[Lecture at the University at Buffalo, summer course 1968. / Robert Duncan.

Recorded at the University at Buffalo on July 2 and July 3, 1968 by Allen De Loach for the Poetry Collection on two Scotch reel-to-reel tapes.

In the fifth session, Duncan read from the early versions of the first three of Ezra Pound's Cantos, "Three cantos of a poem of some length," and from Canto II as it was published in the final version of The Cantos. Among the subjects Duncan discussed were W.B. Yeats, John Milton, Neo-Platonists, Robert Browning, Noh drama, Ernest Fenellosa, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Dante, Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Charles Algernon Swinburne, William Blake, St. Francis, Augustus, St. Thomas Aquinas, "A conversation between Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg" by Michael Reck, John Bunyan, Aristotle, D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, Sergei Eisenstein, Charles Dickens, Stan Brakhage, The faerie queene by Edmund Spenser, Henry IV by Luigi Pirandello, Catherine Medici, Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, B??la Bartok, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Pop Art, Pablo Picasso, Fernand L??ger, Odilon Redon, Plato, Yeats' "Preface to A vision", Charles Darwin, Denise Levertov, Carl Jung, Pound's ABC of economics, Charles Olson's essay "Proprioception," Heraclitus, Aeschylus, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," Peter Paul Rubens, Arnold Schoenberg, Shakespeare's The winter's tale, Leon Trotsky, and "Lycidas" by Milton. During the fifth and sixth sessions, the books added to the reading list were The Spirit of Romance by Ezra Pound, The earliest English poems, translated by Michael Alexander, "an essay by Yeats on Shelley," and Spiritual and demonic magic and The decline of hell by D.P. Walker.

Robert Duncan.

The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries. Digital conversion was made possible through a 2009 National Endowment for the Humanities grant.

1968

Sound recording

INT150

Three cantos of a poem of some length (early version of The cantos) --Canto II.

Hear@Buffalo: The Poetry Collection’s Audio Archive

UB Only

lib-pc002-INT150.mp3