[log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> 1) I am puzzled by the misunderstanding produced by my remark
> "self-sufficient work of art." In the context of the paragraph it appeared
> in, I believe it is clear. The Cantos are not self-sufficient because they
> require the aid of other books to understand. A student must purchase
> Terrell's Companion to the Cantos to have any idea what the references
> mean--the references and the glosses being essential in many places to attain
> the meaning of the passage. Thus, it is not an autonomous work of art.
> Pound's later poetry has not only involved--it has required--the explication
> and annotation of scholars (a la Joyce in Finnegan's Wake--a work Pound
> disparaged) to a remarkable degree.
>

This won't hold water either theoretically or empirically.

From my personal experience: I have read far less commentary on Pound
than I have on either Milton or Pope -- and personally, I find
commentary to have been rather more important in reading those two poets
than in reading the _Cantos_. For one thing, I started reading Pound in
1956 when there was not really much commentary available, and by the
time commentary became available, I was too enmeshed in (a) political
work (b) the ravages of depression and (c) a rather onerous teaching
load to more than skim a random selection of that commentary. ("Onerous
teaching load": From 1970 to 1985 I not too jocularly referred to my
position as that of a "tenured temp.") I never did really "study" the
poem. I kept it near me at home and continually browsed in it. After a
year lines here and there began to stand out. After another year a
passage here and a passage there begin to link up to each other. Many of
the items that a comentary provides the poem also provides if you are
patient enough -- and if you aren't basing your professional career on
it, since that demands more instant comprehension. I believe it was
sometime in the late '80s, when I hadn't paid too much attention to the
poem for a couple of years, when a colleague left a note in my mail box
querying me on some matter concerning the poem. As I drifted off to
sleep that night I discovered that I could to some extent "play" the
poem in my mind: "listen" to its various movements as one listens to
music. And just to open it at random and read can, really, provide the
sort of experience that John Adams found in Cicero. (Someplace in the
Adams Cantos.)

And one can think with it -- though admittedly Pound probably didn't
intend that his reader should use the poem to think thoughts that were
rooted in Marx, Lenin, Mao, & Cabral rather than Sigismundo, Adams, &
Mussolini!  :-)

Carrol