October 7, 1939,
1456 Yale Station,
New Haven, Conn.

Dear Williams,

Just returned from Italy and am damn glad to be an American.
Nice fresh air, nice fresh air, and nice fresh girls. Italy is in a hell
of a position and isn't worth a dime.

I've come back to Furioso and have a couple of drawers full
of poems to be read etc. However at the same time I am some days behind
in all my work and have to cram on Greek etc. I did read your letter
to Reed and there are a few points which I want to discuss with you, and
all that I ask is that you be patient with me and if you get half-a-chance,
please drop me a note and tell me where I am wrong.

(At this point it would be better if I told you that during
the summer I have read, The Happy Life; A good bit of Plato, Provençal,
and Dante. Also I have taken an amorous primrose way to some goddamn bon-
fire, and there is still smoke etc..... It has no doubt, together with
other things affected my former opinions.)

In the first place I believe that you have attacked
Pound unfairly (through suggestion). Personally I believe that there are
two Pounds, the professional poet, and the economic dabbler. By professional
I mean that his poetic ear, taste, feeling, is as subtle and experienced
as XXXXXXXX your professional skill in umbilicating. And at the same time
I think that Pound has surpassed in economics what "Peter Cooper said
a number of years ago". Pound has always been misquoted, and when Reed
states that Pound said that everything he wrote has an economic implication,
he is guilty of usual equivocation. Pound did say that the cantos have
an economic implication, which everyone knows; but in your article you
imply that the Provençal, "crushed strawberries", Hugh Maub., "swift feet"
etc have a source of propaganda. I probably mistake you. But I do feel that
you are better equipped through your acquaintance with Ezra, to write one
good paragraph on Ezra. A squib which would clarify the question 'Pound
and Propaganda'. Someone owes this Pound. Around Yale it becomes tiring
to hear the young professors saying that Pound is the propagandist, that
Pound is crazy, no poet, no man, homo, etc. When I look at your bit on
Ez I feel that it would be justified from Eliot, John Skimpiss; (but hell
there should be all the difference in the world between Ez and Taggard.)

I really shouldn't write this letter as I do like your
article very much. However I feel that you have written stronger and more
objectively about Ez and Eliot in one of your books. Anyway if this letter
is out of tune, forget it as I like the article a hell of a lot and we will
print it. It's just the little thing about Ezra that worries me.

Ezra wrote that we ought to have some mention of Ford's
death and he thought that you were the best person for that. Do you have
have any suggestions or ideas? perhaps you have a poem that could start
off a memorial issue? I have some work that I would like to send to
you sometime. It was hatched from a woman's heat. It probably stinks,
I don't know for as I said there is still smoke. Maybe it's just

Nov. 10, 1939,

Dear Williams,

This is the first opportunity that I have had to
write you. I want to thank you for the article and the poem.
As a matter of fact this is the first time I'VE had to
breathe since I've come back. Too much work to make up etc.
Your idea about the article is o.k. and we will print it as
it stands. My observations were merely personal and won't affect
the readers. The poem for Ford is excellent and we are certainly
proud to have it; I think that we will have a very good issue
with your poem leading. If you have any good ideas about how we
can get good material etc, pertinent to a Ford issue, please drop
a line. The second issue is doubtful. Except for your article,
Cummings, a couple of pieces by Ez, and perhaps one or two from
Gregory, we don't have much to brag about. I have never seen so
much stuff that stinks. It comes mostly from California. However
I think that everything will pan out o.k. in the end. Wheelwright
sent us a couple of good things. Do you know anyone we might try?

As I mentioned before I am putting on a Pound
exhibition and writing a Bibliography. The library is making an
exception and is going to give me a little over $100 for the
publishing job. This will about cover expenses. My idea is to
begin to salt away as much of the modern movement as possible
in the Sterling. I have found that the English Dept. and the
rare book-room work hand-in-hand. The result is that the English
Dept. will be more sympathetic towards Modern Poets etc, if they
own the best modern collection. What do you think? Next year I
would like to have a shot at you and steal everything available
for posterity. That is I would like to collect everything that
you have written, publish the Bibliography, get extant mss. and
have some learned professor open the exhibition.

Reed and I will be in New York sometime soon and
would like to see you if possible.

Incidentally we have a young lady from the Junior
League (who is bored with doing nothing) working on the financial
end of Furioso. She is trying to get patrons etc. We hope to pay
more. 1200 copies of the first issue were passed out. Subscriptions
dribble in ever so often. In seminar class I read out a few of
your poems to defend 'common-speech', the classic scene cinched
everything and the professor spent an hour (2 hour class) showing
the merits. At least our seminar is not stagnant.

