Writing from London (or, as he puts it below, “this stupid little island”), Ezra Pound dashes off a short missive to Harriet Monroe, the founding publisher and editor of Poetry magazine, on American and British ignorance of the French literary tradition. Pound found in Monroe an early champion of his work (she had published his “In a Station of the Metro” earlier that spring), and would convince her the following year to publish T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
September, 1913
London
Dear Miss Monroe:
Heaven knows this is the briefest and hastiest of summaries. And the facts—are old enough. Yet you are dead right when you say that American knowledge of French stops with Hugo. And—dieu le sait—there are few enough people on this stupid little island who know anything beyond Verlaine and Baudelaire—neither of whom is the least use, pedagogically, I mean. They beget imitation and one can learn nothing from them. Whereas Gautier and de Gourmont carry forward the art itself, and the only way one can imitate them is by making more profound your knowledge of the very marrow of art. There’s no use in a strong impulse if it is all or nearly all lost in bungling transmission and technique. This obnoxious word that I’m always brandishing about means nothing but a transmission of the impulse intact. It means that you not only get the thing off your own chest, but that you get it into some one else’s.
Yrs. ever pedagogically.
FURTHER READING
For more of Pound, ever pedagogically: ABC of Reading
And this: Guide to Kulchur
And this: Ezra Pound’s virulently anti-semitic WWII radio broadcasts