PETER SHAW
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treated them with respect for thirty-five years . The Poundians make no
distinction between the Pound of the pre-1922 modernist period and the
Pound of the
Cantos,
and little distinction between the early cantos and
those written during the author's intellectual decline . Pound called the
volume in which the Adams cantos appeared "my best book [of poetry]. "
Accordingl y, Poundians are committed to justifying its place in the
Cantos
at large . More suprisingly , critics not ideologically committed to Pound
have cooperated in this project . By according a misplaced respectability to a
coterie following , they have let themselves be led into acquiescence in
partisan accounts of the Adams cantos . In effect this has put them on the
side of the claim that the
Cantos
as a whole is a unified work .
Significantly, even the Poundians express reservations about the
Adams section before delivering their ritual praise for it-always without
specific comment. Philip Pearlman finds a "general failure of these cantos
to achieve poetic intensity ." Necessarily, though, in a book subtitled "On
the Unity of Ezra Pound's Cantos," he concludes that despite their faults
"they do have an orderly structure ." In
The Pound Era ,
Hugh Kenner , the
staunchest defender and only explicator of the Adams cantos , goes so far in
the direction of criticism as to call them " ten Cantos of finely culled
citations that are bracing but aesthetically dispersive ."
Recently , though, a sourcebook ,
j ohn Adams Speak ing: Pound's Sources
For the Adams Cantos,
by Frederick K . Sanders, has rejected the mild
reservations of other Poundians . Sanders claims to present "convincing
evidence of the care with which the poet has selected and arranged his
materials. " Sanders has gone through the ten volumes of
The W orks o/john
Adams
and located the passages from which Pound quotes ; these , keyed by
canto and line number , he has reprinted in a volume of over five hundred
pages .
In a Prologue to this volume Carroll Terrell, managing editor of
Paideuma, a journal devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship ,
writes:
"The Adams Cantos" add up to a large vortex just as each
of its several parts is a smaller vortex . The stunning result
is the image of an Adams dramatically different from the
image previously made by analytical historians.
Other Poundians have gone so far as to claim that Adams is the hero of the
Cantos.
Yet one searches in vain for a description of the character supposedly
drawn by Pound . William Vasse concludes that "it is impossible
to
give a
simple clue
to
the personality of John Adams ... Pound does not attempt a
