Stock - Reading the Cantos

THE MOST OBVIOUS aspect of the Cantos is that they are composed of at least eight separate sections, the continuity and interdependence of which are by no means obvious. The thing to do then is to begin at the beginning. To examine each section in order, taking note of connexions as we come upon them, but not inventing where we fail to find them. Such links would provide a means for considering the parts as belonging to a single poem and a starting-point for enquiry into the deeper question of form. But until they are discovered any talk of construction is a waste of time.

It is not necessary to find all, or perhaps even half, the relations between the parts of a long poem. Not immediately, at any rate. But we must uncover a reasonable skeleton or we cannot begin to think of it as a self-contained work. We may sense or feel the wholeness before actually arriving at it. This is another matter. But until we are able to see some, at least, of the relations between the parts, such as it is possible to hold in the mind for logical analysis and development, we cannot speak of the work as coherent. Not that we must of necessity submit the relationships to such treatment, only they must be of a kind open to it. Not wholly so, necessarily, but enough to be able to communicate with the ground of realism which is naturally present in the working of the human mind.

Nor does it mean that a long poem must be a logical construction following step by step some philosophical system borrowed or home-made. Works of art obey other laws as well. But they do not, and cannot, if they are true works, obey other laws alone. They must have some link, no matter how fine or roundabout, with a logical world, otherwise the mind could not come to terms with them. The great works, fewer perhaps than the past century or so of extreme self-consciousness in the face of Art might lead us to suppose, cohere at every level, and the levels are related. Logical connexion is a minimum, not a maximum, barely enough by itself, but without which the other relationships tend to give way to non-poetic ambiguity or disappear completely.

A danger with the Cantos, about which so much has been written by its author and others even while it has actually been in the making, is that we may too easily adjust our reading to what we have heard about them rather than to what we see on the page. Since the work is a coherent whole, there must be a network of relations and connexions. And not finding any we may take their existence for granted or even for our peace of mind imagine or invent them. We owe something to the individual poet whose work we are reading. But also to the literature and language without which neither the words written nor the words read have any meaning. A careful reading of the text is the way to do justice to both the work and the setting in and by which it exists.

One of the first things we notice is that the Cantos contain a number of pieces which can be extracted and read as separate short poems or fragments. This in itself is not positive evidence of anything except possibly a common ground with all other long poems. What is surprising is the unusually large number of such passages: not just one or two in the first thirty cantos, but dozens of short poems in various styles already employed by Pound in his earlier work. The opening canto is not far removed from The Seafarer of 1911. It is technically more proficient perhaps, in that it incorporates devices which he had not learnt when he wrote the earlier piece. And it is mature in tone in a way that the other is not. But I am not so sure that The Seafarer is not the better poetry. It is simple and direct, yet full of rhythmic vitality and universal imagery. Exactly the right tone is maintained throughout, with the result that it is an excellent embodiment of something the poet had within himself seeking a form.