Literally nonsense.
>>24929265Did you even read it with the Terrell companion or did you not spend even five minutes looking up how to read this masterpiece?
>>24929306a masterpiece shouldnt need a companion
>>24929306I agree with OP. Its way too self referential. You pretty much need to be an Ezra Pound biographer to make sense of it.
>>24929420Even Ulysses needs to be read with secondary lit. People tend to learn this in their first year of college. >>24929431That's not even hard to do. Just read the Pound Era alongside it. It's impenetrable because you likely don't read much.
You're literally like finding a can of dog food while looking for what to have for dinner and taking it as divine intervention
>>24929265No, it's just obscurantist over-erudite garbage that means nothing even if it does make sense. It's literal marvel "I recognise that reference" hogshit for over educated faggots who studied old greek dicksuckers at some ivy league school.
>>24929265>>24929265it is like finnegans wake. you dont need to comprehend it to feel a substrate of beauty happening beneath the words.knowing all the references is completely besides the point. the text can be enjoyed as is, it is very pretty to read aloud, or to listen to. it sounds like a cascade of life, stories from some kind of archetypal layer where history and culture and myth blend together to simply form aesthetic beauty for its own sake. like the beauty of lived experience without explanation, or birdsong, but using all of life as grist for its mill
>>24929462You can reject the overarching structure and large swathes of the text for being impenetrably obscure, but there are undoubtedly moments when it falls into harmony and is of such great clarity and beauty that no one could fail to understand it. But aside from it making sense or having any meaning, the Cantos is also extremely superb poetry, really a compendium of so many different types of beautiful verse, and that alone justifies it being read.
>>24929437>Even Ulysses needs to be read with secondary litNo it does not. Ulysses is a thoroughly enjoyable novel even without companion guides explaining every reference. The book is made richer by all the allusions and experimentations, but it's very enjoyable even from a less academic reading. Some parts will be incomprehensible like Oxen in the Sun, but how could you not still love a chapter like Proteus?
>>24929927Explain the ending with the big black circle then.
>>24929466>it is like finnegans wake. you dont need to comprehend it to feel a substrate of beauty happening beneath the words.Finnegans Wake, like Ulysses, is narrative fiction at the end of the day. There's an actual, external plot beyond all the experimentation and referential material that's "happening." There's the letter and the crime committed. There's no parallel with non-narrative poetry.
>>24929933The Cantos is an epic poem and has narrative, tard.
>>24929931>You don't need to know every small detail to enjoy the work>Oh okay then explain this super small detailI understand why people like (YOU) need secondary materials to read things for you.
>>24929942You don't know the most famous part of the novel then? You didn't read it, you simply dragged your eyes across the page and didn't comprehend it.
>>24929941>has narrativeIt quite literally doesn't
>>24929944Is that why he says "hang it all, robert browning, there can be but the one sordello"? He is obviously referencing narrative poetry and proceeds to use narrative poetry's techniques
>>24929943The circle at the end of Ithaca is not "the most famous part of the novel." The most famous part of the book is probably the "yes I said yes I will Yes" from Penelope.
>>24929949I am talking about the Molly Bloom soliloquy in Penelope, you idiot. Did you even read the book?
>>24929948Alright big guy, give me a sumamry of the narrative that comprises the Cantos then. Go ahead, take all the time you need and use as many words as necessary. From the first Canto to the last, what's the overarching narrative?
>>24929952>Explain the ending with the big black circle then.I assumed you were referring to the DOT at the end of ITHACA. There is no "big black circle" at the end of Penelope so I have no idea what you're talking about.
