Dear Listmembers, Thanks to Messrs. Gancie, Davis, and Pealrman for their responses. Many wondered whether I was being "willfully provocative" or "playing the devil" when I suggested that the Cantos are a junk heap--littered with pearls of course--so let me discomfort them by affirming that I am perfectly serious. This judgment of the Cantos--it should be added--was one shared by Yeats, Randall Jarrell, R.P. Blackmur, and Allen Tate. In fact, it is an illuminating experience to read Tate's opinion change drastically over time---compare "Ezra Pound" to "Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Prize" (both are contained in Essays of Four Decades). In fact, the opinion I "provocatively" expressed has been the stated opinion of many great critics of the 20th century. I find it disheartening, but perfectly understandable, that the Pound List would not entertain this opinion (except dismissively and in passing) but it shall not be dispelled so easily. What is most interesting is not that the members of this List have difficulty admitting that the Cantos are "nasty, obscure, fragmentary, and long" (this is a self-evident fact) but that justification of " the poetics" of the Cantos should finally, and fatally, involve embracing the virtues of (to paraphrase Alex Davis' response): disjunction, disunity, lack of closure, and lack of totality. Aren't these qualities the very hallmarks of the failed work of art? If we (as Tim Bray has) entertain the idea that the Cantos are a miscellany, and not "a unified work of art" then we explain many problems that have bedeviled Modernism for three quarters of a century. The Cantos are a mess because Pound had no epic plan in mind when he started, NOT because he wished to be "ahead of his time" and champion "disjunction, disunity, lack of coherence and totality" as avant-garde aesthetic values. Talk of it being an epic poem simply dissipates, as it should. The Cantos become not one thing, but many things---whereas an epic poem is a unified work of art--and so talk of the Cantos fragments into various sections (Confucian, Adams, Pisan, Throne sections, ad infinitum). These values have--need it be said?--polluted Modernist and post-Modernist poetry to its great detriment and left the reader with more unreadable poetry (Olson, Duncan, et al. than any one century ought to produce. The Cantos have no one "poetic theory" but many--and I have suggested (in an upcoming essay) that the Cantos would have suffered less had it simply been titled the Later Poetry of Ezra Pound. The Cantos are a collection of disparate poems, without any doubt. "It" will not and does not cohere as one thing the author admitted (either as "a unified work of art" or "an epic poem"). Isn't it time that we treated the Cantos as a miscellany? And stopped talking of "disjunction, disunity, lack of coherence and totality" as literary qualities to be championed (alas, because we wished to defend the Cantos) rather than the very absence of those qualities which characterize the superior work of art? I shall finish by twisting a phrase by Robert Gorham Davis to my purposes: "The Cantos are, finally, a litmus test for a whole range of critical values (and for the excesses of Modernist taste) and stand self-condemned." Regards, Garrick Davis editor, CPR (www.cprw.com)