EZRA POUND himself emphasizes somewhat his work on the element of meter.1 T. S. Eliot wrote of Pound's importance in prosody to younger poets that “there is no one else to study.”2 Yet of all the critical attention which Pound's poetry has received in recent years, not one piece analyzes this fundamental aspect of his work.3 We have almost uniquely Pound's critical pronouncements and the verse iteself to lead us to an understanding.

The James Osborn Collection of Joyce Cary manuscripts deposited in the Bodleian Library contains all of the extant notebooks, worksheets, trial scenes, and early versions of Cary's works, both published and unpublished, finished and unfinished. This collection, gathering together in one place all of Cary's manuscripts, provides a unique record of the techniques, intentions, and development of an important contemporary novelist. Though the genesis and development of each of Cary's novels can be traced from an examination of the manuscript collection, I have limited this study to the first trilogy because the complexity of the trilogy form provides a deeper insight into Cary's method of writing and because the trilogy form represents his most important literary achievement.

The Protagonist of Alejo Carpentier's short novel El acoso is an informer fleeing from men who would avenge the deaths he has caused. The pursuit and punishment of an informer, not a new plot, is usually developed with rapid pacing and suspense. But Carpentier modifies this traditional story of the chase by breaking it into a mosaic of fragmentary incidents and remembrances arranged without chronological sequence. Adopting certain techniques of the stream-of-consciousness writers, he reduces external action to a minimum and uses interior monologues and confused shreds of memory to show the inner life of his characters. Yet his work is not primarily a psychological study: the combination of two apparently disparate approaches to the novel (one a story line based on a closelyknit, causal-temporal progression and the other a narrative structure determined in part by the flux and shift of consciousness) creates a static and almost allegorical depiction of Betrayal in its various modes and incarnations. This duality of presentation is also evident in the subject matter: definite historical happenings, tied to actual sites in the city of Havana, are the factual ingredients in a drama that seems to be just one possible version of a constant theme. Uniting the particular and the abstract, intertwining the external chain of events (shattered and rearranged according to noncausal principles) with pictures of internal chaos, Carpentier presents both the vision of a traitorous, degenerate world in which man plays out certain prescribed roles and the artistic or literary organization of this drama of the fall. Underlying these elements and binding them together is one of Carpentier's repeated themes—the representation, domination, or denial of time.