Homesickness and nostalgia are clearly elements in the Cantos--along with so many other parts of this and that. And the idea of journeying is allover the place. Yet in many ways, the Cantos disrupts the sense of home to which can be made a return. Even myths, for example, are dislocated, so that Kuanon, Chinese goddess of Mercy, is mingled in with Venus and  Artemis, who are themselves lifted out of their historical and regional contexts and made part of a new global or cosmic Poundian arrangement. This sort of thing offers an intellectual comfort more than an emotional one. Pounds journey is ever onward, and that is a hard comfort at best. It is the comfort of the intrepid adventurer who knows that he will not die at anything like home, warm in his bed, even though he carries the memories of his journey, of his various self-constructed homes, with him. 
        Dante attains a permanent sense of paradise. Pound does not. In the Eleusinian mysteries, the adherents do not gain a sense of personal immortality, but rather, some sense that the species, like the vegetation, will always renew.  Confucius would not talk of the afterlife. Too much we don't know about this one. Why bother with the other?  And does an ideogrammic construction allow for transcendence, or box in thought? Where is the transcendence in the following:
 
         Fireman's torchlight procession!
Proportioned to free inhabitants (Dec. 21. '43)
Electro-magnetic. (Morse)
                              Constans proposito...
                              Justum et Tenacem  
                                                   (XXXIV/171)?
 
I know, I know, there are other more elevating passages. But lets not neglect this kind of comfortless passage from the Cantos. 
 
>>> Erik Volpe <[log in to unmask]> 08/25 10:47 AM >>>
Not that I myself read the Cantos when I am far from home and feeling
Frostian, but I have, on occasion, brought The Cantos abroad. The
Cantos may be a working text or a moving text, and that is exactly the
point; it is Dante, it is Odysseus, it is a journey, where at times the
pilgrim yearns for his homeland. Although at times disdainful, it seems
to me London is mentioned  throughout The Cantos with much nostalgia.
Friends, like in Dante's Inferno, are brought back from the underworld,
even those who may have at one time pissed EP off, or stabbed him in
the back (Lewis). The Pisan Cantos possesses a very discomforting
position for the narrator, but is juxtaposed with perhaps some of the
most beautiful imagery and language in all of the book. These
fragmented passages of recalling, i think, can be very comforting. I do
not think Mr.Romano had "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" in mind
when asking his question. Considering Canto I starts with a voyage, I
think homesickness does have a place amongst discussion.
 
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