Usually it is my own ignorance that makes me feel in the dark when I'm
reading the Cantos; I might not get an allusion until I do some background
reading.  At times they're obscure because the relationship of the parts to
each other is not immediately evident even after I have come to some
understanding of a chunk in isolation. I think of the Cantos as puzzles in
which the pieces have very well-defined edges but just how the pieces
interconnect is not apparent. With cogitation the relationships do come
into focus and the clarity of the work often will emerge quite suddenly
where there had been muddle. But the muddle was my own.

Pound discusses this mode of poetic meaning in his elaboration of
Fenollosa's essay on The Chinese Written Character, where he gives this
ideogram:

         cherry, rose, sunset, iron-rust, flamingo

The common meaning that jumps out when these discrete things are juxtaposed
without connectives is "redness".  Substitute several lines of poetry for
"cherry"  and a several more lines for "iron-rust" etc, and the same
principle can be seen operating at a higher formal level in each
canto.  Pound writes:

"The moment we use the copula, the moment we express subjective inclusions,
poetry evaporates. The more concretely and vividly we express the
interactions of things the better the poetry. We need in poetry thousands
of active words, each doing its utmost to show forth the motive and vital
forces. We can not exhibit the wealth of nature by mere summation, by the
piling of sentences. Poetic thought works by suggestion, crowding maximum
meaning into the single phrase pregnant, charged, and luminous from within."

Tim Romano


At 02:33 PM 1/30/03 -0800, you wrote:
>Tim Romano wrote:
>>Why read literature that lacks clarity?
>
>The question above has been obstinately staring me in the face every
>time I visit this list in recent weeks.  The question is too important
>to allow just deleting it, but the answer is less obvious the longer
>Tim's question sits there.
>
>Obviously, we *do* read and enjoy literature that lacks clarity.  The
>Cantos being a prime example.  And yet, clarity is clearly (so to speak)
>a virtue.  For example, you can make a case that Vikram Seth is the
>greatest living writer of English prose (a formidable poet too) and it
>is just impossible to imagine more transparent writing then Seth's.
>
>What other virtue in famous less-than-clear literature is it that
>compensates for lack of clarity?   I think this is a really important
>question. -Tim