The warm winter sun falls on my back as I sit writing. There is an orange on a tree that never yet bore. That is consolation. One once had friends. The cities swarmed with them. One could go towards any of the cardinal points or between them in any direction to find joyous discussion of things worthy the attention of proper men. That is all done. The world’s arguments are grim – and profitless. It is to me great consolation to let my mind wander along the pink corrugations of these Mediterranean beaches. Their rocks hardly fret at all the blue water, and, when the thoughts have sufficiently but not too far pursued the shore, they shall come on where Ezra sits plucking – in the name of the poets – figs from the dusty thistles of this world. So all in our civilization is not lost. All that is civilized in our time comes from these shores by one bye-road or another. Their winds enjoin reason, moderation, frugality and, in due measure, saturnalia. If our civilization is to continue or even to be remembered, we must have our outposts not only in torrid or boreal wildernesses, but beneath these tempered and undying suns. We must have, too, our spies into the Past that inexorably governs us and that changes constantly its aspect. The giant Atlas to refresh his strength must constantly retouch the earth of these Mediterranean shores. So must we.

Mr Pound1 learned all that he knows of life and letters from, in the first place, Flaubert. Tactics he learned at Altaforte at the feet of the Bertran de Born who incensed the whole world with his libels. Of strategy Mr Pound never heard, nor yet, though he sits in the shadow of the statue of Columbus, has he permitted his mind to be opened by travel. Of infinite mental tenacity he reclines in a remote fragment of Coney Island that has dropped from the skies near Porto Fino. There he pursues what Flaubert pursued in his solitudes under the Norman cliffs of Croisset – the just, the ‘charged’ word in just and even more charged cadences. That is his constant pursuit. But at times he throws down the pen, grasps any tool, from chisel to sword, and springs, ululating, into any ballyhooly that may be going on anywhere. With these activities he keeps his muscles keyed up. Very likely without them he could not support the strain of his pursuit of the intangible. These, his minor passions, have been innumerable and boundless in scope. Always writing poetry, from the age of ten, he has been by turns professor of the Romance languages, cattle-hand in liners, Cook’s guide to Spain, founder of movements in London. He has taken chunks of rock, hit them with hammers and produced eggs or golden birds à la Brancusi; he has hammered tennis balls with rackets and become champion of Southern countries; he has taken fleurets and épées de combat and challenged with them admirers of Milton; he has hammered, tickled and blasted pianos, bassoons, spinets and ophicleids and has produced operas that have been broadcast by the BBC. He has been at once the last survivor of Murger’s Vie de Bohème, censor of world morals and Professor of Economics for the Province of Genoa.

These activities would be bad for his work if he pursued them en amateur. But not a bit of it. He has acquired his fantastic erudition by really being in turn all these things. He was professional Professor of the Romance Languages, professional cattle-hand, professional sculptor, duellist, bassoonist and composer of operas. Yesterday he was Professor of Economics at Rapallo. Today, to my relief, he is head impresario of his Ligurian Academe. His Mozart week rivalled that of Salzburg, and he is at the moment organizing concerts of chamber music that should make all proper men desire to go to the Gran Sala Del Municipio di Rapallo. It gives me at least a feeling of, let us say, Sehnsucht to think that, if I could exchange the sunlight in which I am sitting for that other sunlight, I could this very afternoon listen to this programme of Ezra’s Concoction:

        1. From the Collezione Chilesotti:    
      Canzone degli uccelli    Francesco da Milano
      Suite da Ballo   Giovanni Terzi
    2. Sonata per due violini e pianoforte   Corelli
    3. Golden Sonata per do. do.   Purcell
    [4.] Sonata, violino e pianoforte   Debussy
    Olga Rudge, Violinista; Gerhard Munch, pianofortista; Luigi Sansoni, violinista;
    Professor Marco Ottone, cellista invitato.

I wonder where in London I could hear the Purcell, or where in Paris the Debussy. Or, in either, such players! And all the while Ezra pursues the writing of his cantos on his fifth floor over the Mediterranean.

Nor is it to be imagined that all his other activities are merely devices for passing the time, getting rid of uric acid or emulating the wasp. The war put an end to his remarkable activities in London of the ’13s and ’14s. Without that, London might well today be the literary, plastic and musical centre of at least Anglo-Saxondom. As it was, the spirit passed to West Eighth Street between Fifth and Sixth, and from there spread throughout the United States, so that the whole American approach to the Arts resembles today very nearly that of the exciting times that we witnessed round Holland and Church Streets when Vorticists and Cubists and Imagistes and Futurists and the morning stars and Mr Wyndham Lewis (Percy) and Signor Marinetti sang all together in their glory…. Tempi Passati! Tempi Passati!

