Of all those writing poetry in America at the time she was here Marianne Moore was the only one Mina Loy feared. By divergent virtues these two women have achieved freshness of presentation, novelty, freedom, break with banality.
When Margaret Anderson published my first improvisations Ezra Pound wrote me one of his hurried letters in which he urged me to give some hint by which the reader of good will might come at my intention.
Before Ezra’s permanent residence in London, on one of his trips to America—brought on I think by an attack of jaundice—he was glancing through some book of my father’s. “It is not necessary,” he said, “to read everything in a book in order to speak intelligently of it. Don’t tell everybody I said so,” he added.
During this same visit my father and he had been reading and discussing poetry together. Pound has always liked my father. “I of course like your Old Man and I have drunk his Goldwasser.” They were hot for an argument that day. My parent had been holding forth in downright sentences upon my own “idle nonsense” when he turned and became equally vehement concerning something Ezra had written: what in heaven’s name Ezra meant by “jewels” in a verse that had come between them. These jewels,—rubies, sapphires, amethysts and what not, Pound went on to explain with great determination and care, were the backs of books as they stood on a man’s shelf. “But why in heaven’s name don’t you say so then?” was my father’s triumphant and crushing rejoinder.
The letter: … God knows I have to work hard enough to escape, not propagande, but getting centered in propagande. And America? What the h—l do you a blooming foreigner know about the place. Your père only penetrated the edge, and you’ve never been west of Upper Darby, or the Maunchunk switchback.
Would H., with the swirl of the prairie wind in her underwear, or the Virile Sandburg recognize you, an effete easterner as a REAL American? INCONCEIVABLE!!!!!
My dear boy you have never felt the woop of the PEEraries. You have never seen the projecting and protuberant Mts. of the SIerra Nevada. WOT can you know of the country?
You have the naive credulity of a Co. Claire emigrant. But I (der grosse Ich) have the virus, the bacillus of the land in my blood, for nearly three bleating centuries.
(Bloody snob. ’eave a brick at ’im!!!).…
I was very glad to see your wholly incoherent unamerican poems in the L. R.