On Sat, 6 Jun 1998, Daniel Pearlman wrote:
 
>
> When, in one of the last Cantos, he says "I cannot make it cohere"
> (misquote?), he is either speaking out of depression, as he was
> wont, or is not referring to major form in the Cantos.
 
I don't see how he could be speaking about anything *except* the form of
the  _Cantos_. Most of Pound's "organizing principles," e.g.,
the ideogrammic/grammatic method, the fugal structure, the Dantescan
journey, strike me as ex post facto models he developed in response to his
own worries about the lack of structure, as Ronald Bush pointed out twenty
some years ago.
 
As late as 1960 Pound said in their inception the _Cantos_ needed a form
that would not exclude something just because it didn't fit. This is a
poem (or many poems,  as some have argued) that begins with drafts toward
a poem of some length and . . . stops, collapses -- pick a verb, but "end"
isn't the right one -- with drafts and fragments. It doesn't cohere, and
furthermore, there's probably no way it ever could. And for me, that makes
the _Cantos_ a vastly more interesting work.
 
Bill Freind