Once again, I suggest to Garrick to read some of the best
criticism on the Cantos.  To say that a work is not self-
sufficient if you need to refer to external sources is patently
absurd.  We on this list, who have had many disagreements
of a pretty sophisticated nature about the Cantos, their form,
their value, etc., have often had encounters with uninformed,
close-minded newbies who attempt to insert screws using hammers.
But everyone has a screw loose, I guess.
==Dan

At 06:52 PM 01/14/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>Dear Pound Listmembers,
>
>I should apologize for my tardy response to so many emails but I just
>returned from vacation. I would like to respond to a few emails in public and
>in particular. I will begin, however, with a few general comments:
>
>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.
>
>2) There are many competing theories concerning the form/structure of the
>Cantos. It seems clear to me that the Cantos have no form or structure. It
>[i.e. The Cantos considered as a unified work of art, and as an epic] has no
>plot, no central figure, no linear time or chronology, and no fixed verse
>form. To the obvious retort--that the Cantos have many plots, characters,
>chronologies, and verse forms--I would merely say it's not unified then is
>it?
>
>3) The consequences of the insight #2 above are as follows. A century full of
>American poets has taken Pound's lead in escaping poetic forms and
>structures. The so-called Free Verse movement has often used Pound's poetry
>(and particularly the Cantos) as a guide to "making it new." This has led
>(and I can hear the screaming begin already) to mountains of unreadable free
>verse--which has mistaken obscurity for profundity, and fragmentation for
>form. Viewed as an example of the 20th c. epic, the Cantos has led many a
>poet to ruin. Were it viewed as a cautionary tale, a mitigated triumph, an
>epic failure--it might have spared us LANGUAGE poetry, for example. This is a
>problem which Pound scholars will ignore, but for poets it's essential--how
>does one get beyond Modernism? To do that, you would have to diagnose what
>was good--and, most of all, bad--about the movement Pound started and the
>poetry he wrote.
>
>4) A great number of responses have disregarded my main proposition [i.e. The
>Cantos are a mess.] because reading the work has been "enlightening,
>educational, profound, etc." Such remarks side-step the main charge, of
>course, but I sympathize and agree with their position. The problem, I
>believe, is that scholars are attempting to elevate the Cantos as the
>foundation of Pound's poetic legacy--an attempt which will fail. Pound
>matters for many reasons--the least of them, I propose, is the Cantos.
>
>5) A few specific replies to emails follow:
>
> From Mr. Pearlman,
>"Garrick, Is literature supposed to be easy?  Is it supposed to make
>perfectly good sense on a first, second, or third reading?  I don't know,
>I've struggled with Melville's "Bartleby" for a good many years before
>finally coming up with a sense that I've mastered it--and that text can't be
>fully understood without annotations either.  In any case, skipping to our
>postmodernist writers, those who have waved away those elitist-obscurantist
>modernists, do we not see in many of them, in their very ironizing of every
>cultural artifact, the same elitist-obscurantist tendencies reborn with a
>different look?... (admittedly, with a greater sense of humor).  And how
>about Dante, who can get through the Paradiso without falling asleep?"
>
>The error here, I believe, is to mistake obscurity for complexity, depth,
>deep meaning. We have learned to enjoy difficult poetry--poetry which does
>not yield its meaning or its pleasure easily--because we believe that
>difficulty is one sign--usually the first sign--of complexity and depth in a
>work of art that we have yet to fully comprehend. In art, complexity
>misunderstood reveals itself first as difficulty, as the tendency of the
>reader to feel that the work of art is beyond his powers of comprehension.
>Dante is difficult reading--but he was never being obscure--because his
>thought was deep. Whereas Pound's Cantos are obscure--not from the complexity
>of his matter or his argument but from the inaccessibility of his references.
>
>
> From Mr Parcelli:
>"I can't go into this in depth now, but there is always the notion of the
>epic as a
>voyage of discovery. In the Cantos the epic is process, the poet in the
>intellectual and historical landscape as they unfold. What difference does the
>structure make? What example of  20th century epic would one propose as a
>counterweight example of a 'coherent' epic as opposed to the Cantos? Look what
>happened when Dr. Williams tried the form of the Cantos."
>
>This view assumes a certain ambiguity of definitions. The epic is a literary
>genre. A literary genre cannot itself be a "voyage of discovery." This
>statement does, however, imply that Pound didn't know where he was going with
>the Cantos and I agree. Secondly, I would not propose any 20th century long
>poem as a coherent epic--there aren't any. As for coherent long poems, I
>would cite The Four Quartets and  Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate. Variants and
>translations of Pushkin's verse novel, Eugene Onegin, are enjoying a revival
>at the moment.
>
>
> From Mr. Romano:
>"As I understood Garrick's question, it might be paraphrased so:  for an epic
>to be a successful epic, doesn't it have to play to the deep acculturation of
>a People, not the to book-learning and polyglot abilities of the elites? The
>cross-cultural and the Epic don't seem to mix, do they?
>
>My reply to that question would be this: the fair critic must ask how the
>Cantos seeks to _transcend_ the epic genre with respect to  Place, Time,
>People, Language, and the task set for its Hero."
>
>I must admit that I have no idea what Mr. Romano is proposing here. How do
>the Cantos seek to transcend the epic genre? Perhaps he can answer this for
>us. I am merely proposing that the Cantos are a mess: nasty (in a few
>places), obscure, fragmentary (as in devoid of a unified poetic technique),
>and long (to no purpose). Pound wasn't trying to "transcend" the epic; he was
>simply trying to write an epic, which he did not do. He wrote something else,
>and it isn't a unified work of art but a miscellany, in my opinion.
>
>I hope to respond to Mr. Korg's and Mr. Bray's letters later.
>
>Regards,
>Garrick Davis
>editor
>Contemporary Poetry Review
>(www.cprw.com)
>
>
>
>

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