[...] infantile desire in its crytallizations, repressions, and sublimations, opens out into the image of the library and the cell.As Northrop Frye says, "The paradoxical technique of the poetry which is encyclopedic and yet discontinuous, the technique of [Eliot's] The Waste Land or Ezra Pound's Cantos, is, like its direct opposite in Wordsworth, a technical innovation heralding a new mode." That new mode has been called, quite rightly I think, collage - the juxtaposition without explicit syntactic connection of disparate items - in this case [Canto LXXXI], references to Greek mythology, the conversation of Padre Elizondo, the image of "George Santayana arriving in the port of Boston," and so on. It is interesting to note that despite the temporality inherent in any verbal structure, Pound's way of relating word groups is essentially spatial. The words of John Adams, for example, could precede those of André Spire instead of following them with no appreciable difference, or again, it would be possible to interlard a passage from, say, Canto LXXIX somewhere between the references to Possum and the Crédit Agricole without altering the basic movement or momentum of his discontinuous encyclopedic form.
A book is a machine to think with.