"When we
read late Pound we wade through a river of allusion which runs hard on a love story
beneath.
This is the
grand tension of this impossible poem. Capaciousness – the welcoming in of all
sorts of voices, sources, modes and interference – is the Cantos’ great gift to
poetry, but it is equally its damage. It is so tempting to read only for those
fine lyrical refrains, and to overlook the bitty, argumentative interference:
to read, that is, as magpies, picking at the pieces; but we may not. For the
Cantos do not permit a simple opposition between poetry and history, or beauty
and politics, or between reading as a poet and reading as an academic. Instead, we must ferret out the footnotes,
must consult the guides and speak with the scholars, before we can make any
sense of them. The Cantos ask of us this care: that we expend our time in their
unpacking.
This is,
however, a trap. For the Cantos are an artwork which demands forty years of
attention – many have devoted their working life to precisely this – and once a
reader has expended such care , he or she is bound to assume that its object
has been worthwile. It is the care which ennobles the subject, and this is how
Pound converts literary critics into disciples. It is not possible to be a casual
reader of the Cantos.
It is perhaps, not possible to read them as a poem".
Daniel
Swift, The Bughouse p. 240
