I’m glad you’ve written here about Pound. I have been reading his Cantos and secondary texts about them for about six months now. I say “reading” the Cantos mainly because there is not a suitable word in English to describe what I’ve been doing–living with them, perhaps? I might have more ability to read them than most people my age because I read several languages, including Latin; I am a student of history, Classical literature, Renaissance philosophies, and Dante, but I still struggle. I think this struggle is a natural part of the poem; so many pieces of it are so specific to their context in Pound’s life, that any other individual would have little literal meaning for them. They most certainly had meaning for Pound. But who am I to not search for their meaning for me?

Anyway, one of your comments stoked my mind. You wrote, “Genius or not, for me, the more important question is whether the Cantos are worth the effort to comprehend them.” I might suggest that no one is qualified to comprehend the Cantos in their totality, and that if ease is one of your criterion for appreciation, you might do better to read someone else’s work, as you wrote a few lines later. If you read this poem like all the other poems you read, you would surely be dissappointed. It is a new animal, an animal often feared, ignored, or derided as incomprehensible. I fear that our society is losing the ability to understand, or the impulse to TRY to understand, anything written fewer than 10 years ago, and this attitude of yours is perhaps one example. Perhaps this quote from Canto XXXVI (pg.179 pub: New Directions), which sounds a bit like a translated quote, will clarify: “Go song, surely thou mayest / Whither it please thee / For so art thou ornate that thy reasons / Shall be praised from thy understanders, / WIth others hast thou no will to make company.” Goodness forbid that a poem should not snare readers through its accessibility–especially today when poetry is supposed to be pre-digested. Didn’t Whitman once write that great poets require great audiences?

I digress. The message is the only thing in the Cantos–the general over the particulars. The part of their message having to do with their general inaccessibility is well parsed here by George Kearns, who refers to page 135 in Pound’s Guide to Kulture, “Beauty, limpidity, meaning, if they are not to be sentimental, specious, nor serve, Pound thought, as an idological soporific pleasing to the masters of our ‘hell of mercantile industrialism’, are achieved only after considerable effort, research and learning on the part of both poet and reader.” I know I gain more genuine pleasure and understanding through exertion. There really is something worthwhile there. Even so, de re gustibus, non disputandum. Thank you for these posts of yours.
All the best,
Scott

A simple glance at the other poet’s reviewed would show that many of them are just as “old” as Pound, and few of them have written anything in the last twenty years.

The real question in dispute is who is worth the effort to pursue. And, for me, at least, Pound is least worth pursuing.

His vision simply doesn’t seem as remarkable or as worthwhile as Whitman’s, Yeats’, or Roethke’s vision, as well as a dozen other poet’s I could mention.