I have always had trouble with Pound's Confucian Odes. The awful dialect and doggerel-like effects that mar many of the poems. The mixture of the slangy and the sententious can produce effects that verge on the absurd. But the book has its moments:

I plucked your sleeve by the way, that you should pause.
Cast not an old friend off without cause.

That a hand's clasp in the high road could thee move:
Scorn not an old friend's love.

Sure, it's a little stilted and archaic, but to good effect. Only in very short poems does he steer clear of jarring effects. You're almost rooting for him not to blow it.

The New Directions edition I have has an unsigned introduction. It could be by Pound himself, although it refers to him in the third person. I've had this book since I was a teenager.

Pound is like the amateur better than all the professionals. He sets the standard, only to violate it himself in the semi-doggerel of the Confucian Odes. And then there's that dull didactic fervor, that humorlessness.

Marjorie Perloff: Pound Ascendant

But Pound's own poetry contains little of such concrete thing-language and a great deal of verse that looks like this:

Dark eyed,
O woman of my dreams,
Ivory sandaled,
There is none like thee among the dancers,
None with swift feet.

This is the opening stanza of "Dance Figure," which appears, not as we might suppose, in one of the poet's early volumes, but in the post-Cathay, post-Vorticism volume, Lustra. Indeed, such aggressively "modern" epigrams as "The Bath Tub" or "Papyrus," together with those great "Vorticist" poems?"The Game of Chess," "The Coming of War: Acteon," and "Provincia Deserta"?occupy relatively little space in an edition that includes the whole corpus of Pound's poems and translations. After 1917, Pound?s lyric production, most of it translation or adaption, whether of the Noh drama, Cavalcanti, Confucius, or Sophocles, oddly becomes less rather than more imagistic, Vorticist, or ideogrammatic. And this corpus takes up approximately three quarters of the Library of America volume.