Pound forwards energetic complaints about censorship and American artists who refuse European influence. He writes, “Until America has courage enough to read Voltaire it won’t be fit for pigs let alone humans.”
Ezra Pound To Harriet Monroe, 1914
London, 23 May
Dear H.M.: –/–/ Cut out any of my poems that would be likely to get you suppressed but don’t make it into a flabby little Sunday School lot like the bunch in the November number. Now WHO could blush at “Lesbia Illa”????????? WHO???
Anyway I haven’t any new things that will mix with the lot I’ve sent it.
You can leave out the footnote to “[A Study in] Aesthetics.”
The Hueffer good? Rather! It is the most important poem in the modern manner. The most important single poem that is.
As for my only liking importations, that’s sheer nonsense. Fletcher, Frost, Williams, H.D., Cannell and yrs. v.t. are all American. You know perfectly well that American painting is recognizable because painters from the very beginning have kept in touch with Europe and dared to study abroad. Are you going to call people foreigners the minute they care enough about their art to travel in order to perfect it? Are the only American poets to be those who are too lazy to study or travel, or too cowardly to learn what perfection means? –/–/
Blunt hasn’t sent in his stuff, and I won’t stir him up, if you don’t much want him. I don’t care about giving people the sort of stuff they want, or using stuff in the old manner. If he remembers on his own account he will have to go in in my place.
Rodker ought to go in fairly soon, no later than Sept.
As for importations. You know what a man’s painting is like when he has never been out of, say Indiana, and has never seen a good gallery.
And what is there improper in “The Father”?
Am I to confine myself to a Belasco drawingroom? Is modern life, or life of any period, confined to polite and decorous actions or to the bold deeds of stevedores or the discovery of the Nile and Orinoco by Teethidorous Dentatus Roosenstein? Are we to satirize only the politer and Biblical sins? Is art to have no bearing on life whatever? Is it to deal only with situations recognized and sanctioned by Cowper? Can one presuppose a public which has read at least some of the classics? God damn it until America has courage enough to read Voltaire it won’t be fit for pigs let alone humans. –/–/