(1930s) Cantos TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1930s Highlights Books
Time Magazine Cantos

(March 20, 1933)

Of Robert Browning's most obscure poem, Sordello, it was said that only one person understood it--the author--and that later even he forgot what it all meant. Whether or not the Cantos have a "meaning." Author Pound seems to realize that his readers may have the same difficulty:

Hang it all, Robert Browning, There can be but the one "Sordello."

But Ezra Pound does nothing to help his readers. He once told a friend that the key to the Cantos was "the presentness of the past," but if there is any connected idea (there is no story) in the Cantos, it is too elusive for amateur readers, too buried under Greek, Latin, Provencal, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Japanese allusions. Stunned by the almost continuous avalanche of changing subjects, the plain reader may be too dizzied to get far, but if he perseveres and keep his eyes open he should find some picture-passages to please him:

Glide of water, lights and the prore, Silver beaks out of night, Stone, bough over bough, lamps fluid in water, Pine by the black trunk of its shadow And on hill black trunks of the shadow The trees melted in air.