Should I read the Cantos?

as a whole this book is surely a colossal dud, but he did have as good an ear as anyone for fantastic individual lines and images

mark, we agree 100%!! (Leaving aside problem of having an ear for images, obviously).

Andrew life's too short. If I had the chance to re-live my life my (thankfully brief) Pound obsession would be the first thing to go.

Instead read a selection of his shorter early work (including his totally inaccurate but often magical translations, esp Cathay).

I found The Cantos delightful when I was 13, but I found just about everything "avant-garde" delightful at that time, more for the idea of the thing, than for the actual thing. I was, of course, very impressed with myself for reading it at such a young age. I think that, as much as anything else, I loved the rust colored cover, and its starkness; the way the poem looked visually; and the smell of the pages.

It's ironic that Pound, who said that music atrophies when it gets too far away from dance and poetry atrophies when it gets too far away from music, went on to write a very long poem with very little swing to it. There are some worthwhile passages in it, but overall it tends to just become a jumble, especially toward the later Cantos. Anyway, I can't particularly recommend it.

Since you already have the book, I'd recommend at least skimming through the different sections, and reading a few to figure out what his strategies and whatnot are, assuming you're interested in that sort of thing.

Evidence for this? I'm not convinced. 'A good ear', yes, probably (but also... a bad one?); but 'as good an ear as anyone'?

Sometimes you can revisit a book you put aside as unreadable or not worth your while and find it beguiles you on a second (or third) look. The only way that will work out is if you waited long enough that your life experience has pushed you into an altogether different set of mind.

it is inscribed on this handy and portable interweb microdot => .

Just read 'em and see 'em for what they are.

I find Pound's poetry as fascist in terms of method as his politics. Yeats, Owen, cummings, Frost, Williams, Sandburg and Stein all did a lot for me.

This all of course represents more the state of mind I was in when I had to read the Cantos than my actual hate/love for the poetry, mind you! God bless universities. Heh.

So yeah, go ahead and read them. What do I know?

someone should really do a v.severe edit of the cantos (haha il miglior fabbro). search : dolan's "yeah, the man wrote one nice haiku" line.

This sounds like Imagism to me! Anyway, you have Charles Olson writing The Maximus Poems, which pretty clearly takes the Cantos as something of a model. The same can be said for Robert Duncan's "Passages" (or, for example, "Santa Cruz Propositions" from Ground Work: Before the War. (I have tossed a lot of this stuff, so I don't have as many examples at hand as I did before.) After his conversion to Buddhism, Ginsberg talks about Pound's Cantos as nearly life-long graph of one person's mind, and sees it as close to what he is trying to do. (Or that's what he said anyway.) Zukofsky's A would be another example of a poem in the tradition of the Cantos, unless you want to class him with the modernist generation.

I kind of see postmodern poetry as a continuation of the less mainstream (or even canonical, at the time postmodernism would have begun) elements of modernist poetry. There's an old essay on the subject by David Antin that I liked (though I think I also have tossed the book it was in). As Jerome Rothenberg and David Antin tell it, the initial poets identified as postmodern were at least partly breaking with a narrowed sense of what the modernist canon was, where, say, Eliot's sonnets were okay, but something like the Cantos were out.

Personally, at this point, I think that largely abandoning traditional meter and rhyme robbed poetry of its sensual power; and anything new that was added (e.g., in terms of range of what could be discussed) didn't really make up for that loss. Though there are exceptions.

anthony, I do like some of those last Cantos, but it's kind of too little too late (not too little too late as an apology, but too little too late as a compensation for the near unreadability of so much of the other Cantos).