Book excerpt: Drawing on Ezra Pound's notebooks, typescripts and contri-butions to periodicals, Posthumous Cantos is a selection of drafts and sketches that remained unpublished or uncollected in the poet's lifetime. The material spans the entire half-century of Pound's Cantos, 1915 to 1970, and includes newly-recovered passages he wrote in Italian in 1944-45, presented here in their original form alongside English translations. Accompanied by detailed introductory and explanatory notes and a full chronology, Posthumous Cantos offers new insight into the making of one of the twentieth century's most important and forbidding literary works, revealing it as an endless process of writing and rewriting, in which the poetry and the life are finally inextricable. This is a crucial part of the Pound canon, here made available for the first time in an English edition.