Cantos

by Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound’s Cantos constitute, it seems to me, the paramount example of poetry alert to – even anxious about – its own interpretative possibilities. It is the tension between Pound’s confidence in the cryptographic stamina of his readers and his desire to make the poems finally unsolvable that makes The Cantos (all 800 pages of them) so frustrating. And so beautiful. Behind the bricolage of quotations (translated, mistranslated, untranslated), the syntactic suspensions, the typographic oddities and the lunatic fragmentation, there’s always a sense of something powerful, mysterious, and epic at work.

Source: themillions.com