| LXXXV | LXXXVI | LXXXVII | LXXXVIII | LXXXIX |
| XC | ||||
| XCI | XCII | XCIII | XCIV | XCV |
When Mary went to the hospital [St. Elizabeths], she immediately saw a man “hit by history full blast.” Though Pound had persevered, the man she had known as a beloved father and teacher no longer existed. He wandered on psychiatric wards amid the disheartening chaos of disheveled minds. He spoke to ramshackle disciples on guarded lawns; he doled out pennies from a meager purse.
Carol Schloss. Preface. Let the Wind Speak: Mary de Rachewiltz and Ezra Pound. Philadelphia, U. of Pennsylvania P, 2023. xi-xii.
“The title is: SECTION; ROCK DRILL which applies specifically to 85/89. The Paradiso proper starting with 90. However, the reader will have to find THAT out for himself.”
Ezra Pound to Mary de Rachewiltz, 23 November 1954. Taylor, 195.
Rock Drill was intended to imply the necessary resistance in getting a certain main thesis across—hammering. I was not following the three divisions of the Divine Comedy exactly. One can’t follow the Dantesque cosmos in an age of experiment. But I have made the division between people dominated by emotion, people struggling upwards, and those who have some part of the divine vision.
Ezra Pound. “The Art of Poetry No. 5.” Interview with Donald Hall. The Paris Review. 28 Summer-Fall, 1962.
“As the Pisan Cantos are the record of the poet’s life at Pisa, Rock Drill and Thrones are the record of his life at St. Elizabeths. He did not, after all exclude the environment of those years from his autobiographical epic. As he told Donald Hall, at St. Elizabeths he lived ‘more with ideas than with people,’ and it can be added, with the vehicles of ideas: words, ideograms, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, page numbers, chapter headings; he lived with books. Out of them he constructed a complete private world to eclipse the institutional setting. Their physical details, like those of the Pisan setting, were preciously other, something against which the mind and the senses could push to exert their existence.”
Kappel, “The Reading and Writing of a Modern Paradiso,” 239.
