SOURCE: Watts, Harold H. “Reckoning.” In Ezra Pound: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Walter Sutton, pp. 98-114. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963.

In the following essay, originally published in 1953, Watts attempts to define Pound's The Cantos in light of the author's method, tone, goals, and ultimately whether it effectively disseminated its stated aims.

I

The Cantos is a poem that interests in many connections. It is the capital piece of “evidence” in any dispute between Ezra Pound and the United States government. Literarily, it cannot be regarded as a “sport,” a willful driving of the language in the direction of obscurity and inconsecutiveness. It is rather—in respect to technique—the investigation of the resources of our language when manipulated in an unusual way: a way that Pound was driven to discover as an alternative to communication that is orderly, logical, and (in Pound's opinion...