The Maximus Poems. Pound was also an important figure for the poets of the Beat Generation, especially Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. Snyder's interest in things Chinese and Japanese stemmed from his early reading of Pound's writings. and his long poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965–1996) reflects his reading of The Cantos in many of the formal devices used. In Ginsberg's development, reading Pound was influential in his move away from the long, Whitmanesque lines of his early poetry, and towards the more varied metric and inclusive approach to a variety of subjects in the single poem that is to be found especially in his book-length sequences Planet News (1968) and The Fall of America: Poems of These States (1973). More generally, The Cantos, with its wide range of references and inclusion of primary sources, including prose texts, can be seen as prefiguring found poetry. Pound's tacit insistence that this material becomes poetry because of his action in including it in a text he chose to call a poem also prefigures the attitudes and practices that underlie 20th-century Conceptual art. The poetic response to The Cantos is summed up in Bunting's poem, "On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos": There are the Alps. What is there to say about them? They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb, jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree, et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger. Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing? There they are, you will have to go a long way round if you want to avoid them. It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps, fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble! Notes Sources Print Ackroyd, Peter. Ezra Pound and His World (Thames and Hudson, 1980). Bacigalupo, Massimo. The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (Columbia University Press, 1980). Cookson, William. A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Anvil, 1985). D'Epiro, Peter. A Touch of Rhetoric: Ezra Pound's Malatesta Cantos (UMI, 1983). Eastman, Barbara. Ezra Pound's Cantos: The Story of the Text (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1979). Flory, Wendy Stallard. "The Return to Italy: 'To Confess Wrong…'". In The American Ezra Pound. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Flory, Wendy Stallard. "Pound and Antisemitism." The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge University Press, 1999) , Ellis, Mary. Epic reinvented: