Robert,
It was Tim Bray who wrote that the Cantos served his "special needs ... late in the night or far from home".   Tim can answer your question about "comfort."
 
Though I've said the Cantos require a certain kind of effort on the part of the reader, because of their allusiveness and use of foreign tongues, I wouldn't call them "primarily a working text" -- just as I wouldn't call, say, Wyndham Lewis's intelligent engaging portraits of Pound or Eliot or Sitwell "primarily working
paintings."  And, btw,  when one digs deeper into Frost's poetry, one strikes rock.
 
Pound certainly found comfort in poetry.  What he found is summed up, I think, in the line I excerpted from from "Difference of Opinion...":
 
    Much conversation is as good as having a home.
 
Pound found poets long dead to be good company. He talks to Divus. He talks to Whitman. He even talks to his books. He converses with the personae of his own poems.  He writes in "Further Instructions" (LUSTRA):
 
    And I?
    I have gone half cracked,
    I have talked to you so much that I almost see you about me.
 
The "you" to which he refers are his songs.
 
There's a lot more to this behavior than a literary topos or convention.  If I had to reduce the explanations for this behavior into a single cause, I'd say it was because the poet has no place in the modern world. Pound tried again and again to create a role for the artist. But The Poet is an anachronism.  It's a
miserable irony that an entire industry can spring up around such a marginalized creature as the poet.
 
So, what is the quality of that comfort? It's this: misery loves company.
 
Tim Romano
 
Robert Kibler wrote:
 
> I wonder if Pound would see his Cantos as a work to comfort during those certain times late in the night, far from home? I think Frost's work might serve this end, but the Cantos is primarily a working text, not a comforting one. (not to say that it does not possess comforting moments, or lyrical, impassioned ones).
>     Where is this quality in the Cantos that most provides the comfort of which you write? Serious question.
>
> >>> Tim Romano <[log in to unmask]> 08/25 7:18 AM >>>
> "Much conversation is as good as having a home."
>   -- Pound,  Difference of Opinion with Lygdamus
>
> >
> > I wonder what proportion of this list's
> > readers comprises those, like me, who read EP only for pleasure and who
> > find the Cantos, in particular, the only pages that will serve the special
> > needs of certain times late in the night or far from home.>>