The Cantos are one-movement works which have accumulated into a cycle over many years. They are personal, even autobiographical statements ("snapshots from life's album") concentrating on separate moods in the manner of Pound's cycle of poems from which the title is borrowed. Cantos l & II date from 1960 and are based on material from the composer's opera The Mine. Canto III (1972) bears the subtitle "A Portrait of the Artist at a Certain Moment".