Garrick,
Is literature supposed to be easy?  Is it supposed to make perfectly good
sense on a first, second, or third reading?  I don't know, I've struggled with
Melville's "Bartleby" for a good many years before finally coming up with a
sense that I've mastered it--and that text can't be fully understood without
annotations either.  In any case, skipping to our postmodernist writers,
those who have waved away those elitist-obscurantist modernists, do we
not see in many of them, in their very ironizing of every cultural artifact,
the same elitist-obscurantist tendencies reborn with a different look?...
(admittedly, with a greater sense of humor).  And how about Dante, who
can get through the Paradiso without falling asleep?
As to The Cantos, singular or plural, you get out of it/them what you put
into it/them.  Modernism has produced various literary monsterpieces that
are either to be climbed or circumvented.  As to the "small army of scholars
[that] has gained tenure by annotating its lines," I thought that the practice
of exegesis is what much of literary scholarship is all about.
==Dan Pearlman

At 08:38 PM 12/18/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>Dear Pound Listmembers,
>
>I would like to hear some discussion on the lasting importance of the Cantos.
>Is it the great epic poem of the 20th century or a complete mess?
>
>It seems to me that, in the end, it is the great garbage heap of Modernism--a
>vast accumulation of (now annotated) passages from which the reader (or, more
>probably, the scholar) picks at random. It has a vast reputation among
>scholars and poets--and yet it is formless and incoherent by any standard.
>Its reputation (and example) has been pernicious. The Cantos is "responsible"
>for the other unreadable long poems of the Modernist era--like Olson's
>Maximus or Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover.
>
>It is, in short, the perfect example of the excesses of Modernism and the
>taste in poetry that it championed: nasty, obscure, fragmentary, and long.
>
>If I may be permitted to quote myself:
>"Considered as an epic poem, as a unified work of art, the Cantos is a
>failure according to any critical measure we wish to use. It is so obscure
>that a small army of scholars has gained tenure by annotating its lines, and
>that enterprise has taken fifty years. It is so fragmentary that, even with
>their notes, most of it seems willfully private in the worst way: like the
>diary of an encryptionist, written for an audience of one. Without such
>notes, of course, the poem is merely a terrifying, polylingual puzzle. It, in
>fact, depends upon the glosses of scholars to render it readable; it is
>inscrutable without exegesis.  The Cantos is simply not a self-sufficient
>work of art."
>
>This question seems to be exemplified in the whole problem of addressing the
>Cantos in the singular or plural form. The Cantos is or the Cantos are? Is it
>one thing or a miscellany?
>
>Regards,
>Garrick Davis
>editor,
>CPR (www.cprw.com)

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