Pound and/ or Franklin

John Gery takes Philadelphia as his starting point, but less for Pound’s ties to Jefferson than for his mostly unexplored associations with Benjamin Franklin’s sensibility. When looking for early American counterparts to the prominent figures who populate The Cantos, from Sordello to Confucius, Pound looked first to Jefferson, then to John Adams as his American icons, despite Franklin’s public prominence. Although Pound does refer to Franklin some twenty times in The Cantos, he underplays his role. “Given Franklin’s prominent reputation for his imagination, unorthodox manner, wily and sometimes scandalous behaviour, inventive spirit, public service, and political savvy,” he might well have a more formidable presence in Pound’s epic. After comparing Franklin’s views on education with Pound’s ideal of a formal education, and after contrasting both writers’ views on “civic economy,” Gery ends with a close reading of Franklin’s portrait in Canto 31, to determine what Franklin represents for Pound, what aspects of his American imprint has found its way into The Cantos, cross-historically, possibly evident as much as by what Pound omits as by what he incorporates.