The Power Of Chaos

Pound's Cantos is a huge rare work whose aesthetic power is generated from chaos. Chaos abounds in the poem, including its overall structure, its use of language, its creation of ideograms, and its planning designs.It begins abruptly, ends with fragments, and is chaotic in between. One of the most striking features of the poem is its constant structural incoherency. The cantos are there, yet are put there one after another, without any logical connection in between. The same is true with sentences that are fragmental, chaotic and strange. Their oddity is further complicated by the use of different languages that are muddled together. Since many languages are joked together, they, too, look very strange and broken. Even the many visual pictures and ideograms in the poem appear detached and chaotic against the muddled use of those languages.The presumed planning design is no exception. The hell-purgatory-paradise pattern is not strictly followed, and the Chaucerian framework is a mere tool for greater chaos. Each is maintained and broken from within, each is challenging and being challenged from without, each is interlaced with the other. A unifying plan for The Cantos is a critical assumption that lacks textual support, a hope that is not fulfilled, an attempt that testify the working of chaos in the poem.The Cantos remains fragmental, strange, chaotic. Precisely, it is chaos that gives power to the poem. It challenges all conventions for poetry; it is personal, unique and impressive. It challenges our established expectations, awakening our consciousness to novelty. It has its own life, it asks for fulfillment, it enriches our experiences for poetic innovation, refreshing our aesthetic pleasure, broadening our vision of space and time, and increasing the slashing power of the poem.This power is exactly what The Cantos is working for. The power of The Cantos is not subjective but poetic; therefore if it needs any justification, it has to be one that is aesthetic. The poem as whole is not to be tamed, it is wild, overwhelmingly powerful, and itself is the power.