The Cantos have been called Ezra Pound’s intellectual diary, composed over the course of sixty years. An epic of great vision and complexity, it addresses the profound human issues in history and in our time. Readers often approach the work warily, daunted by Pound’s encyclopedic erudition, but the Cantos were written to be read first and foremost as poetry. Each of the nine groupings of poems can be seen as a fresh wave that swells out from and falls back upon the earlier cantos, extending them structurally, adding new layers of meaning. A Draft of XXX Cantos (1933), which introduces the work, thus anticipates the full Cantos’ essential themes and provides the surest entry into Pound’s masterpiece. Long out of print as a separate volume, A Draft of XXX Cantos is now available as a New Directions Paperbook.