Rating: 
Summary: Worth the effort
Review: The Cantos are not easy to read. Furthermore, there are parts of the work - in some cases, dozens of pages long - that are a complete waste of time, Pound being hopelessly self-indulgent.Having said all that, studded here and there throughout this big thick difficult book you will find some of the most beautiful poetry ever written. I once seduced a beautiful but previously-unattainable woman by taking her to a sunlit park and reading to her from the Pisan Cantos in the slanting sun. Which is what poetry should be all about, right?
Rating: 
Summary: Another failed twentieth-century experiment
Review: This is a tough review to write. I studied Ezra Pound under Hugh Kenner and -- an even bigger piece of luck -- I read a lot of the Cantos in a seminar at U.C. Santa Barbara taught by Basil Bunting. Bunting is not yet a household name, but I believe it is accurate to say that he was an accomplished poet who spent a lot of time with Yeats and Pound. When he read the Cantos, he read them very much as Pound would have done it. And there are magnificent sounds in the Cantos, magnificent riffs of verbal magic, where Pound re-creates what he thinks Homer must have sounded like, and so forth. But there is unfortunately the stubborn question of sanity. You can see Pound's mind reeling in the Cantos, as he begins to subscribe to crackpot economic theories (and devote whole Cantos to them, rambling on maniacally about where Martin Van Buren's policy towards the peso was misguided, and then, suddenly BLAM a string of Chinese ideograms as if to say "I told you so." I ultimately turned against the Cantos because they didn't make sense, and also for another reason which I do consider serious: they aren't written in English! This may seem like a moronic complaint but it is not. Just as Yeats complained that free verse was like "playing tennis with the net down" -- and implied that there is a challenge to writing things which obey certain rules, so is there an unwritten rule that (say) a Japanese novel must be written in Japanese, and a French novel must be written in French. If you allow yourself, as an author, to simply go ahead and write in any language that strikes your fancy, then I will wish you luck and remove your name from the list of those authors who are devoted to writing literature in English. I love some of Pound's early poems, especially "Exile's Letter." But beware: Pound was very pretentious about his "knowledge of Chinese." Real scholars of Chinese regard his "translations" as hamhanded rubbish.
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