Preface

Summary

My aim in this brief introduction to Pound's Cantos - brief for a poem of 800 pages, each of which is a centrifugal force spinning off pages of explication - is to address the reader approaching the poem for the first time. I have tried to convey a sense of what the poem is about, and of its aesthetic and political-ethical-didactic dimensions. There are detailed demonstrations of the complex, often curious activities one performs while “reading” Pound. I have been acutely aware of steering a course between the Scylla of making the poem sound easier than it is, which can only lead to disappointment, and the Charybdis of making it appear so formidable and arcane, so removed from the concerns of our lives, that the reader will see no point in going on with it.

It is hoped that this study cannot be mis-read as a potted version, something the reader - facing examinations, for example - can substitute for time spent with the text. It has been designed to resist such usage, such usury, for in Poundian terms that sort of substitute reading would be like collecting interest on someone else's money. T. S. Eliot, in an introductory note to David Jones's In Parenthesis, a work he thought had strong “affinities” with the Cantos, offers wise advice:

Good commentaries can be very helpful: but to study even the best commentary on a work of literary art is likely to be a waste of time unless we have first read and been excited by the text commented upon even without understanding it. For that thrill of excitement from our first reading of a work … which we do not understand is itself the beginning of understanding… We must have the experience before we attempt to explore the sources of the work itself.

I assume the reader has at hand a copy of the complete Cantos and will turn to many of the references, allowing the eye occasionally to wander off course. The Guide to further reading includes both works enthusiastic, pro-Pound, pro- Cartes, and works that take more qualified, sometimes severely disapproving views. Through them the reader may be introduced to advanced, sometimes sharp critical debates which the present study can only glance at.