ABSTRACT
A Draft of XXX Cantos is an odd work, compounded of two earlier volumes and three additional cantos. Yeats always organized his volumes carefully and, as we have seen, these larger structures shape and are shaped by his poems of paradise. Eliot once told Kenner that he considered Pound a gifted sequencer and that the ordering of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) had been Pound's. 2 In May 1916, around the time he must have been advising Eliot, Pound wrote to his publisher, Elkin Matthews:
Do try to think of the book as a whole, not of individual words in it. Even certain smaller poems, unimportant in themselves have a function in the book-as-a-whole. This shaping up a book is very important. It is almost as important as the construction of a play or a novel. 3
