In a message dated 1/5/03 10:27:03 AM Pacific Standard Time, [log in to unmask] writes: << Well-said, but I don't think it holds water. I am one of those awful people who find gems scattered through the Cantos unequaled elsewhere in the canon of poetics, and who feel that large parts of the Cantos are in fact unintellegible rubbish. I would really like to see through to "the essential challenge of the piece as a whole" which is one reason I hang out here, but so far haven't. In part because I'm baffled at the thousands of lines of obscurantist-take-on-forgettable-bits-of-US-history that seem so poetically vacuous - it would be nice if there were a framework on which they were mounted that better exposed their virtues if any. Please enlighten us. -Tim >> It would also be useful if you would point to those areas of the Cantos which you consider 'unintelligible rubbish' -- and I do not take this designation as pejorative as such. Then, perhaps, we could actually discuss these areas without having the usual resort of broad generalizations. I wonder at times if we don't try too hard to 'understand' the literal aspects of the poem, much as we would understand a prosaic explication, instead of remembering that it is in the main art, with all of the affect and residual effect that art transmits. My own experience with the Cantos is that I was not the same person after I read it as I was before doing so. joe brennan