Brennen Lukas wrote:
>
>
> However, I still believe that Pound's sheer number of classical references
> is worthy of note. I'd be the first to admit that I do not share the poet's
> ethos in terms of languages and mythology. The problem with Pound is that if
> one doesn't share his extensive classical education, then one cannot fully
> grasp his images without referring to other texts. The meaning is not fully
> contained in the poems.

Probably the references are fewer in the _Cantos_ than in _Paradise
Lost_. Only in PL (a) they are hidden from you unless you can recognize
them on the wing as they go by and (b) they are far more important to
initial understanding of the poem. One gets a good deal more from the
_Cantos_ on first reading than from PL.

But more importantly, you can read the _Cantos_ (and read them more and
more deeply) for years before you really need to start identifying the
"classical references" (a misleading phrase anyhow). And it is not "The
Problem with Pound" -- it's "Brennan Lukas's problem with Pound." If he
baffles you, go read some other poet. There are lots of them. If you are
curious what's in that loose baggy monster of a poem, just keep reading
here and there (skip the foreign languages, skip the passages that seem
too dense; you can come back to them some other day). One day two or
three years from now you might be wonderfully surprised as at how huge
swaths of the poem began to play over in your mind as you drift off to
sleep. In the meantime just think of them/it as an anthology.

And Rennert had said: Nobody, no, nobody
Knows anything about Provencal, or if there is anybody,
It's old Levy."
And so I went up to Freiburg,
And the vacation was just beginning,
The students getting off for the summer,
Freiburg im Breisgau,
And everything clean, seeming clean, after Italy.

And I went to old Levy, and it was by then 6:30
in the evening , and he trailed half way  across Freiburg
before dinner, to see the two strips of copy,
Arnaut's, settan'uno R. superiore (Ambrosiana)
Not that I could sing him the music.
And he said: Now is there anything I can tell you?"
And I said: I dunno, sir, or
"Yes, Doctor, what do they mean by _noigandres_?"
And he said: Noigandres! NOIgandres!
"You know for seex mon's of my life
"Effery night when I go to bett, I say to myself:
"Noigandress, eh, _noi_gandres,
"Now what the DEFFIL can that mean!"
Wind over the olive trees, ranunculae ordered,
By the clear edge of the rocks
The water runs, and the wind scented with pine
And with hay-fields under sun-swath.
Agostino, Jacopo and Boccata.
You would be happy for the smell of that place
And never tired of being there, either alone
Or accompanied.
Sound: as of the nightingale too far off to be heard.
Sandro, and Boccata, and Jacopo Sellaio . . . .
        Canto 20

Read these lines just ignoring the proper names. What greater clarity
(as with gin in cut glass) than, for example, "Wind over the olive
trees, ranunculae ordered"? Doesn't it quicken your circulation? (We
will see that John Adams is present in these lines.)

I typed far more than I'd planned -- the lines just pull one on. Now I
don't know who Levy was/is, nor do I know whether some further lines
(not quoted here) in this Canto represent a "solution" to the problem of
"Noigandres" or not. (More on that in a moment.) And I used to know but
no longer do (can't keep everything in mind picked up over 50 years) who
Agostino, Jacopo and Boccata are -- though it would be easy enough to
find out. Since their names are repeated several times, you might  if
you keep on browsing in the Cantos find them again someplace else -- and
that would connect the two cantos for you. (It's one of the ways the
poem is stitched together: try tracing the name of Jefferson through
it.) And all this without (at least at first) knowing who any of these
people are or what the point of the references is.

Levy is willing to postpone dinner to see two bits of a ms. the scriptor
made a special trip to show the two strips and two ask a question about
one word. Could this be digging with one's fingernails. (And is the
reader being asked, or tempted, to him/herself reenact the poem by doing
some digging too?) But as to digging:

Britten, Fleta on Glanville, must dig with my fingers
as nobody w ill lend me or sell me a pick axe.
Exercises my lungs, revives my spirits, opens my pores
reading Tully on Cataline quickens my circulation.
        Canto 63

John Adams digging for English law and its roots, the scholar Levy
digging for the meaning of one obscure term in an old manuscript. (And
someplace there is a reference to the Albigenses [sp?], a problem in
history. And in an early canto Kung is quoted

And Kung said "Wang ruled with moderation,
        In his day the State was well kept,
And even I can remember
A day when the historians left blanks in their writings,
I mean for things they didn't know . . . .
        Canto 13

I'm no longer an academic, being retired since 1997, and I never
published on Pound. (My dissertation was on Pope and my only publication
on _Paradise Lost_.) There are apparently many people on this list who
have no "professional" stake in Pound but simply have been reading him
for years.

It's lots of fun if you stick at it -- digging with one's fingers in
that vast gold mine, The Cantos. And you don't have to agree with Pound
all that much either -- but that is another topic. Just relax over those
"classical references" for a decade or two. You've got lots of years
ahead of you.

Carrol Cox