Oh, the Cantos. Iceland's greatest 20th Century poet (the criminally undertranslated Steinn Steinarr, whose greatest poem, Time and the Water has barely been translated into the Nordic languages, let alone any other) once got asked who he thought the greatest poet of the 20th Century was to which he replied: "Probably Ezra Pound, but you could knock out a bull with his poetry."

Of the high modernists (a phrase that should come with irony quotes permanently attached) I prefer Eliot. Eliot's fucked upness gives his best poetry an edge that Pound lacks. Not that Pound wasn't a bowl of raisins short of a fruit cake. But there's something charming about Eliot's neurosis that Pound's utter psychosis lacks.

That being said, Pound was technically a much better poet, and The Waste Land was a true collaboration between the two. Any time I hear/read a poet complain about editing, I think of Waste Land. Without Pound it would have been an incomparably lesser poem.

But I'm writing my B.A. thesis about Cummings.