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...