Anonymous:
At your suggestion I have begun to read Arthur Symons’s “Spiritual Adventures.”
“Christian Trevelga” strikes me, as you predicted, most strongly so far. Symons is one of the subtlest of minds; everything he writes is worth reading. This is of his best certainly. What is one to make of him? I don’t know. I don’t know whether his kind of subtlety is of any earthly value, or whether it is as valuable as Shelley’s. I can never give up faith in the human race quite as completely as he does, nor adopt his attitude of autocratic detachment; yet I never seem to have any real faith, either.—Vae victis!
He is removed from all sense of human values, and lost, always, in abstract patterns. This particular story is an extraordinary expression of him—of the prizes and peril of such a state. Oh, hell! what an insult is put upon us when we are invited to live, and to make such a choice.
Perhaps one makes it: then he is not happy until he has lost himself in an art that is “something more than an audible dramatization of human life.” Perhaps he is right. But—
But—but—
Sometimes I know that for the greatest artist there would be no chasm between what the heart desires and what the mind constructs. Tell me how to do that in poetry and I’ll give you a dollar. Perhaps it can be done in music—I don’t know. But in poetry the human heart and the mathematical soul are always fighting—and so far as I know they have not yet come to an agreement—not in English poetry, at least. The artist and the human being never get to be bedfellows. It’s either sickening humanitarianism or stark designing—the second is the less painful.
Well!—I loathe the world, including Symons and all the arts.
Ezra Pound, London:
Thanks for the January-February issue. Your magazine seems to be looking up. A touch of light in Dawson and Seiffert—though The Little Review seems to me rather scrappy and unselective. I thought you started out to prove Ficke’s belief that the sonnet is “Gawd’s own city.” However, he seems to have abandoned that church. I still don’t know whether you send me the magazine in order to encourage me in believing that my camp stool by Helicon is to be left free from tacks, or whether the paper is sent to convert me from error.