Browning's Sordello has often been regarded as teh ultimate difficult poem, at least until its twentieth-century successors. It is also usually seen as an anomalous freak of literary history. Browning's early masterwork can be understood best, however, as a mature extension of the poetics of its time, as well as a late-Romantic attempt to write an epical work which must be read both willfully and imaginatively.

For Gibson, the aesthetic Pound and the political Pound, Pound the visionary and Pound the historian, are one.