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)