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The question of whether Ezra Pound will occupy the footnotes or the chapter headings of future literary history depends, as Biographer Norman concludes, on the poetic merits of the Cantos, a monumental 40-year-long work in progress that has now consumed more writing time than Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past combined. The Cantos are concerned with all history, 20th century history, Pound's personal story, and an eclectic sampling of all he has read. In effect, it is the poetical twin to Finnegans Wake. In sections laden with socio-economic bafflegab, multilingual word play and telegraphic truncations of meaning, the Cantos might as well be Finnegans Wake as far as most readers are concerned. But many of these poems are as water-clear as gin, and just as powerful. The Pisan Cantos, in which humility is cloaked in a language of Biblical authority, are already recognized as modern masterworks:
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made
grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be
thy place
Pull down thy vanity . . .
No Answer. After his fitful, feverish life, Pound is not resting. He lives in his son-in-law's medieval castle in the Italian Alps, completed Canto No.111 last Christmas, and hopes to push the count to 120. Apart from romping with his grandchildren, he fires Menckenesque letters around the world, and his talk, as he once said, is still "like an explosion in an art museum." He is scarcely a hero, but as minister without portfolio of the arts he has served more gallantly than most, and he has never had any truck with "the almost-good and the not-quite dead."
Once an Italian journalist asked him about his tragically flawed character: "How is it that you, who merited fame as a seer, did not see?" Ezra Pound could not answer.