You're quite right, Tim.  And in EP's own early tripartite scheme for the
Cantos,
passing events were one of the constituents.  Allusions to current events
become
more insistent in the middle Cantos, however--post #30, as he became more
politically engaged.

I wonder if Canto 2's Bacchus comes more out of Pound's vision of a virile
Christ,
as in "Ballad of the Goodly Fere," rather than in response to Prohibition.

==Dan


At 12:49 PM 10/12/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>Daniel Pearlman wrote:
>
>>I'd guess that the best poets don't concern themselves much with
>>alluding to current events in their poetry.
>
>Yeats did, see "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen".  Derek Walcott does in
>"Omeros".  Vikram Seth wrote a highly-contemporary Eighties novel in
>verse, "The Golden Gate".  -Tim

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