaissance have often depicted Sigismondo as a cruel tyrant, guilty of almost every conceivable outrage, Pound's thorough examination of primary and secondary sources convinced him of the distorted historical tradition concerning Malatesta and induced him to celebrate the singleness of purpose that resulted in the construction of the Tempio, an achievement which constituted for Pound "the apex of what one man has embodied in the last 1000 years of the occident.".;The early drafts reveal that, as Pound grew more familiar with the historical background of the period, he gradually excised passages which either criticized Malatesta for his alleged crimes or which attempted to justify them in some way. His attention thus came to be focused less on the moral issues involved in assessing Malatesta than on the spectacle of a heroic rebel with an audacious vision (the Tempio), thwarted and ultimately defeated by the forces of repression and orthodoxy--here, the Church under Pius II. The later drafts and published version of the Malatesta Cantos exemplify the representational technique that Pound finally chose, that of "deflated epic," which makes use of humor, irony, bathos, and comic juxtaposition of styles and levels of diction in order to register the plight of a heroic individual caught up in a world that trivializes itself by its pettiness and deceitfulness.;The third chapter examines the Malatesta sequence from this viewpoint of deflated epic and points out the subversion of parody of numerous epic conventions, resulting in the introduction of a new rhetoric into the Cantos. The final chapter traces the evolution of the "Malatesta-figure" (the rebellious, gifted "outsider") in Pound's work as a whole. Beginning with such early exemplars as Bertran de Born, this section follows the various modifications of this figure through Propertius and Mauberley ending with a discussion of the outsider in the Cantos--from the alienated leaders of the early cantos, through the temporary abandonment of the outsider in the unalienated leaders of the middle cantos, to the powerful re-introduction of the outsider, after the collapase of Pound's hopes for Italy, in Cantos 72 and 73 (written in Italian and not included in any edition of Pound's poem) and in the Pisan group, in which the caged poet himself emerges as the greatest embodiment of the heroic outsider in the Poundian canon. This survey demonstrates that, in the decades following the publication of the Malatesta Cantos in 1923, Pound almost invariably associated each new representative of the outsider-figure with Sigismondo Malatesta--"a failure worth all the successes of his age.".;After providing a brief sketch of Sigismondo's career, the dissertation discusses the more than 700 sheets of Pound's notes and drafts for the Malatesta Cantos (8-11) now housed at Yale's Beinecke Library. These unpublished materials are studied for the light they shed on Pound's methods of note-taking, composition, and revision, as well as their usefulness of providing sources and glosses for hitherto unexplained allusions. The first two chapters trace the external history of these cantos and the course of their internal evolution (their growth from one canto to four, and the radical shifts in focus and emphasis that took place during the year of Pound's work on the sequence). Pound's first three drafts are examined in detail, as is a typescript submitted to the Dial but never published.