>>24929953Anyone who has read the book can give you this summary. If you can't memorise this, then reading isn't for you. Pound puts himself into poetry's tradition as a first-person perspective but creates extrapoetic polyphony by referencing other poets and other people.>First XVI cantos: Creating the inferno-purgatory-paradise triad structure that will inform the Cantos>Canto I in particular: Resurrecting the dead from the episode of the Odyssey, by using Andreas Divas's Latin translation as the vehicle, which is a parallel to the way that Pound is resurrecting Homer for the sake of saving the epic. Pound situates himself as a character in the epic tradition, with Elpenor as a funny throwaway character.>Canto II in particular: Being in self-exile like Ovid and using the Metamorphoses to comment on how poetry fluctuates. He uses Picasso as a character here to comment on the shift in art.>Canto XI in particular: Malatesta enters as a patron of the arts and the narrative centres around the patronage of the Medicis>Canto XIII in particular: Kung (Confucius) enters and makes a didactic parable with his students on how to create art>Draft of XXX Cantos is a critique of the international usury system, in Pound's lampoon of modern capitalism and war; it echoes the first XVI canti but adds accounts of Marco Polo's journeys and Kublai Khan's paper money, whilst critiquing the history of patronage, not only of the Medicis but Thomas Jefferson>XXXI–XLI (Eleven New Cantos) introduces the political history of the Adams and has early American history as a character in the narrative about the creation of nations>XLII–LI (The Fifth Decad) deals with the economic history of banks, particularly as banks figure as monsters for the heroes to slay. The most famous is the "Usura canto" which deals with the economic "murrain" of usury capitalism; the narrative here is on how the everyman character of the spinner at the loom or the bricklayer must deal with death and starvation at the hands of Usura, the mythical monster.>LII–LXI (The Chinese History Cantos) features a cultural diptych where it contrasts the history of the west with the history of the east>LXII–LXXI (The Adams Cantos) are the desert of the Cantos, being the driest and most American (culturally) which Pound will carve up in the cartography of literature. But the hero characters of the American political dynasties will show that they can harvest the light of Neoplatonic thought (a la Eriugena) to cast truth onto the foul errors of emergent Usury capitalism.>The Italian Cantos (two canti) are odes to Cavalcanti and Dante, and figure as a brief buffer to the deluge of autobiographical narrative that will flood the Pisan Cantos>The Pisan Cantos are the most famous, the narrative here is that Pound becomes a prisoner of war and must live in a cage like a zoo animal. In his imagination, he imagines an ant as a centaur in his dragon world and must remember all his life's details [cont]
>>24930013I suppose that's narrative in the same way a Pollock painting is.
>>24930021It is a narrative poem. Definition: >A narrative poem is a poem that tells a story, complete with a beginning, middle, and end. It contains all the elements of a story, such as characters, plot, and conflict, but is written in verse, which may include rhyme, meter, and poetic devices. Look at this poem. What is happening? A character is furthering the plot. It's just spliced with language from other poems or other registers. It's polyphony: many voices.I would continue my description of the narrative of The Cantos but you don't seem to even care enough to read it.
>>24930030NTA but there's quite literaly no plot here whatsoever.
>>24930052You have no idea how to read between the lines.
>>24930053To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you want to be one of those contemporary academics who reads phantoms into existing works and says things like Moby Dick is an allegory for the Red Scare, sure, there's a WHOLE LOT of narrative between the lines there.
>>24930060Then why did Pound purposefully try to model his epic on Robert Browning, the foremost narrative poet?
>>24930064The same reason Deleuze and Guatarri namedrop every famous thinker that they can and pretend to "engage" with their work. It makes it seems like a highly intellectual work to pseuds like you, no matter how surface level it is to people of moderate or high intelligence, like myself. TO POUND'S CREDIT, it was smart of him to do this: make a surface level allusion to Browning, and some retards will be defedning my pseudointellectual claptrap as narrative genius almost 100 years down the line. I have to applaud him for that.
>>24930069You are a simpleton, not moderate or high intelligence. You wouldn't be struggling over finding an epic poem a narrative, otherwise. Source: I scored a 132 IQ on the CAIT and have an even higher verbal IQ. Get good.
>>24929265Intuitively I felt that Pound was a bad poet. It's nothing against modernism, because I enjoy Eliot, but Pound's words are dead, evoking nothing in me.Even lesser moderns like Mina Loy or Marriane Moore have moved me more.
>>24930075>Source: I scored a 132 IQ on the CAIT and have an even higher verbal IQ. Get good.An intelligent person has never taken a test to prove that they are intelligent.>You wouldn't be struggling over finding an epic poem a narrative, otherwise.It is not an "epic poem" simply because you say so. >ERM BUT HE CALLED THEM CANTOS ITS A REFERENCE TO DANTE ITS OBVIOUSLY AN EPICSee >>24930069
>>24930085>An intelligent person has never taken a test to prove that they are intelligent.Said the retard who can't even read a poem properly.>It is not an "epic poem" simply because you say so.Except the entire literary establishment regards it as a modernist epic poem. And academia with it. Cantos just means songs, tard.
>>24930087>the entire literary establishment regards it as a modernist epic poem. And academia with it.Appealing to 'the literary establishment' and 'academia' is actually even more retarded than appealing to an IQ test. Now I know you have nothing of even slight intelligence to author. Who would have thought that Pound's legacy would be appealing to Kiked up institutions to pretend his work is of any merit LOL
>>24930102>Everyone who reads is wrong, except me, who can't read!
