In this essay, Barnhisel looks at the Cantos in their historical context. He argues that the poem became the focal point for a debate in American culture whose ramifications went far beyond the poem, Pound, or even literature.

Ezra Pound's Cantos, the masterpiece of one of modernism's central figures, is perhaps the least read of any of the great works of modernism. The poem is difficult, certainly. It asks the reader to come to it with a vast array of knowledge of languages, historical events, and mythologies. It is written imagistically, as a string of images and fragments strung together by a logic that is hard to decipher. It expresses opinions that are unfamiliar and foreign at times and at other times are disturbing and offensive. For these and other reasons, few college poetry courses bother to include more than a few excerpts from The Cantos and...