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. But I think it is unlikely that Pound couldn't make the Cantos cohere because his ideological and historical conceptions had been associated, however correctly, with unmitigated brutality and disaster. 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. 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. 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. Finally, there are the earlier false starts or Ur-Cantos. I believe that Pound began the Cantos anew several times because he was attempting to adjust his entry into the poem so that the resulting product would have some semblance of coherence. This is in contradistinction to his poetic temperament and therefore can be viewed as the desire to bring some aesthetic and thematic discipline to the poem. 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. 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. 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. So he had to cope in other ways with the constant need to maintain the tension in the poem. This requires alternating musics among other things. But it is the music, Pound's fabled ear (and let me tell you the guy was good) that bears much of the weight of moving the poem along. But coherence. Nah. The poems too ambitious; the poets temperament was all wrong. But Pound risked it anyway. CP