Dear Carrol,

I always took Pound's remark as a statement about the formal failure  
of his own Cantos to cohere.

Diana

Sent from my iPod

On Mar 26, 2010, at 1:02 AM, Carrol Cox <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> The following may for all I know a commonplace in Pound criticism
> --since I have read nothign of that in the last four decades. But if
> not, it may be of interest to some on this list. It stems from my mind
> wandering a bit while pondering a post on another list, which I  
> wondered
> if I could express coherently -- which reminded me of the lines near  
> the
> end of the Cantos on coherence.
>
> "I cannot make it cohere" This line (quoted from memory) somehere near
> the end of Pound's poem is a pretty exact paraphrase of the end of
> Dante's poem. Dante sees the co-existence of man & God, which coheres,
> but he can't hold on to the image (the great imaginatin fails), and
> hence (as Pound puts it in his poem) It coheres alright but I (Dante)
> can't make it cohere.
>
> Carrol
>