552
PARTISAN REVIEW
Pound's
Cantos
have remained a problem to the majority of his critics.
Because of the erratic nature of his genius-and he is one of the very
few living poets to whom the word "genius" is appropriate-there will
continue to be differences of opinion concerning the value of some cantos
as opposed to others. In the
Cantos
Pound is a great historian of cul–
tures. A final judgment of them-and the entire work itself-rests in
the future.
If
nothing else, the
Cantos
have proved Pound master of
a style, a style which permits him to talk out loud, to air his theories,
to quote his preferences, to write lines of poetry, to translate quotations
from Chinese, Latin, and Greek, or quote them directly as he chooses,
to interpret history-all without losing the character of a form he has
created. As poetry, or as coherent thinking, it is madness to say that
everything he writes within the
Cantos
is of equal or lasting value-of
course, there are many unequal passages in them; and at best they
depend upon the authority of his poetic insight. But it is not critical
nonsense to admire the style, the wit, the passages of lyrical intensity
contained within the
Cantos-and
to recognize even now that Pound's
Cantos
should be accepted as one of the major works of our time.
Rock–
Drill's
ten cantos are a rocklike pedestal for a group of later cantos,
and no group of cantos is without several magnificent poems. This
book has Canto 91, which, as far as I know, is the best poem pub–
lished in 1956, and it is likely to endure for many years to come.
For readers of the twentieth century, Pound has invented, has "made
new" lyric poetry in "the grand manner", in the lines that begin:
that the body of light come forth
from the body of fire
And that your eyes come to the surface
from the de ep wherein they were sunken,
R eina- for 300 years,
and now sunken
That your eyes come forth from their caves
&
light then
as the holly-leaf
qui laborat, orat
These and the lines that follow have an imperishable quality that
should instantly be discerned (if not completely understood) by any in–
telligent reader of poetry. They also contain more than a hint of the
probity of Pound's historical imagination. I am content to let others
worry about his syntax and his use of Chinese characters-which, often
