Nature and Eleusis in Ezra Pound's Cantos 1-11

This study concentrates on the significance of nature in Cantos 1-11. The purpose or the Cantos is understood to be the formulation of a permanent hierarchy of values for a new culture by returning to the origins of Western civilization. Pound finds those origins in the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece. An understanding of Cantos 1-11, since they are "preparation of the palette," is essential to an understanding of the Cantos as a whole. After correlating Pound's thought on epic poetry, culture in general, and the Eleusinian tradition as "secret history" informing Western values, the study proceeds to a detailed examination of individual cantos. The Eleusinian tradition is considered in the three determinative phases of Western civilization: ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Provencal, and Renaissance Italian. Coordinating Pound's prose writings with the poetry, one finds that these cantos portray Eleusinian consciousness as intimate awareness of "the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive." Pound's use of the Circe episode from Homer's Odyssey dramatizes the necessity and the difficulties involved in properly relating man's will with the forces of nature. The basic polarity in these cantos is between man's will and the dualistic power of nature—at once creative or destructive, depending on the will of the individual. The reading developed for Cantos 1-11 is checked for Cantos 39 and 47 and is found to be valid

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead