IRONY IN POUND'S CANTOS LXXX AND LXXXI
Of the great modernist poets, Ezra Pound stands apart as the most elliptical. His omnivorous learning, obscure allusions and frequent obtuseness make much of his work inaccessible to the general reader. For Pound's poetry to be readily understood, if such a thing is possible, a reader ought to be familiar with Eastern and Western philosophies, politics, history, several languages and the poet's own life. Even then, comprehending Pound's meaning in a given poem requires diligence and a willingness to allow for great ambiguity. His central work, the Cantos, represents Pound's greatest achievement, containing his most profound comments on the world and his art in all their learned and abstruse glory.
Within this collection of poems, Pound sought to trace the world's history using a Ulyssean/Dantesque framework. The poet within the narrative journeys through the myths, political upheavals and religious systems of the world in a decisively iconoclastic and unapologetically erudite style. The reader, traveling with the poet through the detritus of civilization, confronts an elegiac vision in the Cantos: a post-mortem in which the poet addresses both the totality of civilization's intellectual efforts and his own creeping mortality. Even so, the poems are not despairing. The failure of politics and religion, the failure of humanity to live up to its promise, does not engender in the poet an existential or absurdist crisis. Pound does not reject the world but l...