Pound's Cantos

There are the alps said Basil B. You can go the long way round to avoid them, or you can sit and wait for them to crumble.
Not me I said, I'll go straight through.
so I did.
1-95 without much pause. five days. The pain killers helped.
With no footnotes or translations or other critical waffle.
and there was much bad history and poor economics and some rancid ideology and vast swathes of boredom and once in a very long while a bit of jaw dropping poetry.
Compare/contrast Pound's editing of The Waste Land, which I have also been mulling over. Available in facsimile. How removing chunks of it turned a good but rather uninteresting poem into a piece that still unsettles with its strangeness.
Pity he lost that crayon.