Carrol Cox wrote: > But there are major works > concerning which the critics have laboreed mightily to identify the > form, without major success (success being measured by the consensus a > given view attains). It is always easy to give a label and call it form. > > Examples: _Winter's Tale_, _Canterbury Tales_, _Paradise Regained_, > _Dunciad_, _Don Juan_, _Moby Dick_. > > The "form" that is missing from the _Cantos_ seems, primarily, the kind > of form that eases the work of explication by providing a framework on > which to distribute the commentary. Well said. Put another way, the great works are like trees looming well above the underbrush of ex-post-facto meta-works. Some more examples might include "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Dhalgren". In any case, the only rational capsule description of the Cantos' form/content that works for me is as of a painting in language, over the stretch of some decades, of the inside of EP's mind. Which was in many ways not a pretty place or one where you'd want to spend much time... but ah, the brush-strokes, the mastery of line and colour! -Tim PS (semi-related): Is there anyone else who thinks that the attempt to link Joyce's "Ulysses" to the Odyssean story is a vast practical joke perpetrated by the author and that the linkage is entirely spurious?