Dear Angleton:

I've got a subject, you write, that I don't know anything about. It may have been covered a lot before but it certainly should be covered right now in *Furioso*. Propaganda in *Poetry*. *Poetry* that tries to influence people. In other words, just what is the function of *poetry*? What has a *poetry magazine* to do with a war, with a country's policy, with a new bunch of quintuplets, etc.? In publishing *Furioso* I think that's one of the things we've been trying to find out, and so far I haven't found out anything. That isn't very specific, I know, but it's one of those intangibles that you can't get at until you know an awful lot about *poetry*. Pound says that everything he's written has economic implications. Everything (nearly) that Genevieve Taggard writes says "better read *Marx*". In other words most of the modern poets *think* they're pointing toward something which they believe is right. And I want to know if they've picked the right medium. Why not write an article for *Liberty*? My idea is that *poetry* deals with the generalities of human conduct, with questions that are important for more than ten minutes, with movements greater than the French occupation of the Saar Basin. Then all I can do is say So what. I wonder what's the good of writing an article for *Liberty* either, except that we're still a neutral country. . . . I've read several poems of yours that are precisely about what I'm trying to get at. etc. etc. - To all of this my answer would be, Yes.

Take an extreme case, take the concepts that walk around as T. S. Eliot. We know they are completely worthless so that aside from Eliot's being a poet we do not have to pay much attention to him. He is strictly limited even as a poet but for all that we may speak of him as a good poet, good, that is, far beyond his other limitations.

2

That, I think, if true, would leave a certain irreducible
minimum which we may designate as the poetic quantum.

Taggard may entertain certain concepts but these do not by
any stretch of the imagination make her a good writer. Pound, you
say, believes that all his writings have an economic implication. So,
by the way, does the peanut vendor at a ball game. It is obvious that
unless Pound's writings have other implication, the poetic quantum, he
would be of far less use to us as Pound than a lucid text on the sub-
ject he believes he is expounding, the lucid text he is always dream-
ing of. Should his concepts ever clarify themselves, that is to say,
his economic concepts, and he be able to transcribe them . . it
might be the end of him. Horrible thought.

Peter Cooper said a number of years ago, Exorbitant rent
(commonly called interest) silently but surely devours the substance
of the people. - I think this, in one sentence, says more succinctly
than Pound ever dreamed, everything he ever conceived of economics.
But Peter Cooper was not a poet.

We all like to believe that we are master minds. But what
men seldom seem to learn is that the end of poetry is a poem. I
don't know a thing about the value of a poem as such or of a hunk of
gold as such or of a man himself as such but I do know that. So what,
huh? After all, man being human must believe himself at times a great
conceptualist (read your Spanish lit.: "just savages" E.P.) at least
for home consumption or lie down and die of disgust at the sights he
sees about him. I don't blame anyone for wanting to teach his fellows
to "blow hard" when Papa wields the rag. 's O.K. by me.

3

Then occasionally we get someone who can write. It's a
**double entendre** that goes something like this:

See the little angels
Ascend up! ascend up!
O! see the little angels
Ascend up to Heaven!

There's something deeper to it than most people imagine. Ha!

Dear Dr. Williams; Is there anything you want
to contribute to the great second issue of
Furioso? Or am I right in thinking (since June)
that you don't want to? If there's something
wrong there's nothing I can do about it, but I'm
sorry. You were one of our big pushers not so
far back, in the beginning. However, I'd better
shut up and hope for the best. Of course we
want very much to hear from you.

Best.

Reed Whittemore

1456 Yale Station

Reply : Focus

1. Typical is a bad word, there are only poems, one at a time. The only work that might bear the word "typical" would, I am sure, be a mediocre one. First rate poems stand by themselves.

BUT to imagine that any work, Greek, Latin, British, Irish or American can be conceived of as in vacuo is idiotic. Every work created in any environment is compact of that environment in all its diverse appearances since any work of art is sensual in its nature and we can only know and present as artists what we sensually perceive in the character in which we perceive it. Thus any art or work of art is always local and only national in its character by accident.

When a Frenchman visits the United States, as many did during the recent war, does he write like an American? Of course not. His "locality" is still France just as most of us feel here that Auden's locality is still England. He is struggling hard, so we are told, but I for one doubt that he will ever get to the bottom of his difficulty and write an American poem. It would be too much to expect of him.

Any poem, we're talking of excellence, written in the American locale or climate, if you prefer, will have compact in it all those characteristics, psychological and otherwise, intonations, use of words, differing from British use, which make our lives here of a separate character than the British equivalent. To that extent, excellence or the lack of it being equal, one might well speak of a "typical American poem"--reserving always what I have said above as to the use of the word "typical."

