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)