Your point is well-taken, but why use a term like "self-sufficient", which implies so much more? The terminology itself seems to have been invented in order to raise a certain type of work above others by imbuing these works with an ontological superiority. Why not just call them "straight-forward" or "accessible" or something like that? Could it be that, though accessibility is their touchstone, critics of this ilk wish to retain the mystery of the mantle of scholarship and to create an elitism of the anti-intellectual? -----Original Message----- From: Tim Romano [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Saturday, December 22, 2001 6:19 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: "self-sufficient work of art" 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