page_title: The Cantos
section_title: LXXXV–XCV [85-95] (Section: Rock-Drill)
hierarchical_section_title: The Cantos / LXXXV–XCV [85-95] (Section: Rock-Drill)
caption_attribution_description: English: Thomas Hart Benton — Democratic Senator from Missouri, 1821-1851
context_page_description: The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 116 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered to be an intense and challenging read. The Cantos is generally considered one of the most significant works of modernist poetry in the 20th century. As in Pound's prose writing, the themes of economics, governance and culture are integral to the work's content.
  The most striking feature of the text, to a casual browser, is the inclusion of Chinese characters as well as quotations in European languages other than English. A close reader will normally require a scholarly commentary to help understand the text. The range of allusion to historical events is broad, and abrupt changes occur with little transition.
  There is also wide geographical reference.
context_section_description: Published in 1956 as Section: Rock-Drill, 85–95 de los cantares by New Directions, New York.
  Pound was flown from Pisa to Washington to face trial on a charge of treason on the 16th of November 1945. Found unfit to stand trial because of the state of his mental health, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital, where he was to remain until 1958. Here he began to entertain writers and academics with an interest in his work and to write, working on translations of the Confucian Book of Odes and of Sophocles' play Women of Trachis as well as two new sections of the cantos; the first of these was Rock Drill.
  The two main written sources for the Rock Drill cantos are the Confucian Classic of History, in an edition by the French Jesuit Séraphin Couvreur, which contained the Chinese text and translations into Latin and French under the title Chou King (which Pound uses in the poem), and Senator Thomas Hart Benton's Thirty Years View: Or A History of the American Government for Thirty Years From 1820–1850, which covers the period of the bank wars. In an interview given in 1962, and reprinted by J. P. Sullivan (see References), Pound said that the title Rock Drill "was intended to imply the necessary resistance in getting a main thesis across — hammering." It was suggested by the heading ("The Rock Drill") of Wyndham Lewis's 1951 review of The Letters of Ezra Pound.
  The first canto in the sequence, Canto LXXXV, contains 104 Chinese characters from the Chou King, in addition to a number of Latin phrases, mostly taken from Couvreur's translation. There are also a small number of Greek words. The overall effect for the English-speaking reader is one of unreadability, and the canto is hard to elucidate unless read alongside a copy of Couvreur's text.
  The core meaning is summed up in Pound's footnote to the effect that the History Classic contains the essentials of the Confucian view of good government. In the canto, these are summed up in the line "Our dynasty came in because of a great sensibility", where sensibility translates the key character Ling, and in the reference to the four Tuan, or foundations, benevolence, rectitude, manners and knowledge. Rulers who Pound viewed as embodying some or all of these characteristics are adduced: Queen Elizabeth I, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, as are Napoleon III, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Dexter White, who stand for everything Pound opposes in government and finance.
  The world of nature, Pound's source of wealth and spiritual nourishment, also features strongly; images of roots, grass and surviving traces of fertility rites in Catholic Italy cluster around the sacred tree Yggdrasil. The natural world and the world of government are related to tekhne or art. Richard of St. Victor, with his emphasis on modes of thinking, makes an appearance, in close company with Eriugena, the philosopher of light.
  Canto LXXXVI opens with a passage on the Congress of Vienna and continues to hold up examples of good and bad rulers as defined by the poet with Latin and Chinese phrases from Couvreur woven through them. The word Sagetrieb, meaning something like the transmission of tradition, apparently coined by Pound, is repeated after its first use in the previous canto, underlining Pound's belief that he is transmitting a tradition of political ethics that unites China, Revolutionary America and his own beliefs.
  Canto XCVIII reintroduces Ocellus, a fictional character whose name derives from the Latin word for "eye." Ocellus is first introduced in Canto LXXXVII, "Y Yin, Ocellus, Erigena." This tripling is crucial to an understanding of Pound's motivations. Here, he combines Confucianism with Neo-Platonism—Y Yin was a Chinese minister famous for his justice, while Erigena refers to the Irish Neo-Platonist who emphasized regeneration and polytheism. Ocellus is hence the imagined amalgamation of Eastern Confucianism and Western Neo-Platonism.
  Canto LXXXVII opens on usury and moves through a number of references to "good" and "bad" leaders and lawgivers interwoven with Neoplatonic philosophers and im
caption: Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who opposed the establishment of the Bank of the United States. His Thirty Years View is a key source for this section of The Cantos.
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