Aiiie! My hard drive!
 
Seriously, though:
 
Dave --
 
        I think my experiences might be somewhat similar to yours; the
Cantos just don't seem to want to slip neatly in to undergraduate work
-- either you end  up making it all  the way through the  criticism to
find that the life is drained out of the text,  or you begin somewhere
that makes  complete sense to you  but either fails to  sustain itself
over a longer period of time, or fails to make any sense to the people
responsible for advising you.
 
        One thing that might help prevent reinvention of the wheel, or
that might  help  define  "problems"  to   solve within   your  thesis
statement  -- angles   of attack  --   is to look  at  similar efforts
beforehand.  Not  to  do a fullblown  comparison,  but  perhaps over a
weekend when you're  not hitting the  "primary" texts, to look at some
of  the criticism  of,  say,  Joyce's   Finnegans Wake (which   Pound,
incidentally,   disliked -- Joyce    returning  the complement to  the
Cantos), or  Berryman's Dream Songs.  Both of these  are related  in a
number of  ways to the  Cantos, and, in  my  beyond humble  and to the
other  side opinion,  can   shed  a  lot  of  light on   each  other's
structure.   How   Berryman  intertwines   personal   experience  with
historical  events, for example.   Certaintly, there are a  great many
differences between the  texts, but, speaking  from experience, the FW
and the DS seemed to work well at "shaking up" critical notions of the
texts.
 
        Let me know if this is  useful/interesting; I've done a lot of
thinking myself about the relations between  the three texts mentioned
above, and would welcome the chance  to dicuss connections with you or
other folks on the list.
 
-- Simon DeDeo
 
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http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~sdedeo/localpapers.html
 
Sorry about the odd formatting -- strange emacs things...
 
 
 
 
 
> Dan:  You wrote:  "In other words, the thesis statement you give
> below sounds too general, or like rediscovery of the wheel.  Perhaps
> you can refine it"  . . . . tell me about it, I've got at least six
> books on the table on the topic of organization of _Cantos_; the
> theme seems quite done already.  At present it doesn't seem like
> there is a "new" angle at all.  But on the plus side, I've got about
> 10 months to complete the thing (and its an undergrad project --
> meaning they're taking it easy).   What interests me about
> organization is the controversy; T. S. Eliot said: "That never
> worries me, and I do not believe that I care.  I know that Pound has
> a scheme and a kind of philosophy behind it; it is quite enough for
> me that he thinks he knows what he is doing."  Plenty of other
> critics become fully irate at the notion of finding order to
> _Cantos_.   Even in responding to my little blip there seems to be a
> variety of degrees of opinion as to how much intentional structure
> there was / is in it.  I don't think that I plan to find a structure
> which has never been seen, but I would like to accurately explore
> what IS there.  Over the months, I may develop a "new" angle, but
> now I've got to produce a draft of a prospectus.   Several critics
> have objectified "Odysseus in Hades" (I - XXX) as a thematic and
> structural introduction for all of the following Cantos wherein (I'm
> gleening from different sources) the concept of the "subject rhyme"
> is introduced.   how's ". . . mimicking the seeming spontaneity" of
> real-world events sound, instead of transpiration?   what's wrong
> with "transpiration"?    Anyway, thanks to all respondents.  I'll be
> back.    Dave Centrone