In British poetic usage there is locked the British Empire; I hope we have nothing of that here. If we do have that here then to that extent our poems would be unamerican. You have, of course, acquired T.S.Eliot from us; my own opinion of Eliot is that he was antipathetic to that which would have been required of him to be a first rate American poet -- or, rather, to write a first rate American poem. Between Eliot and Auden lies a mountain of effort which neither for opposite reasons will climb. I have no objections; each will, I am sure, do something else, has in fact done much else excellently--but there is much else to be done here. Besides.

2. My own feelings concerning the language of American poetry as it differs and might differ from standard, present-day British usage are of a basic nature. Our language is our own, it has no relation, except an accidental one, to English. We only make

2.

asses of ourselves when we teach "English" in our schools. But
that is a small matter. The important thing is to use any language
tactically, sensually

(23 hours later--15 minutes to myself--one of them used
up now: the violence of my life at least serves to break
up some overly devoted moods and give me a fresh start)

I do not wish to belabor the point of a possible relationship be-
tween a prosody and a corresponding political-social make-up but in
one aspect the British social fabric and its prosody are identical,
both are for us here in America useless. We get a picture of the
thing, a summation, in the pathetic sonneteer, a definite psycho-
logic that has been thoroughly catalogued and discounted.
That is, naturally, an extreme type but it serves, I hope, to
emphasize my point.

We need a new prosody as much as we need a new social understanding--
an expanded prosody, an enormously expanded understanding of the
"metrical core of speech" as Grover I. Jacoby, Jr., editor of his
free verse magazine *Variegation* (Variegation Publishing Co., 124
West 4th Street, Los Angeles 13, California.) has phrased it.

The Ptolomeic System is no more antiquated to astronomy than the
present prosody is to our understanding of the poem today. Not,
mind you, that much of the past generally is not immutable but it
has so long thwarted the imagination in the name of stability that
we don't even dare to think beyond it in many cases.

I am certain that the American language offers a far more labile
opportunity for a really basic opening up of the prosodic rules than
does the British today. In any case we might as well go on with
our investigations and observations here without paying much
attention to what the British may conceivably be doing--if at all--
better than we.

I myself feel that the really sweeping enlargements of opportunity
in *measure*, in the making of the poem, the opening up of the
field, will come with structural changes--growing out of what
began as free verse. I must quit trying to write an essay.

An attempt to answer your second question directly: differences
in the use of vocabulary, metric, cadences, syntax, punctuation as
between English and the American language are in themselves largely
fortuitous. That is to say, many such differences are purely
accidental and of no specific influence. However, if stability of
vocabulary, use of vocabulary, cadence and so forth becomes a
barrier to the development of new prosodic resources, then and to
the extent that a stasis is induced by conventional practice, the
trend which breaks away from that convention by discarding the old
is the trend that will appeal most to the American. In that case
and in that light the differences between English and American as
two languages diverging from a single root are basic. Basic
because it shows the nature of the two characters involved, in
their differences as well as their objectives.

3.

The measure remains in this, in all other matters under discussion here: What advances toward a new and expanded prosody are involved? If changes in vocabulary, use of vocabulary, cadences and so forth have advanced us or might advance us toward that they are important, otherwise not.

3.

American poems that I read have not been affected by those trends in English poetry in the thirties typified by the work of Auden, Spender, Day Lewis and Macaulay--because such work is unrelated to the work that lies before us. We enjoy such poems as you speak of but find them completely foreign--as we found the work of Eliot foreign in its implications. Eliot's work stopped the development of American poetry for over twenty years by the tremendous popular success of its mannerisms. His influence here today is paltry though there is no one in America who does not acknowledge his skill or in fact who does not take pleasure in his successes. We have learned, however, not to be thrown off our gait by him. The same would apply to the work of the poets mentioned above.

You see, consciously or unconsciously, the American must work toward a present, a local necessity. This necessity is precisely the same as that which animated Athens, Rome or whatever other locality you may wish to name, present day London among the rest. Each man uses what he has for his constructions. This promises that the materia of each is different from the materia of the other in other places and ages. Usually there is a competition for excellence in the world which--whether we like it or not--has run parallel to world dominance.

Anyhow, I see little influence of recent British poets here. We like them but we are not diverted by them in more important work.

4.

No, I see no effect of the romanticism now prevalent, you say, in English poetry--here. BUT, influence or no influence, everyone who has read it is bowled over by Miss Edith Sitwell's recent work. And there you have it. Should we do anything more, after our unstinted enjoyment, than marvel at the work of this woman? And when we have done that should we not look about to see whether or not we have anything comparable in excellence to present here? And see our lack what more is there for us to do than to apply ourselves anew to our difficulties in order to try as we may to make of our own materials anything so successful and so fine. Much that is purely British has gone into the making of such work as Miss Sitwell has given us. What difference does it make that it is British or otherwise? It is magnificently realized, that is all that matters in the end; it arose in a certain place, out of that place--a thousand facets of English thought and history are revealed in it--but once it has fallen under wind it becomes universal and thus the place has at last immortalized itself. Much else could be said of Miss Sitwell's work--especially in the work of a woman in particular, as of what influence the work of other women have had on her, beginning with Sappho -- I think this is a subject concerning which we had better look to Homer for light.

