Why, at the most rudimentary level, can't we be allowed our taste while those with
less capacity for High Modernism continue to absorb whatever lessons the other
genres have to offer?

I can't go into this in depth now, but there is always the notion of the epic as a
voyage of discovery. In the Cantos the epic is process, the poet in the
intellectual and historical landscape as they unfold. What difference does the
structure make? What example of  20th century epic would one propose as a
counterweight example of a 'coherent' epic as opposed to the Cantos? Look what
happened when Dr. Williams tried the form of the Cantos.

The classical notion of the epic has perhaps given way to the stochastic notion of
the epic; the epic of probability. I just finished an excellent essay by Philip
Mirowski called What Were They Trying to Accomplish? about Oskar Morgenstern's and
John von Neumann's book, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, a text I
pillory in my own "incoherent" work as foundational to the dehumanizing nature of
contemporary science as well as the social sciences. One could safely say that
TGEB is an 'epic' of economic thought. It has given rise to voluminous
interpretation and imitation. It operates in power nexus's that no poetry could
ever dream of. Yet, Mirowski is at great pains to demonstrate that the work is
"incoherent." Without going into great detail, I believe that Mirowski is correct
in identifying much of the incoherence as arising from the attempt to create a
synthesis between tenets of quantum theory and game theory based economics; the
set of epistemelogical reductions required to assay one text against another. In
this case the text of quantum has priority, therefore the tendency is to
mathematicize, e.g. make monads of human beings. Von Neumann's life long attempt
to create moral and ethical immunity for math based endeavors is well documented.

But on the levels of materials Pound faces the same contemporary dilemma. Pound's
virtue (and his coherence) is that, although he elides, he is not reductive and
therefore presents an alternative to the highly reductive and ultimately
incoherent project of modern technological development. Other less coherent poems
than the Cantos benefit from a supporting, even driving theoretical crutch, or
from a biographical/psychological 'self.' I admit I do not find Jarrell, Blackmur
et al unreadable though I don't read them much. When I do read them, the time my
mind allows for them is restricted to the duration of that reading. However, I've
formed a permanent dialectic with Pound, Olson, Zukofsky et al.  Carlo Parcelli
[log in to unmask] 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)