Ten years later as assistant editor of the Egoist she refers to my long poem, March, which thanks to her own and her husband’s friendly attentions finally appeared there in a purified form:
14 Aug. 1916
Dear Bill:—
I trust you will not hate me for wanting to delete from your poem all the flippancies. The reason I want to do this is that the beautiful lines are so very beautiful—so in the tone and spirit of your Postlude—(which to me stands, a Nike, supreme among your poems). I think there is real beauty—and real beauty is a rare and sacred thing in this generation—in all the pyramid, Ashur-ban-i-pal bits and in the Fiesole and in the wind at the very last.
I don’t know what you think but I consider this business of writing a very sacred thing!—I think you have the “spark”—am sure of it, and when you speak direct are a poet. I feel in the hey-ding-ding touch running through your poem a derivitive tendency which, to me, is not you—-not your very self. It is as if you were ashamed of your Spirit, ashamed of your inspiration!—as if you mocked at your own song. It’s very well to mock at yourself—it is a spiritual sin to mock at your inspiration—
Hilda.
Oh well, all this might be very disquieting were it not that “sacred” has lately been discovered to apply to a point of arrest where stabilization has gone on past the time. There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.
But in any case H. D. misses the entire intent of what I am doing no matter how just her remarks concerning that particular poem happen to have been. The hey-ding-ding touch was derivitive but it filled a gap that I did not know how better to fill at the time. It might be said that that touch is the prototype of the improvisations.
It is to the inventive imagination we look for deliverance from every other misfortune as from the desolation of a flat Hellenic perfection of style. What good then to turn to art from the atavistic religionists, from a science doing slavey service upon gas engines, from a philosophy tangled in a miserable sort of dialect that means nothing if the full power of initiative be denied at the beginning by a lot of baying and snapping scholiasts? If the inventive imagination must look, as I think, to the field of art for its richest discoveries today it will best make its way by compass and follow no path.
But before any material progress can be accomplished there must be someone to draw a discriminating line between true and false values.