Pound, Ezra 1885–1972: Critical Essay by Peter Shaw

The longest and most obscure section of Ezra Pound's Cantos has until recently been all but ignored. His ten cantos devoted to John Adams, when they are discussed, are described by Poundians as an extreme but viable example of Pound's poetic method. Old fashioned readers, argue the Poundians, are put off by chronological discontinuities and by apparently obscure passages, but these fall into place in the harmonious design of the whole work. This defense at once invokes the authority of Pound's private terms for modernist poetics—vortex, ideogram, paideuma—and asserts that he has written nothing but what can be understood with care by an intelligent general reader. But aside from such generalizations, since publication of the Adams cantos in 1940 no more than six out of their twenty-five hundred lines have been explicated, and these incorrectly. The case presents a challenge not only to the reputations of Pound and his followers, but also to some of the cherished dogmas of modernism. (p. 112)

[After] the apotheosis of 1922, and while the pioneering [modernist] works were still being absorbed and made influential, their authors [Eliot, Joyce and Pound] withdrew from the battle of modernism in order to write at greater length in the idiom they had established. This second wave of modernism saw the awed reception of works in progress by the masters as they appeared over the next twenty years. One could not hope to grasp all of the complexities until these works appeared complete, and even then it promised to take years of explication before critical evaluation could begin. In the meantime, the point was not to criticize but to attempt to understand…. Both Eliot and Pound continued not so much to be reviewed as ushered into the tradition. The triumph of modernist principles had insured such a reception despite, or rather because of the difficulty of their works: The Quartets and Cantos promised, like Finnegans Wake, to reveal their meanings with time. Whatever the results of this attitude for other writers, in the case of Pound it served to obscure the nature of what he had written.

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