Cantos

The most that can be said for The Cantos is that the method is interesting and that it is littered with fine phrases, but both of these advantages are totally obscured by Pound's lugubrious insistence upon simply dropping the name of a vague historical personage upon the page, meaning to evoke something only to have that evocation stand totally stagnant among a dozen other disparate images. An interesting essay might be written about Pound, but he is unreadable. He was an economist at best, and his poems read like the densest tome of that most dismal science.

You should take some with in your eyes potential and cut and edit and expand on lines to make it better.

The Cantos Of Ezra Pound and user: Remix 2.0 The Better Version

they are supposed to be read outloud: on a barge, on the beach, in the forrest, in a church, near a waterfall, to a deer, under a gazebo in the rain, (all of these scenarios surrounded by at least 12 women all wearing white semi see through gowns/dresses), at the top of a tower/parking garage, and outside starbucks with a fedora for money on the ground

Legitimately kek'd. I think Ezra was the true genius between him and Eliot tho. Both are over hyped.

Agreed. Ezra is an engineer not a poet

I got the Cantos as a present and haven't actually tackled them yet. Don't have the Companion so I am going to have to research/annotate them myself as I go.

I agree I think they are maybe unreasonably obscure - one of the duties of literature is to GET ITSELF READ, and maybe the Cantos just make too many demands - but we'll see.

I've read a fair bit of his other stuff, and much of it just leaves me stone cold, but on occasion he is just so darned good that I know he isn't an idiot, even if I can't always make out what he's burbling on about.

So I am prepared to give him a certain amount of slack.

Just admit you hate him because he was a fascist and his writing wasn't effeminate.

Not at all, although I find just the reverse - I find that people like him now as a rebound against so many people having disliked him on the basis of his bio - all of this is purely personal. On a strictly poetic level Pound cannot stand

I have the Terrel companion but even that hardly suffices. Terrell enumerates the images but does not clarify the reason of their conjuring - Terrell shows you the pixels but not the picture - here’s a page I read today and marked up

>I think Ezra was the true genius between him and Eliot tho. Both are over hyped.
I think comments such as yours downgrade your 'overhype' tag to tip the scales to underhyped, so be careful with your criticism sir, it just may have an opposite effect.

I dont think either can be so brushed away nonchalantly with a few of your words and thoughts. I have not read much pound at all, and have only read some elliot but I have found quite a bit of awe in the elliot I have read, enough to not make me state words similar to the ones you have

His writing is incredibly effeminate though

Bump

Who the fuck are you again, to be underwhelmed by ones who overwhelm you?

t. Assblasted pseud defending his hosts

where is someone supposed to start with this?

Pound just did not give a fuck about his readers. He expected those who read him to know or want to know all the references and allusions.

If you find that too challenging and "pseud" then read his fucking essays where he clearly explains all of his themes contained in the Cantos and more.

This. Pound is fantastic when he's on his game and you have the background necessary to make sense of him. Individual lines or images can be moving to anyone, but the cantos require more than that. Are you mad at Joyce, or DFW, or any other author who wrote obscure complex works? But if your mythology is weak and your Italian fascism, he at least demands respect for being the prime mover behind modernism.
"No doubt Eliot, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, and Marianne Moore would have produced interesting and innovative work whether they had known Pound or not, but Pound’s attention and interventions helped their writing and sped their careers. He edited them, reviewed them, got them published in magazines he was associated with, and included them in anthologies he compiled; he introduced them to editors, to publishers, and to patrons; he gave them the benefit of his time, his learning, his money, and his old clothes."

Someone here once said you should read a biography of him before the cantos, is that true

His fans will convince you that you need to read seventeen Occitanian poets in their original tongue and know classical Chinese before you can even begin to read him
The truth is he's just not a good poet

I can't agree with that. Sometimes he's wonderful, and not at all obscure or reliant on obscure references.

For example:

The Needle
----------------
Come, or the stellar tide will slip away.
Eastward avoid the hour of its decline,
Now! for the needle trembles in my soul!

Here have we had the vantage, the good hour.
Here we have had our day, your day and mine.
Come now, before this power
That bears us up, shall turn against the pole.
Mock not the flood of stars, the thing's to be.
O Love, come now, this land turns evil slowly.
The waves bore in, soon will they bear away.

The treasure is ours, make we fast land with it.
Move we and take the tide, with its next favour,
Abide
Under some neutral force
Until this course turneth aside.


"O Love, come now, this land turns evil slowly"

>Sometimes he's wonderful, and not at all obscure or reliant on obscure references.

Put two and two together, he's good BECAUSE he's not relying on self indulgent gimmicks and pretentions

>read seventeen Occitanian poets in their original tongue and know classical Chinese
What if I kind of want to do that anyway