The Equinox (Volume III, Number I)

THE EQUINOX and Correspondence Schools through which the earnest citizen may learn how to converse as though he had seen the world, make $125 a week, never forget any name or telephone number once heard, write a short story or a Broadway Revue, draw comic cartoons, manage his wife, never look more than thirty-five, and live to be a hundred. Yet Mr. Pound is ignored by the great American public. When all the readers and reviewers in the land should be hasting in their thousands to acclaim this ‘new birth of our new soil, the first American’—as indeed Mr. Pound is the first Complete American high-brow, armed at all points, accoutred cap-d-pie—instead they persist in regarding him as an exotic, a fantastic, a new-art poseur. I suppose, because he lives in Europe, because he has written vers libre, because he has praised a man with a name like Gaudier-Brzeska. These trifling accidents do not in the least affect the essential Americanism of what he has done, and of the way in which he has done it. He began by following rules, and now he is making them. According to pre- cept he ‘copied masterwork, and proceeded to his own Composition.’ He has taken himself with the seriousness of Whittier and Tupper and Howells and Mr. Winston Churchill. His reverence for the technique and toil of art is Bostonian. When he is not either observing the law or laying it down, he is as ill at ease as a pedagogue in a bar-room. His American Puritanism nibbles his ear all the time. His hatred of what he calls rhetoric, his mania for the ‘clear’ and the ‘hard,’ his earnest belief that poetry must never be a ‘pastime,’ all derive from the Amer- ican conscience; and so does his distaste for the Puritan poet Milton, whose ex- treme sensuality avenged its suppression magnificently unawares in the greater Miltonic lines, But Mr. Pound’s Puritanism is too distantly inherited. Like modern American Puritanism, it is a melancholy survival, drained of creative or destructive power. It is not a fierce and terrible thing, any more than the Puritanism of the modern New Englander is fierce and terrible. It nibbles at Mr. Pound, but it does not devour him; it has not strength left for that. It is not a Demogorgon, but a schoolmaster, not a victim or a priest. He has all the schoolmaster’s love of the chalk and the blackboard, he has the true pedagogic flair for dogma, the true pedagogic knack of rapping it out ‘clear and hard’ on the board, with the ‘expert’ touch under which the chalk never crumbles. No writer, you would think, could be more acceptable to the American mind, for no nation in the world believes in the schoolmaster and his methods as America believes in them, no nation venerates pedagogy so profoundly. ‘But what is the good of style,’ I was asked yesterday, ‘if it cannot be taught?” Mr. Pound of course would not say that a man can be taught to be a poet or a prose-writer, but he is so pathetically at the mercy of ‘artistic principles,’ he is so Puritanically conscious of artistic right and wrong, that he can never give us so 282