C.Parcelli" <[log in to unmask]>  wrote,

>I'd just like to comment on Pound's statement late in the Cantos that he
>could not make them "cohere." There is little doubt that the emotional,
>physical, psychological and ideological exhaustion Pound must have felt
>at that time (as well as just plane old age) played a role in the Cantos
>not energetically moving forward.

There is a great deal of truth in this observation, I believe.

>Pound must have known very early on that the
>Cantos would not cohere or at least had a strong sense that his energy,
>sense of music and imaginative spirit would have to be used as a tension
>to energize the language of the poem. I believe Pound "knew" the
>untenable nature of the Cantos before he even began the first Canto as
>it now stand in the finished poem. I believe Pound had experienced
>several instances that pointed to the open ended nature of the poetic
>enterprise known as the Cantos.
>

This last sentence also makes a great deal of sense to me.

>First, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is a brilliant anomaly in Pound; a poetic
>sequence that through its faux formalisms gives at least the impression
>of a predetermined and faithfuly executed series of poems. I've always
>had the sense that Mauberley was a set of poetic ideas that had gestated
>in Pound for a long time, not necessarily consciously (and I don't if he
>prepared notes), and is actually made up of fragments, that however
>brilliant, did not satisfy the thematic or musical ambitions of the
>poet.
>

This seems to me to be a valid reading of Mauberly, which can be extended in
its applications to the Cantos.

>Pound also must have been aware of the effect he had on the Wasteland
>when edited it for Eliot. The microcosm of Eliot's breakdown and
>personal responses are inflated and conflated to allow for the
>interpretation of the breakdown of an entire civilation. The reader cut
>himself on the shards and looked for healing in interpretation.
>

Do you think that there was something in the way Pound's era was constituted
that made any epic poem (with a form and structure in anyway similar to
Dante's) impossible?   In other words, does the perception of a breakdown in
civilization make the composition of any epic (in the Virgilian, or
Dantesque) form impossible?


>But his comments to his
>father belie how unsuited Pound was to the task of writing a second
>Divine Comedy. Besides that isn't the way Cantos get written. The
>ambition is too large. To read and assimilate all the material that
>would eventually comprise the Cantos was beyond Pound's financial and
>intellectual means, and would have required foresight that would
>preclude the one thing leading to another element of Canto formation,
>one of its great insecurities and frustrations.

Why was Dante capable of assimilating his material, and Pound not capable of
assimilating his?  (Perhaps you have already answered this, but I wonder if
the specific comparison with Dante, or with other successful epic poets
could be made?)


>
>Besides if the Cantos
>had been carefully plotted, many of the themes would never have made an
>appearance and a whole body of forced conceits would be there in their
>place.

Do you think that was the case with the Divine Comedy (To my mind, this was
the case, and the Divine Comedy, is ---forgive the unintended insult to
Dante fans --- somewhat sterile).


>Pound was a relatively young man when he began the Cantos; far
>too young and passionate a person to write a reflective work and just
>not the person to sustain a narrative.

I think similar statements could be made about Bryon and about Shelley, both
of whom wrote their own "epics."  Byron's Don Juan, is a bit more like the
Cantos, in that it strings together many disparate themes and subjects
(without any carefully unified spiritual or religious vision).  On the other
hand, Shelley's neoplatonism, and utopian visionary premises do give unity
to Prometheus Unbound, and make it very much unlike the Cantos, in that
Shelley's work is heavily focussed and carefully plotted.   Pound's
spiritual vision (neo-platonism, and sympathy with Pagan religion), and his
"passionate" nature, plus his desire to "believe" in something, make him
more similar to Shelley in psychological temprament, I think.

(Leaving the political philosophy aside), Is the failure of Pound to make
the Cantos ultimately "cohere" due in part to some deficiency in his
"spiritual vision", or the lack of a strong spiritual focus, such as Shelley
had?

Another possibility, or to consider the question another way, why could
Pound not have ended the Cantos as Ovid ended the Metamorphoses?  Pound
greatly admired Ovid; and since the latter's "epic" is in some sense, simply
a concatenation of disparate incidents all unified by the theme of "change"
(narrated in a rather lose historical temporal movement), it bears some
similarity with the Cantos.  So could Pound not have ended his work in some
fashion similar to Ovid, with the souls of the great historical figures and
admired contemporaries undergoing apotheosis, finding their place in
Paradise, and the poet himself soaring into the heavens to take his place
among them, as a reward for his poetic acts?   Such an ending would not have
been any less consistent with the body of the larger work than was the case
in the Metamorphoses.

Regards,

Wei

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