I'd just like to comment on Pound's statement late in the Cantos that he
could not make them "cohere." There is little doubt that the emotional,
physical, psychological and ideological exhaustion Pound must have felt
at that time (as well as just plane old age) played a role in the Cantos
not energetically moving forward. But I think it is unlikely that Pound
couldn't make the Cantos cohere because his ideological and historical
conceptions had been associated, however correctly, with unmitigated
brutality and disaster. Pound must have known very early on that the
Cantos would not cohere or at least had a strong sense that his energy,
sense of music and imaginative spirit would have to be used as a tension
to energize the language of the poem. I believe Pound "knew" the
untenable nature of the Cantos before he even began the first Canto as
it now stand in the finished poem. I believe Pound had experienced
several instances that pointed to the open ended nature of the poetic
enterprise known as the Cantos.

First, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is a brilliant anomaly in Pound; a poetic
sequence that through its faux formalisms gives at least the impression
of a predetermined and faithfuly executed series of poems. I've always
had the sense that Mauberley was a set of poetic ideas that had gestated
in Pound for a long time, not necessarily consciously (and I don't if he
prepared notes), and is actually made up of fragments, that however
brilliant, did not satisfy the thematic or musical ambitions of the
poet.

Pound also must have been aware of the effect he had on the Wasteland
when edited it for Eliot. The microcosm of Eliot's breakdown and
personal responses are inflated and conflated to allow for the
interpretation of the breakdown of an entire civilation. The reader cut
himself on the shards and looked for healing in interpretation.

Finally, there are the earlier false starts or Ur-Cantos. I believe that
Pound began the Cantos anew several times because he was attempting to
adjust his entry into the poem so that the resulting product would have
some semblance of coherence. This is in contradistinction to his poetic
temperament and therefore can be viewed as the desire to bring some
aesthetic and thematic discipline to the poem. But his comments to his
father belie how unsuited Pound was to the task of writing a second
Divine Comedy. Besides that isn't the way Cantos get written. The
ambition is too large. To read and assimilate all the material that
would eventually comprise the Cantos was beyond Pound's financial and
intellectual means, and would have required foresight that would
preclude the one thing leading to another element of Canto formation,
one of its great insecurities and frustrations. Besides if the Cantos
had been carefully plotted, many of the themes would never have made an
appearance and a whole body of forced conceits would be there in their
place. Pound was a relatively young man when he began the Cantos; far
too young and passionate a person to write a reflective work and just
not the person to sustain a narrative. So he had to cope in other ways
with the constant need to maintain the tension in the poem. This
requires alternating musics among other things. But it is the music,
Pound's fabled ear (and let me tell you the guy was good) that bears
much of the weight of moving the poem along.
But coherence. Nah. The poems too ambitious; the poets temperament was
all wrong. But Pound risked it anyway. CP