Dorothy Shakespear and the Cantos of Ezra Pound

Dorothy Shakespear and The Cantos of Ezra Pound is the first extensive study of Dorothy Shakespear’s career as a modernist artist. Her creative period (1908-1942) included Vorticist experiments in watercolour, book illustration, and design. The present volume includes her artist biography and detailed commentary on her work for The Cantos of Ezra Pound.

Ezra Pound never abandoned his wish that his most important poem, The Cantos, be published in illustrated folio editions that would show both the poem’s value in the canon and its durability over time. Largely by his own efforts, Pound managed to publish two instalments of the poem in this format: the initial volume, collecting his first 16 cantos, was published in 1925; the second, (cantos 17-27), three years later. In 1934, Pound was offered the opportunity of publishing his cantos in mass-produced, cheap editions and the folio instalments ceased. The Depression was an unfavourable time for such luxury projects, even if Pound continued to seek a publisher for a third volume of folio, done in cooperation with his wife, Dorothy Shakespear. The present book is a reconstruction of this projected folio which includes the full texts of cantos 28-51, together with Shakespear’s illumination, done in Vorticist style. This edition is prefaced by introductory essays on Shakespear as a British modernist artist and a canto-by-canto commentary on the relationship between her designs and the poem. The edition itself will be followed by a brief chapter on Shakespear’s designs beyond canto 51, opening the way to a fourth folio, illustrated up to canto 61.