The Editor Behind Eliot's "The Waste Land"
To put it bluntly, Canto VII is a lot like T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," which it predates by about three years. There is no question that Pound had some of Eliot's work in mind when he was writing Canto VII, and that Eliot's poem was in turn influenced by the fact that Pound cut more than half of its original lines. The constant shifts between different times, places, and cultures are one of the dead giveaways of Pound's style, as we see with the shift from ancient Rome to medieval France and Renaissance Italy all within lines 5 to 10.
Further, the tone of constant yearning mixed with allusions to a more beautiful, glorious past are also total Pound—through and through. But unlike Eliot's "The Waste Land," which uses several different narrators, Pound doesn't seem to trust anyone to speak his poem other than Ezra Pound himself. This is why the humbler Eliot had a tendency to speak his poetry through different characters, while the more confident and brazen Pound was more than likely to always put himself front-and-center in his own poetry.
Take, for example, the lines that read, "Damn the partition! Paper, dark brown and stretched/ My lintel, and Liu Ch'e's lintel" (38/41). In these lines, Pound inserts himself and his poetry directly into a worldwide tradition of poetic beauty that stretches back to 14th century China and its poetic master, Liu Ch'e. Other Modernist writers tend to be a little more modest about comparing their own work to the great classics of the past, but Pound doesn't even bat an eyelash. You have to hand it to him. The dude has swagger.