Section: Rock Drill de los Cantares

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.

BOOKS AND DISSERTATIONS

1. Bacigalupo, Massimo. Forméd Trace. The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
2. Eastman, Barbara. “Building a Temple: An Interpretative Study of Rock Drill 85-95 de los Cantares of Ezra Pound.” Diss. Oxford University, 1978. Print.
3. Grieve, Thomas. “Annotations to the Chinese in ‘Section: Rock-Drill.’” MA Thesis. Simon Fraser University, 1973. Pdf. 
4. Kindellan, Michael. The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound.London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
5. Lan, Feng. Ezra Pound and Confucianism. Remaking Humanism in the Face of Modernity. Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 2005. Print. 
6. Marsh, Alec. Ezra Pound's Washington Cantos and the Struggle for Light. London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2021. Chapter abstracts.
7. Mitchell, Amy Diane. “Form and Transcendence: Touching the Limits of Poetry in Ezra Pound’s ‘Rock-Drill’ and ‘Thrones’, and Basil Bunting’s ‘Briggflatts.’” Diss. U of Western Ontario, 2008. DAI 69.11 (2009): 4340. Print. Abstract. 
8. Swift, Daniel. The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics and Madness of Ezra Pound. London: Harvill Secker, 2017.
9. Wilhelm, James J. The Later Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: Walker, 1977.

ARTICLES IN JOURNALS AND COLLECTIONS

1. Cole, William. “Pound’s Web: Hypertext in the Rock-Drill Cantos.” Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship 26.2-3 (1997): 137-50. 
2. Davie, D. “Res and Verba in Rock-Drill and After.” In Modern Critical Views: Ezra Pound. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 127-139 ; Ezra Pound’s Cantos: A Casebook. Ed. P. Makin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 205-210. 
3. Grieve, Thomas. “Annotations to the Chinese in ‘Section: Rock-Drill.’” Paideuma 4-2/3 (Fall and Winter 1975): 361-509.
4. Golston, Michael. “Inaudible Rhythms: Form in Ezra Pound’s Cantos of the Fifties.” Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship 26.2-3 (1997): 123-35.
5. Kappel, A. J. “The Reading and Writing of a Modern Paradiso: Ezra Pound and the Books of Paradise.” Twentieth Century Literature 27.3 (1981): 223-246. (LXXXV)
6. Kearns, George. “Reading Pound Writing Chinese: A Page from Rock-Drill.” Modern Critical Views: Ezra Pound. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 199-208.
7. Kimpel, Ben and T. C. Duncan Eaves. “Pound and Pumpelly.” English Language Notes 17.4 (1980): 293-94. (LXXXIX)
8. Korg, Jacob. “Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill and the Cantos.” Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship 4.2-3 (1975): 301-13. 
9. Reed, Brian M. “Ezra Pound’s Utopia of the Eye: The Chinese Characters in ‘Rock-Drill.’” Paideuma, 26.2/3, (1997) 111–21. JSTOR. Accessed 6 Jun. 2022.
10. Scott, Peter Dale. “Anger in Paradise: The Poetic Voicing of Disorder in Pound’s Later Cantos.” Paideuma 19.3 (Winter 1990): 47-63.
11. Scott, Peter Dale. “Energy Near to Benevolence: Anger and Poetic Politics in Rock-Drill.” San Jose Studies 12.3 (Fall 1986): 68-82.
12. Stauder, Ellen Keck. “‘Crystal Waves Weaving Together’: Visual Notation and the Phrasal Music of the Rock-Drill Cantos.” Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship 26.2-3 (1997): 93-110.
13. Taylor, Richard. “From Father to Daughter: Selected Letters.” Paideuma: Studies in American and British Modernist Poetry 37 (2010): 193-212. 
14. Taylor, Richard D. “The Cantos: Section Rock-Drill de los Cantares LXXXV-XCV.” The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Ed. Demetres Tryphonopoulos and Stephen Adams. Westport Ct: Greenwood Press, 2005. 43-46.

BOOK CHAPTERS AND SECTIONS

1. Alexander, Michael. “Rock-Drill.  The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound. London: Faber, 1979. 212-16.
2. Carpenter, Humphrey. A Serious Character. The Life of Ezra Pound. New York: Delta, 1988. [Section: 813-814].
3. Cookson, W. “Some Notes on Rock-Drill and Thrones.” The Merrill Studies in The Cantos. Ed. M. Hénault. Columbus, OH: Ch. Merrill Publishing Company, 1971. 106-113. 
4. Davie, Donald. Ezra Pound. The Poet as Sculptor. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964. 202-32.
5. Flory, Wendy. Ezra Pound and The Cantos: A Record of Struggle. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980. [Section: 232-259].
6. Kenner, Hugh. “Leucothea's Bikini: Mimetic Homage.” Ezra Pound: Perspectives. Ed. Noel Stock. Chicago: Regnery, 1965. 25-40.
7. Liebregts, Peter. “Section: Rock Drill: 85-95 de los Cantares.” Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2004. 291-328.
8. Nicholls, Peter. Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing. A Study of  The Cantos. London: Macmillan, 1984. [Section: 182-212].
9. Read, Forrest. ’76: One World and the Cantos of Ezra Pound. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. 347-84.
10. Sicari, Stephen.  Pound’s Epic Ambition. Dante and the Modern World. New York: SUNY Press, 1991. 154-61.
11. Stock, Noel. “Rock-Drill 1955.” Reading the Cantos. A Study of Meaning in Ezra Pound. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966. 91-103.
12. Surette, L. A Light from Eleusis. A Study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979. [Section: 235-253]. 
13. Ullyot, Jonathan. “How to Read Leucothea.” Ezra Pound and his Classical Sources: The Cantos and the Primal Matter of Troy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 241-274. Chapter extracts.
14. Wilhelm, J. J. Ezra Pound The Tragic Years. 1925-1972. University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1994. 294-302.