Peter Makin, Pound's Cantos. Allen and Unwin, 1985.

Christine Froula, To Write Paradise:Style and Error in Pound's Cantos.
Yale University Press, 1985.

Peter Nicholls, Ezra Pound:Politics, Economics and Writing. Macmil-
lan, 1984.

Number ten in the Unwin Critical Library, Peter Makin's book is
very good. No one can say with any confidence that it will attract
new readers to Pound's immense poem; and in fact one of its great
virtues is that it doesn't try to minimise how difficult The Cantos
is, and always will be. The difficulties are of three kinds: first, those
inseparable from the nature of the enterprise (i.e. epic); second, those
inseparable from Pound's temperament; lastly, those involved with
the political and other vicissitudes endured by Pound through his
more than fifty years labour on the poem. Devoted work by com-
mentators through now several decades has in one sense 'cleared up'
difficulties in each of these areas: for, though The Cantos have
attracted a quota of pedants and loonies, that quota is surprisingly
small, and most Poundians have worked harder and more responsi-
bly than, for instance, the Hardyans have. But their clearings-up
necessarily partake of the refractory and multifarious and arcane
nature of the text that they work with, and of the sources of that
text; and so mastering the elucidations is not much easier than mas-
tering the poem. The Cantos is or are, and through any foreseeable
future will remain, 'caviare to the general': and yet there they sprawl,
a labyrinthine ruin (to put the case at its worst) plumb in the middle
of whatever we understand by Anglo-American Modernism in
poetry. Anyone may be excused for deciding that life is too short
for coming to terms with The Cantos: but if we make that decision
we thereby disqualify ourselves from having any opinion worth
listening to, about the poetry in English of this century.

What incessantly threatens to disable and demoralise commen-
tators on Pound is precisely this clear-sighted recognition that the

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