But I think that you will find that those who perform the wing-clipping are the other butterflies whom money or position or callousness has set above the people—not those who are really of the crowd. They of the crowd love wings, and those who truly use them.
I am not daring to attempt reply to the statement which inflames me most, lest I become profane and entirely incoherent. I mean, of course, the statement that the estimate of four or five thousand living artists would be too optimistic because that would mean four or five thousand who “have nothing in common with caterpillars.” That’s a worse libel on artists than the rest of it is on people. But I’ll try to stop with one remark and one question. The estimate is entirely too pessimistic; I positively refuse to believe there are four thousand persons alive who have or even who think they have “nothing in common” with the great splendid mass of folks; if there are, the gods have pity on them! And—has there ever been one single real and great artist, whether of brush or pen or tone, whose art and whose very greatness was not absolutely dependent upon and because of the fact that he had, and knew he had, everything in common with, and indeed included in his being, the beings of these whom you term “caterpillars”?—these whose life and living are and always have been and through ages will continue to be the most worth while content of all art? Of course you reply: Nietzsche; but he was an intellectual and spiritual Rockefeller—not an artist-in-life.
And Individualism? When all have been set free to use their wings, then the few may feel free to strive toward the super-butterfly. And when they arrive, perhaps,—oh, just perhaps—they will find all the other “caterpillars” there too, and with quite wonderful wings. There are wings, and wings, and if they but serve to bear us free of the disaster of meanness and cruelty and snobbishness and injustice, who shall say they are not super-wings?
Witter Bynner, Windsor, Vermont:
I wish I could honor the Imagists as you do. Hueffer wrote On Heaven (not imagistic); and Pound wrote well before he affected a school ... Pound has a rhythm he can’t kill. But none of them, except Hueffer, says anything worth mentioning. They build poems around phrases, usually around adjectives. George Meredith has thousands of imagist poems incidental to each of his novels. But he knows their use and their beauty. These people wring tiny beauties dry. I can imagine a good poet using their methods on occasion, but he wouldn’t be so damn conscious about it. On the whole, the Imagists strike me as being purveyors of more or less potent cosmetics, their whole interest being in the cosmetic itself, not even in its application. Poetry gave signs of becoming poetry again and of touching life—when these fellows showed up, to make us all ridiculous.
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