he way that Pound presents all these different voices is a good beginning to discovering the meanings of what they have to say and how it is all connected.
Obviously all three of the works that are mentioned or dealt with in these three cantos were very important in the history of civilization. Homer was a source for many ideas in European literature and Confucius developed a very influential way of thinking. Karl Mark, in Das Kapital, developed a whole new way of looking at economics. Marx's communist ideas were developed in response to the conditions of the nineteenth century and the industrial revolution--a revolution that made the modern world what it is--and were followed by the Russian version of communism as a form of government and a way of life. Pound moves the reader around in time, jumping from one century to another in nearly every canto. But there are many connections that can be made between the sources that he used.
One example of these connections is the types of human activity that Pound's three authors wrote about. Odyssesus, for example, was a soldier and a sailor, and Homer wrote about a man of action. Kung was concerned with a way of thinking. And Marx was interested in the nature of money and business and the power that it gave one class of people over nearly everyone else in their societies. Ideas are very important to the poem. Pound sees all these ideas as different expressions of human experience that may contrast with each other but are addressed to human beings who are very much alike in many ways, no matter when or where they live.
Another way of viewing the connection between the three sources is the ideas about religion and death that are presented in each of the cantos. The first canto involves gods and goddesses, rituals and sacrifices, and prayer. Odyssesus and his men live in a society where everything is accounted for by their ideas about religion. For them death is terrifying...