Dear Jeff, Like you, I just read them. In my case, it happened when I was 19 years old. The year was 1955, so at that time there were no guidebooks, etc. (Kenner's first book had been published, but I didn't know that.) However, I did know Bill Vasse, who was the teaching assistant in a class that I took at the University of California, and who was perhaps already at work on the first guide to the Cantos. Tom Parkinson, who taught the class, was perhaps another influence. I remember Tom saying in class that Pound doesn't necessarily assume that his readers have read the Adams/Jefferson letters, but that he IS telling us that we SHOULD go and read them. And after class, I went to the library, and checked out the Adams/Jefferson letters, and read them. So I think you're right: we need to get rid of the assumption that you need some sort of critical guide before you can read the Cantos. (I would say the same of Ulysses, which I read that same year, also in total innocence of THE CRITICS.) EP demands of us that we come to terms with a radically new way of engaging language and the sensory world. We need to approach The Cantos as a poem, not as a code, to be deciphered. I very much doubt that anyone will keep on reading The Cantos, unless they respond in some way, directly and immediately, to the language. If you (like Zukofsky and Duncan and lots of other intelligent readers) fall in love with the language, then you'll keep going. If not, then not. And nothing that any teacher or critic can do will change that state of affairs. But in the years since 1955, along with rereading The Cantos a good many times, I've also read a fair amount of critical and biographical commentary on Pound. Some of this reading has helped me to understand WHY I found and find the language of EP's poetry so compelling. Some of it has also helped me to understand how a poet whose work I find so energizing could have slid into personal and political attitudes that I find so repellent. And the best of it has helped me to think through that contradiction between the poetry and the politics. Burt Hatlen