In 1914 Pound abandoned - as too static in its implication - the “ image” as a metaphor for poetry, adopting the more dynamic “vortex.” Note that the vortex, the poem in motion yet shaped, is primary while “ideas” are secondary: “The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing” (GB 92). Poetry, as MallarmS said, is not made with ideas, but with words; yet any discussion of the Cantos is in danger of allowing the ideas to predominate. The greater my experience with the Cantos, the wiser I think Donald Davie's advice that we allow the poem's energies to “interact, climb, spiral, reverse themselves, and disperse,” as we listen for “large-scale rhythms” and do not deny ourselves the experience of reading “many at a time, and fast” (Pound 84-S5). This chapter offers a very swift overview of the poem as it appeared in instalments from 1930 to 1969. Major thematic concerns, and some of the outstanding figures in the poem, are discussed more thoroughly in chapter 3.

A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930)

To what extent did Pound think his poem accessible as poetry to readers who would, as it were, enter the vortex? It is difficult not to find unintended irony when in the early 1930s we hear the author of A Draft of XXX Cantos lecture a young poet, Louis Zukofsky, on the obscurity of Zukofsky's verse. Poetry demands “concentration / BUT AFTER that you have … to go out for the NEXT step / which is clarity /.” Zukofsky “cd. have expressed the same subject matter in a more simple and lucid manner without losing one jot of the meaning” (PZ 137, 125). The last phrase is curious, for although Pound urges them on Zukofsky, simplicity and lucidity appear as potential threats to meaning.