Wonderful reading by Leon, who's put in the equivalent of
an article's worth of work in his commentary on the
ant/centaur line.

The question Leon raises in my mind is how we, as critics/
readers, are to bring instances of these images that occur
OUTSIDE the passage at issue (e.g., in letters,
articles by Pound) to bear upon the passage at issue.
Indeed, we have to ask ourselves, also, how to relate
ant and centaur images within the text of the Cantos
to this specific passage of the poem.

It seems to me that our *first* responsibility as readers
is to START by limiting our reading of those images (in
the "Ed ascoltando" stanzas) only to meanings we can derive from their
immediate 3-stanza context.  If we have to admit defeat, i.e.,
if we can't get a satisfactory reading of that 3-stanza
unit in its own terms, then we may need to fan out to the
rest of the context provided by C. 81 and those surrounding,
finally to rely on all the external instances like those
discussed by Leon, et al.  The more distantly we travel away from
that self-contained passage, the less certain our readings.
To me this is methodologically obvious.

I happen to believe that those external instances are very dubiously
related to what Pound is up to in the passage in question and that
if we DON'T have pre-set notions about ant & centaur referring
to the poet himself (Leon certainly doesn't), we can very easily see
them as initiating a bitterly ironic indictment of the elegantly
attired, overweening Miles Gloriosus and all his deeds of hate
and destruction.

We may thus get a perfectly self-contained reading that accounts for
the entire structure of the passage and all its imagery.

==Dan



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