T. S. Eliot

“ Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music. ”

“ One must be capable of reacting to stimuli for a moment, as a real, live person, even in face of as much of one's own powers as are arrayed against one;... The virile complaint, the revolt of the poet, all which shows his emotion,—that is poetry. ”

“ Ezra Pound has been fathered with vers libre in English, with all its vices and virtues. The term is a loose one—any verse is called "free" by people whose ears are not accustomed to it—in the second place, Pound's use of this medium has shown the temperance of the artist, and his belief in it as a vehicle is not that of the fanatic. He has said himself that when one has the proper material for a sonnet, one should use the sonnet form; but that it happens very rarely to any poet to find himself in possession of just the block of stuff which can perfectly be modelled into the sonnet. ”

“ Pound
seems to us rather a scholar than a poet, and we should like to see him giving his unusual talent more to direct translation from the Provençal.
and Mr. J. C. Squire (now the literary editor of the New Statesman) , in an appreciative review in the New Age, had counselled the poet that he would
gain and not lose if he could forget all about the poets of Dante's day, their roses and their flames, their gold and their falcons, and their literary amorousness, and walk out of the library into the fresh air. ”

“ Like the sea that brooks no voyaging With the winds unleashed and free, Like the sea that he cowed at Genseret Wi' twey words spoke suddently. A master of men was the Goodly Fere A mate of the wind and sea, If they think they ha' slain our Goodly Fere They are fools eternally. ”

“ Pound is not one of those poets who make no demand of the reader; and the casual reader of verse, disconcerted by the difference between Pound's poetry and that on which his taste has been trained, attributes his own difficulties to excessive scholarship on the part of the author. "This," he will say of some of the poems in Provençal form or on Provençal subjects, "is archaeology; it requires knowledge on the part of its reader, and true poetry does not require such knowledge." But to display knowledge is not the same thing as to expect it on the part of the reader ”

“ The only kind of emotion worthy of a poet is the inspirational emotion which energises and strengthens, and which is very remote from the everyday emotion of sloppiness and sentiment....
And as for the platform of Imagism, here are a few of Pound's "Don'ts for Imagists":
Pay no attention to the criticisms of men who have never themselves written a notable work. Use no superfluous word and no adjective which does not reveal something. Go in fear of abstractions. Don't retail in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. ”

“ Pound's commandments tend too much to make of poetry a learned, self-conscious craft, to be cultivated by a guild of adepts, from whose austere laboratories spontaneity and simplicity are excluded.... ”

“ Believing we should meet with lips and hands ... There shut up in his castle, Tairiran's, She who had nor ears nor tongue save in her hands, Gone, ah, gone—untouched, unreachable! She who could never live save through one person, She who could never speak save to one person, And all the rest of her a shifting change, A broken bundle of mirrors...! ”

“ Pound is well known, even having been the victim of interviews for Sunday papers, it does not follow that his work is thoroughly known. There are twenty people who have their opinion of him for every one who has read his writings with any care. Of those twenty, there will be some who are shocked, some who are ruffled, some who are irritated, and one or two whose sense of dignity is outraged. ”

“ The Provençal canzon, like the Elizabethan lyric, was written for music. Mr. Pound has more recently insisted, in a series of articles on the work of Arnold Dolmetsch, in the "Egoist," on the importance of a study of music for the poet.
Such a relation between poetry and music is very different from what is called the "music" of Shelley or Swinburne, a music often nearer to rhetoric (or the art of the orator) than to the instrument. For poetry to approach the condition of music (Pound quotes approvingly the dictum of Pater) it is not necessary that poetry should be destitute of meaning. ”

“ The twenty-first critic will probably be one who knows and admires some of the poems, but who either says: "Pound is primarily a scholar, a translator," or "Pound's early verse was beautiful; his later work shows nothing better than the itch for advertisement, a mischievous desire to be annoying, or a childish desire to be original." There is a third type of reader, rare enough, who has perceived Mr. Pound for some years, who has followed his career intelligently, and who recognizes its consistency. ”

“ As to the "freedom" of his verse, Pound has made several statements in his articles on Dolmetsch which are to the point:
Any work of art is a compound of freedom and order. It is perfectly obvious that art hangs between chaos on the one side and mechanics on the other. A pedantic insistence upon detail tends to drive out "major form." A firm hold on major form makes for a freedom of detail. In painting men intent on minutiae gradually lost the sense of form and form- combination. ”

