THE TANK
much as a half-holiday from the Ethical Culture Hall of his esthetics. Whether
he is making a creative appearance, as in Pavannes, or a critical appearance, as in
Divisions, he has to impose upon us the propinquity of ferule and desk. Either
by example or precept he must enforce the doctrine: ‘Look in your note-book and
write.’ And like all doctrinaires, Mr. Pound is exposed to the besetting sin of
the half-true or the maybe-true platitude. ‘The mastery of any art is the work of
a lifetime, for example. How about the art of lyric poetry, how about Sappho
and Keats and Swinburne’s early work? Again, we must have ‘direct treatment,’
Mr. Pound affirms, and we must ‘use absolutely no word that does not contribute
to the presentation.’ Such pronouncements are either platitudes or untrue, they
either mean nothing that can’t be taken for granted or a good deal that can’t. The
last of these ‘principles’ is that one should ‘compose in the sequence of the musical
phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.’ If this means that
‘My brother John was nine in May;
And I’ll be twelve on New Year’s day’
is not fine poetry, let’s shake hands: but if it means that
‘Till the maid, knowing her mother near,
Sobs with love, aching with sweet fear’
are not poetic lines, it means nonsense. In either case, the dictum is pointless, it
leads nowhere at all. We do not need an official censure of crude and jingly
rime, and we need something more than the mere comparison of the regular se-
quence of rime to the sequence of a metronome to disparage the genius of those
great poets who happened not to write free verse.
Mr. Pound himself in the Pavannes tries rime as a ‘diversion.’ L’homme
Moyen Sensuel once again confirms the impression of him as a serious school-
master, and as an American. For he relaxes consciously, he is as conscious of his
diversion as the schoolmaster is of the Norfolk suit donned for a game of golf
or a fishing expedition or a trip to Paris; and in his treatment of humour as a
thing by itself, a thing in a separate compartment of its own, he is intensely
American, American @ Voutrance. Stark Realism, another of the Pavannes pieces,
proclaims this same deliberate and detached American humour, a humour that is
no salt for sprinkling, but is stocked in chunks to be made a whole meal of at a
time. Stark Realism might have got into The Smart Set if the manuscript had
been sent there and had happened upon a hospitable editorial mood. L’homme
Moyen Sensuel is in its way a more striking affair, because the attempt to spring
is so evident that one is positively startled by its not coming off. You wonder
where the author has landed; and you find, quite surprisingly, that he has not
landed at all. The verse is so Byronic in its demeanour that you feel there must
be barbs in it somewhere; it is really a shock not to discover a single one.
There is a profoundly American phrase that recurs to the reader of this book
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