A Draft of XXX Cantos. de POUND, Ezra - 1930

Paris: Hours Press,, 1930. The blossoms of the apricot / blow from the east to the west, / And I have tried to keep them from falling First edition, first impression, number 31 of 200 copies printed on Canson-Montgolfier soleil velin paper, from a total edition of 212 copies; there were also 10 signed copies on Texas Mountain paper, and 2 copies on vellum. This publication marks the first appearance of the poems that would make up Pound's Cantos, his magnum opus. When Cyril Connolly wrote The Modern Movement in 1965, he selected XXX Cantos as "the best work in Pound's 'poem of some length'". Connolly remarks that "one enters them like a sunlit church with a service going in a dark corner and suddenly the music pierces... A moment later all is muttering and mumbling". The Hours Press was owned and operated by Nancy Cunard, heiress to the Cunard shipping fortune. She first met Pound in 1915, when he approached her mother for support for Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. Cunard was able to fulfil an ambition to learn hand-printing when William Bird, proprietor of Three Mountains Press, agreed to sell her his press and types for £300. By late 1928, she had set herself up at Reanville, 50 miles from Paris, intending to publish experimental literature, with an emphasis on poetry: Pound's developing cantos suited her aims perfectly. Octavo. Original grey buckram, spine and front cover lettered in red. Woodcut initial letters by Dorothy Shakespear. Bookplate of South African industrialist Sir Ernest Oppenheimer (1880-1957) and ink shelfmark to front pastedown. Spine slightly toned and faded, a few small marks to cloth, contents almost entirely unopened: a near-fine copy. Gallup A31a; Connolly 66.