The Cantos
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.
Pound conceded in the late fragments that he could not make it cohere, and he was right. Whole stretches are unreadable without a companion volume: untranslated Chinese ideograms, Provençal, ledger-book economics. And the antisemitism runs through the poem's argument itself; the usury cantos braid hatred into the economics. You are grading salvage, magnificent salvage, for 800 pages.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