“ In hot summer have I great rejoicing When the tempests kill the earth's foul peace, And the lightnings from black heaven flash crimson, And the fierce thunders roar me their music And the winds shriek through the clouds mad, opposing, And through all the riven skies God's swords clash. ”

“ It was a true insight to ally Pound to the Latin, not to the Greek poets.
Certain of the poems in "Lustra" have offended admirers of the verse of the "Personae" period. When a poet alters or develops, many of his admirers are sure to drop off. Any poet, if he is to survive as a writer beyond his twenty-fifth year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express. This is disconcerting to that public which likes a poet to spin his whole work out of the feelings of his youth ”

“ Pound is the greatest poet of this day." He goes on to say:
The poems in "Cathay" are things of a supreme beauty. What poetry should be, that they are. And if a new breath of imagery and handling can do anything for our poetry, that new breath these poems bring.... Poetry consists in so rendering concrete objects that the emotions produced by the objects shall arise in the reader.... ”

“ Pound's work demands. Thus has "Lustra" been a disappointment to some; though it manifests no falling off in technique, and no impoverishment of feeling. Some of the poems (including several of the "Contemporanea") are a more direct statement of views than Pound's verse had ever given before. Of these poems, M. Jean de Bosschère writes:
Everywhere his poems incite man to exist, to profess a becoming egotism, without which there can be no real altruism. I beseech you enter your life. I beseech you learn to say "I" When I question you. For you are no part, but a whole; No portion, but a being. ”

“ But even so favourable a critic pauses to remark that
He baffles us by archaic words and unfamiliar metres; he often seems to be scorning the limitations of form and metre, breaking out into any sort of expression which suits itself to his mood.
and counsels the poet to "have a little more respect for his art."
It is, in fact, just this adaptability of metre to mood, an adaptability due to an intensive study of metre, that constitutes an important element in Pound's technique. ”

“ Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright or try to conceal it. Consider the definiteness of Dante's presentation as compared with Milton's. Read as much of Wordsworth as does not seem to be unutterably dull. If you want the gist of the matter go to Sappho, Catullus, Villon when he is in the vein, Gautier when he is not too frigid, or if you have not the tongues seek out the leisurely Chaucer. Good prose will do you no harm. There is good discipline to be had by trying to write it. Translation is also good training. ”

“ The tone, which is at once jocund and keen, is one of Pound's qualities. Ovid, Catullus—he does not disown them. He only uses these accents for his familiars; with the others he is on the edge of paradox, pamphleteering, indeed of abuse....
This is the proper approach to the poems at the beginning of "Lustra," and to the short epigrams, which some readers find "pointless," or certainly "not poetry." They should read, then, the "Dance Figure," or "Near Périgord," and remember that all these poems come out of the same man.
Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark ”

“ Beauty is a very valuable thing; perhaps it is the most valuable thing in life; but the power to express emotion so that it shall communicate itself intact and exactly is almost more valuable. Of both these qualities Mr. Pound's book is very full. ”

“ There is evident, and more strongly in certain later poems, a tendency toward quantitative measure. Such a "freedom" as this lays so heavy a burden upon every word in a line that it becomes impossible to write like Shelley, leaving blanks for the adjectives, or like Swinburne, whose adjectives are practically blanks. Other poets have manipulated a great variety of metres and forms; but few have studied the forms and metres which they use so carefully as has Pound. ”

“ Real pain is born of this stupid interpretation, and one does not realize how deep it is unless one can feel, through the ejaculations and the laughter, what has caused these wounds, which are made deeper by what he knows, and what he has lost.... ”

“ He has not the current melancholy or resignation or unwillingness to live; nor the kind of feeling for nature which runs to minute description and decorative metaphor. He cannot be usefully compared with any living writers;... full of personality and with such power to express it, that from the first to the last lines of most of his poems he holds us steadily in his own pure grave, passionate world.... ”

“ Ton, who has left America to reside for a while in London and impress his personality on English editors, publishers and readers, is by far the newest poet going, whatever other advertisements may say. ”

“ Also, Pound has frequently expressed disapproval of Milton and Wordsworth.
After "Ripostes," Mr. Pound's idiom has advanced still farther. Inasmuch as "Cathay," the volume of translations from the Chinese, appeared prior to "Lustra," it is sometimes thought that his newer idiom is due to the Chinese influence. This is almost the reverse of the truth. The late Ernest Fenollosa left a quantity of manuscripts, including a great number of rough translations (literally exact) from the Chinese. After certain poems subsequently incorporated in "Lustra" had appeared in "Poetry," Mrs. ”