The most ambitious and most failed of 20th-century long poems, and still indispensable. Pound's attempt to compress all of history, economics, and culture into a single Dantesque structure ran aground in fascism and paranoia. But the early Cantos (particularly the descent into Hades in Canto I, the Malatesta sequence, the Chinese history Cantos) are as brilliant as anything in the century. Even the failure is instructive about poetry's limits and ambitions.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.