[Gregory Dowling]

There is a brilliant essay by Richard Wilbur entitled "Round About a Poem of Housman's". The poem is "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries", and he shows how the poem works more effectively for a reader who can catch the allusions to Milton and to the letters of Saint Paul. However, even a reader who doesn’t catch them will appreciate much that the poem offers. Wilbur says: “A poem should not be a like a Double-Crostic; it should not be the sort of puzzle in which you get nothing until you get it all.” The essay goes on to talk more generally about “the art of referring”, which, he says, ultimately comes down to a question of tact. The tactful poet knows how to refer to things that a reader is likely to know; if the reader doesn't know them, the poem will often still work, even if not so fully. Pound’s Cantos, he says, "are supremely tactless. That is, they seem to arise from a despair of any community, and they do not imply a possible audience as Housman's poem does."

Let me quote his final remarks about the Cantos, with which I thoroughly agree:

There are three things a reader might do about the Cantos. First, he might decide not to read them. Second, he might read them, as Dr. Williams recommends, putting up with much bafflement for the sake of the occasional perfect lyric, the consistently clean and musical language, and the masterly achievement of quantitative effects through the strophic balancing of rhythmic masses. Or, thirdly, the reader might decide to understand the Cantos by consulting, over a period of years, the many books from which Pound drew his material. At almost every university, nowadays, there is someone who has undertaken that task: he may be identified by the misshapenness of his learning and by his air of lost identity.