The Apocalyptic Vision of Nature in Ezra Pound’s Cantos LXXX and LXXXI

This paper examines American modernist poet Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos 80 and 81 with a focus on the poet’s vision of nature as an apocalyptic power. In these two cantos, the divine essences of beauty and love manifest themselves in the phenomena of nature. In creating his own cosmos, the poet humanizes nature and harmonizes the surrounding objects with nature. With a poetic quality of “tenderness,” the poet’s capacity for sympathetic identification with inhuman forms of life makes up an attitude of reverent vigilance before the natural world. Pound also infuses in his poems the concept of Taoism characterized by the harmonious order in nature and between nature and man. Through writing nature as both the incarnated love and the medium to establish the harmonious relationship with humans, Pound regards nature as a redemptive power. The poetic form, despite its fragmentized quality, becomes proper in that it reflects the pulverization and reconstruction of the self in a process of healing, of coming to himself out of chaos. The mysteries in nature, “the green elegance,” ultimately point to the revelation of the apocalyptic power in Pound’s poetics.