[log in to unmask] wrote: > > 1) I am puzzled by the misunderstanding produced by my remark > "self-sufficient work of art." In the context of the paragraph it appeared > in, I believe it is clear. The Cantos are not self-sufficient because they > require the aid of other books to understand. A student must purchase > Terrell's Companion to the Cantos to have any idea what the references > mean--the references and the glosses being essential in many places to attain > the meaning of the passage. Thus, it is not an autonomous work of art. > Pound's later poetry has not only involved--it has required--the explication > and annotation of scholars (a la Joyce in Finnegan's Wake--a work Pound > disparaged) to a remarkable degree. > This won't hold water either theoretically or empirically. From my personal experience: I have read far less commentary on Pound than I have on either Milton or Pope -- and personally, I find commentary to have been rather more important in reading those two poets than in reading the _Cantos_. For one thing, I started reading Pound in 1956 when there was not really much commentary available, and by the time commentary became available, I was too enmeshed in (a) political work (b) the ravages of depression and (c) a rather onerous teaching load to more than skim a random selection of that commentary. ("Onerous teaching load": From 1970 to 1985 I not too jocularly referred to my position as that of a "tenured temp.") I never did really "study" the poem. I kept it near me at home and continually browsed in it. After a year lines here and there began to stand out. After another year a passage here and a passage there begin to link up to each other. Many of the items that a comentary provides the poem also provides if you are patient enough -- and if you aren't basing your professional career on it, since that demands more instant comprehension. I believe it was sometime in the late '80s, when I hadn't paid too much attention to the poem for a couple of years, when a colleague left a note in my mail box querying me on some matter concerning the poem. As I drifted off to sleep that night I discovered that I could to some extent "play" the poem in my mind: "listen" to its various movements as one listens to music. And just to open it at random and read can, really, provide the sort of experience that John Adams found in Cicero. (Someplace in the Adams Cantos.) And one can think with it -- though admittedly Pound probably didn't intend that his reader should use the poem to think thoughts that were rooted in Marx, Lenin, Mao, & Cabral rather than Sigismundo, Adams, & Mussolini! :-) Carrol