I do not mean that that gay, iconoclastic spirit passed entirely to transatlantic parages. Of the contributors to the remarkable, spontaneous tribute to the cantos and their writer that sprang up last year at their first publication in the United Stales, six at least of the fifteen are European by birth – Hugh Walpole, Francesco Menotti, Paul Morand, James Joyce, Basil Bunting and another; and two more, T.S. Eliot and H.D., have become British subjects, the Old World having thus the majority, the seven, dyed in the wool – and Anglo-Saxon – sons of Old Glory being Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, John Peale Bishop, Archibald MacLeish, Allen Tate, Edmund Wilson and William Carlos Williams. So this Poet’s Progress has not wanted for observers either in the New or the Old Worlds. And the tributes were as remarkable to his activities as to the cantos themselves. Mr Walpole says that Ezra stirs both his appetite for beauty and his creative zest; Mr Hemingway that any poet in this century or in the last ten years of the preceding century who can honestly say that he has not been influenced by or learned greatly from the work of Ezra Pound deserves to be pitied rather than rebuked; Mr Joyce that ‘but for him I should still probably be the unknown drudge that he discovered’ – and so on through the whole gamut of admiration or gratitude….

The reason is that Mr Pound has a genius for words that no one – not excluding Shakespeare in England or Heine in Germany – has ever in modern times much surpassed. Almost any line of his: ‘Here we are picking the first fern-leaves’, ‘You who lean from amber lattices upon the cobalt night’, ‘And dawn comes, like a silver-sandalled Pavlova’, ‘Kung walked by the silver temple and into the dynastic grove’ – any line of his, in a hundred moods – ‘Sleep thou no more, I see the star upleaping that hath the dawn in keeping’ – without context or support, any such line is like the trumpet-call awakening of a good novel. Mr Pound has, of course, learned a great deal from the novelists – perhaps more from Flaubert than from any other individual, though obviously the Romance and Italian poets of before 1500 and seventeenth-century English – and the Yellow Press and railway time-tables – have all played their parts with his rhythms. So that the range of tones and rhythms of his lyre-bassoon-ukalele-kettledrum-klaxon verse music is almost incredible, and he can turn on this or that stop with the ease and certainty of the consummate organist who plays the double toccata of Bach and at the same time fourteen games of chess at once. I do not recall anyone – not even Pierre Vidal – who ever had the rhythmic virtuosity of the poet of Rapallo – or, indeed, his scholarship, erudition in fantastic human instances and invention.

The XXX Cantos make up part of an immense epic history of the world as it centres round the Mediterranean. It is also the divine comedy of the twentieth century. It differs from most other epics in the fact that it is interesting. Mr Pound has learnt what there is to know of form from his long apprenticeship to novelists, and the result is a permanent advance of the poetic art. That is what Mr Hemingway means when he says that the modern poet who has not learned from Mr Pound is to be pitied. The day is over for the solemn individual who augustly specialized in nothing but archaic verbiage, sham medievalism, florists’ catalogues and the habits of birds – all things that no human being can much care about. Mr Pound’s words are singularly alive, his medievalism is infinitely modern, his subjects infallibly chosen; but his great characteristic is his power to awaken and to hold the interest – a power that is in part the result of training but much more that of his native gift of words – his genius in the300 strictest sense of the term.

He uses his erudition with extreme boldness, and because Artemis, Sigismund Malatesta, Poggio – and Picasso – all equally live for him, so they and their times and the times between live in his pages. Obviously in so immense a work there will be inequalities. Here and there half a page or half a canto will be given up to humorousnesses that might well have delighted us when we were in the fourth form – and to devote a whole canto of his inferno to human excrement and natural processes is to be prodigal of the inessential. That is no doubt a relic of Americanism. You must have some unpleasantnesses in a hell for financiers, and, for a son of Philadelphia, defective plumbing may well have a hypnotizing dreadfulness. I mention these characteristics so that, should, say, the keeperess of the public lavatories in Charing Cross Station be induced by these lines to purchase a copy of XXX Cantos she may not upbraid me. Other adults may well support with equanimity Mr Pound’s boisterousnesses.

Boisterousness – which is also vitality – is, of course, necessary to getting Mr Pound through his labours. No person of correctitude of views or nicety of expression could have compassed them. In any case here is a work of vast scope, extending from the heights of Olympus to the bottom of the Cloaca Maxima, and one of which our age may well be proud. Banks may break, sterling sink into bottomless pits, and great financial figures know disgrace, and yet the Age need not hang its head. But an Age that does not produce at least one huge, vital and Joviainly laughing epic must stand for ever shamed in the endless ranks of her sisters. From that Mr Pound’s great work may well save us. There seems to be very little else that will.