Tim Romano's assessment of Garrick Davis's intentions seems accurate to me, and
I think it also points up the paucity of his approach.

Tim's response also raises the question of the possibility of an 'epic' in an
age of specialists where it is asserted when advantageous that one specialty
cannot meaningfully communicate with another. A grasp of all disciplines is not
possible and the philosopher or poet who tries is open to ridicule and failure.
Pound tried.

The other day I was scouting books and came across a festschrift for John Nash.
Several people immediately informed me that Russell Crowe was starring in a new
movie about Nash. I had, of course, encountered Nash's work a number of times
in my effort to learn about the mathematization of the social sciences as part
of a fundamental critique of the sciences a la Pound. I also had read a breezy
trade publisher's biographer a couple of years back. But now Nash, largely
because of his nervous breakdown I guess, was in the public consciousness.

Nash's work is tremendously influential and has broad application. Nash's work
along with Heisenberg's, Bohr's, Pitts' (another good melodrama) and
McCulloch's, Watson's and Crick's, von Neumann's, Turing's, Weiner's, Shannon's
and dozens of others forms the theoretical and practical bedrock of our daily
lives. Can the consumer of 'epics' only explore this as melodrama, ghosted
forces that make self-interest possible, or in simple allegories of good and
evil? If not through the Cantos, Maximus, "A" etc., how else would such an
ambitious and risky poetics proceed? Carlo Parcelli


Tim Romano wrote:

> Not that I agree with the critical stance taken by Garrick Davis ... but I
> think he had in mind the kind of work that makes no recondite or arcane
> allusions, when he used the term "self-sufficient". Take Hemingway's _ The
> Old Man and the Sea _, for example; it alludes broadly to baseball in a way
> that "everybody" would understand, not to its obscure statistics or to a
> particularly dazzling double-play in the bottom of the 8th inning of some
> game that has achieved legendary status among baseball fans, but in the
> form of beloved teams.
>
> To understand Hemingway's allusions requires a deep acculturation. To
> understand Pound's allusions, on the other hand, requires extensive
> book-learning and a cross-cultural, anthropological perspective.  As I
> understood Garrick's question, it might be paraphrased so:  for an epic to
> be a successful epic, doesn't it have to play to the deep acculturation of
> a People, not the to book-learning and polyglot abilities of the elites?
> The cross-cultural and the Epic don't seem to mix, do they?
>
> My reply to that question would be this: the fair critic must ask how the
> Cantos seeks to _transcend_ the epic genre with respect to  Place, Time,
> People, Language, and the task set for its Hero.
>
> Tim Romano