I for one am glad to hear a voice like Garrick's that questions
fundamental literary values and suggests that we reassess
our evaluation of the Cantos (and, perhaps, the reasons that
a number of us become Pound-beguiled, unable to look at
his work objectively).  I, too, would like us to stop pretending
that "disjunction, disunity, lack of coherence and totality" are
literary qualities to be championed.  The thing is, I don't have
a problem with Cantos unity, coherence, etc.  I've seen it
and I've expounded upon it, and if Garrick were actually to
READ some of the critics of the poem--including my own
BARB--he'd have a hard time defending his bravura dismissal
of the work.  Instead, Garrick seems to rely too heavily for
his breezy dismissal on listing a bunch of major literary critics
throughout the century who have equally dismissed the Cantos
(also, with little more reading effort than Garrick appears to
have put into the job), and he does not seem to realize that
much of the reason for the critical dismissal of the Cantos
over the years stems not only from the work's difficulty but
also from Pound's totalitarian and anti-semitic value system.
(We on this list have wrestled with these issues on and off
over the last several years, and many of us have been quite
objective about the potentially damaging effects of the ideas
on the art.)  I myself, to reiterate, do not have a problem
defending the unity of the Cantos; rather, as I think more
and more about what Pound has to say to us (above and
beyond all that annoying political froth of his), I find that I
cannot defend anything that remotely could be identified
as a sophisticated, profound view of the world that the
poem was intended to critique.  Such profundity and
sophistication I find, to the surprising contrary, in the
considerable body of the work of Robert Frost (Pound's almost
complete opposite), and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in
the earlier work of Pound's friend  W.C. Williams.  In my
dubiousness about the depth of Pound's thinking, I suppose
I am merely echoing his friend Wyndham Lewis, who
expressed it all as early as 1927.
==Dan Pearlman

At 01:35 PM 12/20/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>Dear Listmembers,
>
>Thanks to Messrs. Gancie, Davis, and Pealrman for their responses.
>
>Many wondered whether I was being "willfully provocative" or "playing the
>devil" when I suggested that the Cantos are a junk heap--littered with pearls
>of course--so let me discomfort them by affirming that I am perfectly serious.
>
>This judgment of the Cantos--it should be added--was one shared by Yeats,
>Randall Jarrell, R.P. Blackmur, and Allen Tate. In fact, it is an
>illuminating experience to read Tate's opinion change drastically over
>time---compare "Ezra Pound" to "Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Prize" (both are
>contained in Essays of Four Decades).
>
>In fact, the opinion I "provocatively" expressed has been the stated opinion
>of many great critics of the 20th century. I find it disheartening, but
>perfectly understandable, that the Pound List would not entertain this
>opinion (except dismissively and in passing) but it shall not be dispelled so
>easily.
>
>What is most interesting is not that the members of this List have difficulty
>admitting that the Cantos are "nasty, obscure, fragmentary, and long" (this
>is a self-evident fact) but that justification of " the poetics" of the
>Cantos should finally, and fatally, involve embracing the virtues of (to
>paraphrase Alex Davis' response): disjunction, disunity, lack of closure, and
>lack of totality. Aren't these qualities the very hallmarks of the failed
>work of art?
>
>If we (as Tim Bray has) entertain the idea that the Cantos are a miscellany,
>and not "a unified work of art" then we explain many problems that have
>bedeviled Modernism for three quarters of a century. The Cantos are a mess
>because Pound had no epic plan in mind when he started, NOT because he wished
>to be "ahead of his time" and champion "disjunction, disunity, lack of
>coherence and totality" as avant-garde aesthetic values. Talk of it being an
>epic poem simply dissipates, as it should. The Cantos become not one thing,
>but many things---whereas an epic poem is a unified work of art--and so talk
>of the Cantos fragments into various sections (Confucian, Adams, Pisan,
>Throne sections, ad infinitum). These values have--need it be said?--polluted
>Modernist and post-Modernist poetry to its great detriment and left the
>reader with more unreadable poetry (Olson, Duncan, et al. than any one
>century ought to produce.
>
>The Cantos have no one "poetic theory" but many--and I have suggested (in an
>upcoming essay) that the Cantos would have suffered less had it simply been
>titled the Later Poetry of Ezra Pound. The Cantos are a collection of
>disparate poems, without any doubt. "It" will not and does not cohere as one
>thing the author admitted (either  as "a unified work of art" or "an epic
>poem"). Isn't it time that we treated the Cantos as a miscellany? And stopped
>talking of "disjunction, disunity, lack of coherence and totality" as
>literary qualities to be championed (alas, because we wished to defend the
>Cantos) rather than the very absence of those qualities which characterize
>the superior work of art?
>
>I shall finish by twisting a phrase by Robert Gorham Davis to my purposes:
>"The Cantos are, finally, a litmus test for a whole range of critical values
>(and for the excesses of Modernist taste) and stand self-condemned."
>
>Regards,
>Garrick Davis
>editor,
>CPR
>(www.cprw.com)

Dan Pearlman's home page:
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My new fiction collection, THE BEST-KNOWN MAN IN THE WORLD AND OTHER
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