Carrol Cox wrote:

> But there are major works
> concerning which the critics have laboreed mightily to identify the
> form, without major success (success being measured by the consensus a
> given view attains). It is always easy to give a label and call it form.
>
> Examples: _Winter's Tale_, _Canterbury Tales_, _Paradise Regained_,
> _Dunciad_, _Don Juan_, _Moby Dick_.
>
> The "form" that is missing from the _Cantos_ seems, primarily, the kind
> of form that eases the work of explication by providing a framework on
> which to distribute the commentary.

Well said.  Put another way, the great works are like trees looming well
above the underbrush of ex-post-facto meta-works.  Some more examples
might include "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Dhalgren".

In any case, the only rational capsule description of the Cantos'
form/content that works for me is as of a painting in language, over the
stretch of some decades, of the inside of EP's mind.  Which was in many
ways not a pretty place or one where you'd want to spend much time...
but ah, the brush-strokes, the mastery of line and colour!  -Tim

PS (semi-related): Is there anyone else who thinks that the attempt to
link Joyce's "Ulysses" to the Odyssean story is a vast practical joke
perpetrated by the author and that the linkage is entirely spurious?