>>24930106Idk, everyone else in this thread seems to agree Pound is either overrated or outright bad. You're the lone person pretending he's a quality writer here. So even this gay attmept doesn't really work like you'd hope it would
>>24930111This board is notoriously illiterate. The joke of 4chan is that not one single board is about what its purported purpose is. Your appeal to authority, ironic considering you accused me of it, is sorely lacking considering all this.
>>24930121I wasn't appealing to authority but simply falsifying your claim that I'm the only one complaining he's bad here. But of course you're too stupid to understand basic logic. Average Pound enjoyer I suppose
>>24930126I didn't say you were the only illiterate person who couldn't understand Pound. You just made that up. Your illiteracy (the cause) is shared with others, because they can't into Pound (the effect).I said: >Everyone who reads is wrong, except me, who can't read!Because you seem to think that the entire world of literary criticism, and readers with it, is wrong.
>>24930030What do you make of Pound conceding "I cannot make it cohere" >>24930082Admittedly, Pound didn't intend to "move" you in ways a Romantic would. His project was more about History and Civilization, the how and why thereof. His style, if I may, is too macho, for lack of a better word, virile and what have you. If you were to read French poetry, you would sooner realize that it has a much more authoritative, paternal tone to it than what the stereotypes and clichés would have you believe. There is much more to poësie than mere sentimentalism. Read more.
>>24930165>What do you make of Pound conceding "I cannot make it cohere"The economic and historical contradictions of The Cantos make the epic buckle under its own weight and crash. It's more like a broken mosaic than a pure masterpiece, but that's what makes it an important work in my mind. It's not supposed to be a heavenly product, because after all Pound is not a "demigod" but I think you should study The Cantos to make sense of poetry in the modern era, or poetry in general, especially if you want to pick up the pen or understand the importance of Homer (or Dante or Virgil or Ovid or any other poet) under modernity. After all, Pound was instrumental in getting the Odyssey and Iliad to the masses, because he advocated for Penguin to make paperbacks of easy-to-digest translations, in correspondence with WHD Rouse. I wouldn't have read the Odyssey as a teenager if it weren't for Pound, because I picked up a Penguin Classic of Homer's Odyssey. This board needs to pay more respect to him for bringing western culture to us.
>>24930185>>24930165Is it pointless to read Pound if you haven't previously read Homer/Virgil/Dante etc? Is a monolingual pleb that has mostly only read prose fiction forever bound to be filtered if I try to pick up and enjoy the Cantos? What would you reccommend to read beforehand or alongside them?
>>24930190honestly? Pound's very own ABC of Reading and Guide to Kulchur and you're good to go. He lays out every literary obsession and fixation in those two.
>>24930190>Is it pointless to read Pound if you haven't previously read Homer/Virgil/Dante etc?Not really, it's just you mightn't see the literary parallels or paratext he's trying to evoke. You can easily just read that alongside Pound, which is what I did the first time I read him, but I already had a solid foundation in reading Dante and Homer (but not in the original).> Is a monolingual pleb that has mostly only read prose fiction forever bound to be filtered if I try to pick up and enjoy the Cantos?To understand Pound, you only need these two books: LOA Ezra Pound poems and translations and The Cantos. Work through the early works of Ezra Pound and it will be very easy to pick up on, because he mainly writes in English and even English vernacular, which will sound very "current" compared to reading someone like Longfellow or Tennyson. In fact, if you got LOA's collection and Cantos, you'd have every major work of Pound's and be able to read it in less than a year. This would set you apart from the majority of the world, not even just this board that refuses to read whoever they talk about.>What would you recommend to read beforehand or alongside them?I recommend Terrell's companion, Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, and Moody's biography. But you don't *NEED* them, they just situate a lot of the biographical details and are actually quite good stylistically. I suggest you read more broadly around Pound's influences, like Homer's Odyssey and Iliad, Homeric apocrypha, Dante's Divina Commedia, Cavalcanti's sonnets and ballate, Confucius Odes and Analects, Li Bai and Tang Dynasty poets, Virgil's Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Browning's The Ring and the Book, Dramatis Personae, and Sordello. If you're feeling game, check more obscure influences like The Golden Bough, Andreas Divus, GRS Mead, Japanese Noh theatre, and Fenollosa.
>>24930199>>24930210Okay I will look into these. As it stands the only thing I've read of or about Pound is that Selected Prose book released by New Directions which I really liked; it even got me to pick up a copy of the Adams-Jefferson correspondence as a result.
