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)