In The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult (1993), critic Leon Surette writes that The Cantos trace in epic fashion the historical interplay of two opposing forces -- one which frees and flows and the other which attempts to block, divert and capture this flow:
The Cantos explain historical event through its exposure of a malignancy blocking the creative forces that are also identified and celebrated in the poem. Pound calls the malignancy "Usura." The creative forces are called "amor" and "Eleusis."
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