Dear Whittemore:

I've got a subject, you write, that I don't know anything about. It may have been covered a lot before but it certainly should be covered right now in Furioso. Propaganda in Poetry. Poetry that tries to influence people. In other words, just what is the function of poetry? What has a poetry magazine to do with a war, with a country's policy, with a new bunch of quintuplets, etc? In publishing Furioso I think that's one of the things we've been trying to find out, and so far I haven't found out anything. Pound says that everything he's written has economic implications. Everything (nearly) that Genevieve Taggard writes says "better read Marx". In other words most of the modern poets _think_ they're pointing toward something which they believe is right. And I want to know if they've picked the right medium. Why not write an article for Liberty? My idea is that poetry deals with the generalities of human conduct, with questions that are important for more than ten minutes, with movements greater than the French occupation of the Saar Basin. Then all I can do is say, So what? I wonder what's the good of writing an article for Liberty either, except that we're still a neutral country. . . I've read several poems of yours that are precisely about what I'm trying to get at. etc. etc. - To all of this my answer would be, Yes.

2

Taggard may entertain certain concepts but these do not by
any stretch of the imagination make her a good writer. Pound, you
say, believes that all his writings have an economic implication. So,
by the way, does the peanut vendor at a bell game. It is obvious that
unless Pound's writings have other implication, the poetic quantum, he
would be of far less use to us as Pound than a lucid text on the sub-
ject he believes he is expounding, the lucid text he is always dream-
ing of. Should his concepts ever clarify themselves, that is to say,
his economic concepts, and he be able to transcribe them . . it
might be the end of him. Horrible thought.

Peter Cooper said a number of years ago, Exorbitant rent
(commonly called interest) silently but surely devours the substance
of the people. — I think this, in one sentence, says more succinctly
than Pound ever dreamed, everything he ever conceived of economics.
But Peter Cooper was not a poet. Pound is a poet, so we forgive him.

We all like to believe that we are master minds. But what
men seldom seem to learn is that the end of poetry is a poem; I don't
know a thing about the value of a poem as such or of a hunk of gold
as such or of a man himself as such but I do know *that*.

Some exposure to the sharp edge of the mechanics of living -
such as blindness, political exile, a commercial theatre to support
and be supported by, a profession out of necessity, dire poverty,
defiance of the law, insanity - is necessary to the poet. It doesn't
matter what the form is, these are all of a class, to give the poet
his sense of precision in the appreciation of values, what is com-
monly spoken of as "reality". They force him to observe and to

3

weigh, they prompt his choice of the means of expression and give
his words pungency and a charge. In themselves they have nothing
to do with poetry.

Notice clearly, this is the sole use of these focusing
stimulae; they are not in any way related to the poet's function
as a poet. He must know this without possibility of a doubt. The
end of poetry is something apart from all that.

A blind singer for bed and board, an altar thief, a starv-
ling - if they for one moment forget, prodded as they may be by
death, disease or economic pressures, that their work as poets is
completely alien to all that - if they permit themselves to be
caught in the snare of their own lives and let that affect their
decisions touching their workmanship in the faintest possible man-
ner - they are lost. It is a balance as to the push of reality's
either stimulating them to excellence or killing them outright -
but they must never forget that the real significance passes be-
yond such incidentals. It lies imbedded indestructably in the body
of the poem itself, if . . . !

This being true the poet who mistakes the function of the
propaganda he practices, taking it over-jealously to heart, is his
own dupe. Let's have no more jerked measures. To the poet it is
plain that all stimulae are and must be one, he is the Jesuit of
his own mind, the end always justifies the means if he produce a
good poem. But he must be more resourceful than all that, he must
still remain a Jesuit even in giving up the Church. No matter what
the propaganda and no matter how it touches him, it can be of no
concern to the poet. To hell with it as soon as he has finished
with it, when it's worn out he'll find some other propaganda.

4

Be the Shakespeare of your own day, write well, skilfully,
covertly, deceitfully, with every faculty under a hood or blanket
concealed from public view, write of that which is nearest to the
skin (to hell with the heart!) but write well.

So what, huh? After all, man being human must believe
himself at times a great conceptualist, (read your Spanish lit.:
"just savages" E.P.) at least for home consumption, or lie down and
die of disgust at the sights he sees about him. I don't blame any-
one for wanting to teach his fellows to "blow hard" when Papa wields
the rag. 's O.K. by me.

Then occasionally we get someone who can write. It's a
double entendre that goes something like this: