Does anybody teach all this any more?
No one taught literature in English before the late 19th-c. The MLA was established in the 1880s with the purpose of making the study of modern literatures respectable. Carrol
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I'll take that as a `no'.
My introduction to Pound, Joyce, Eliot was from English grad students at Uni Iowa. They were attracted there because of the creative writing program. I just accepted it as impossible the way modern painting was impossible. Except somehow what was okay for painting didn't seem okay for poetry and literature. Well truth was I wasn't all that crazy about the far end of abstract painting either. Same with jazz. Some is fine, a lot turns into a struggle and too far just snaps the thread that is supposed to connect experience with form. I'll say this, though, it's a lot more fun to do than to look at or read or listen to. There is a discipline involved where once you find something by experiment, you are supposed to put it to work in its capacity to express, and that is were things seem to break down.
You're right about The Cantos, or at least the one posted. It did take awhile and some googling. I completely forgot who Circe was, but remembered my annoyance that Homer kept using immortals I've never heard of and had to look up. My familiarity with the greek gods was from their art and so it was hard to visualize Circe and remember her. She wasn't popular with the art crowd. Maybe Homer's point for using a bizarre cast was to underline the strangeness of the struggle back....and ancient form of science fiction ... visiting strange new worlds, etc.
Riffs here. What's gained in that kind of wondering around education seems like an opening up of history and the ability to see lost worlds. Does anybody think that is still possible to find? It seems to me to be important because I think we are losing our ability to connect with the past.
Maybe it's me, but, it seems like anything before about 1980 is just a blurr. And that's pushing it. The 1990s seems to be fogging out of mind, back when computer's had text on their screens.
CG