TLS, five pages, 9 x 11.5, personal Rapallo letterhead, March 26, 1927. Letter to English writer Sir Henry Newbolt. In part: “All right. I suppose a man ought to be allowed to put what he likes into his own anthology. I enclose ‘for separate filing’ the formal permission. All I wanted with the proposed footnote was to indicate the existence of another definite set of ‘values’; I mean a difference between those which you and Dr. Bridges and ‘men of good taste’ of a certain generation in England held and hold, and those that I, and another set of serious and sober-minded writers hold; as for the ‘next lot,’ chronologically later; ‘we’ doubt if they have any considered set of values whatsoever…
These lines are not to be taken with undue seriousness; As you say, any idea of technique, or just expression, or of the dignity of the gods, wd. seem to be in abeyance. I don’t however think they are ‘adventurous,’ ‘audacious,’ I think they (the neo-gentlemen whom you mention) are merely sloppy.
The Sitwell’s sun is set, Sigfried Sassoon / Rises o’er Britain like a pallid moon, / Cheeselike and bulging, while J. Squire pours / Unending hogwash through the semaphores….
When…recently I proposed to edit a free review I found no one who cd. send me any news of a cheerful nature re/ younger authors in England. I had a certain amount of correspondence; the one reason for publishing a poem (in fact the only reason offered for publishing ANY poems by the younger Britons, was that the author was himself an editor and cd. further the sale of ‘The Exile.’)
I am, as usual, incurably litigious. It appears to me that the state of England gets worse; and that my own writing improves. I am sending a fragment of a Canto (in No. 1. of the Exile) not that you can use a fragment in an anthology, or that the snippet is particularly comprehensible taken apart from its possible still more incomprehensible context.
I am also very longwinded. The American ‘Personae, or Collected Poems’ contains nothing that has not already appeared in England…My best work is, or ought to be, in the Cantos; that’s no use for an anthology, you don’t want passages from longer poems.
The same applies to the ‘Homage to Propertius’; the ‘Mauberley’ is not A.1. although it carries English poetry a step further than anyone else had done: both as to sheer technique within the line or short passage, or as to form and content of the whole…
It all depends on whether you aim in your anthology to give the reader an idea what the author’s work is like, and what its extent is; or whether you want to show that during a certain period certain poets have written things that conform to a certain standard…
You and Dr. Bridges like, or believe in, a certain orderly, chiseled, traditional language of verse. I began (La Fraisne etc.) with desire to say absolutely nothing the character wouldn’t have said. (I mean cutting off Browning’s explanations and expositions). I had a shot at formal, orderly expression, in Canzoni (& Ripostes) and then decided in favour of what seems to me a live language instead of a dead one.” Pound makes numerous corrections and additions throughout the text in his own hand. In very good condition.
Perfectly capturing Pound’s self-aggrandizing personality, this lengthy letter provides excellent insight about his opinion of modern poetry and its future. In addition to rattling off a virtual bibliography of his work, he discusses his newest project, a literary magazine called The Exile. Its first issue was released earlier in March to moderate success, but ultimately only four issues were published. Pre-certified PSA/DNA.
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