sions, not only historical but also personal? In a narrative poem using varied
data and often written as a texture of images, what is the principle by which
one moves through a canto and from canto to canto? How does one correlate
comprehensive definitions of the poem with details of varying magnitudes,
from single words, images, and passages to single cantos, groups of cantos,
instalments of cantos, and groups of instalments?

This book seeks to show that intention, subject, form, and end have inhered
since A Draft of XVI. Cantos for the beginning of a poem of some length was
published in 1925 and that from the beginning a mind in the process of making
itself up over an era and a lifetime derives simultaneously, while turning them
into narrative, forms of tradition, biography, government, and art. It would
demonstrate that the first canto is an intricately designed epitome of the whole;
that the first draft constitutes a prototype for a series of analogously formed
instalments; that one instalment metamorphoses into another while sequence
accrues toward a whole prophesied by historical materials and realized by the
activity of what claims to be an archetypal revolutionary mind.

It should be self-evident, though the point has never been pressed, that The
Cantos is an epic of revolution. The title of this book reflects an overall form
and its concomitants inherent in American history and in American revolution
prophesied by previous histories and projecting a world future. The varied
subject matters may be local, but surely The Cantos is an historical narrative
by an American mind informed at every point by its own native heritage.

Scrutiny both in the large and in meticulous detail has convinced this writer
that a distinctive, discoverable form inheres in a subject matter chosen and
arranged to be prophetic as well as literal, and that before he published his
first definitive draft Pound had correlated and universalized the symbols and
documents of '76 in a revolutionary Calendar for a new era dated from his
birthday. The Calendar, as yet little known and never investigated, implies
origins for world history. As I seek to show, both substantively and mathe-
matically, it derives from the Seal of the United States a dynamic process of
historical evolution caught at various points "in the course of human events,"
and correlates the Seal symbolism with a philosophy of revolution, an epic
evocation, and a vision of justice found in the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution. Tradition, personality, and justice are to be consum-
mated in a continuation of world revolutionary epic delineating a new world
civilization.

Evidence for such early beginnings—from 1904 or 1905, Pound said in
several places—appears here abbreviated (see pp. 64-65) from a subse-
quently written complementary book, The Search for Oneself: Shaping Up
Personae and The Cantos, 1907-1926, parts of which elaborate further
Pound's early American background (1885-1900) in his family and in col-
lege. The first chapters of '76 itself describe an overall scope, subject, argu-
ment, and emerging form of The Cantos. Succeeding chapters present external
evidence and a special kind of symbolic internal evidence ("arcana"). I

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