4pQonT

176 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
In continuation of his stark philosophy of the later years—a sort
of Greek bareness of rocks and sea, such as we find in the plays of
John Millington Synge—Yeats wrote in one of his essays of the
1930s, "I think that profound philosophy must come from terror.
An abyss opens under our feet; inherited conventions, the presuppositions
of our thoughts, those Fathers of the Church Johnson
expounded, drop into the abyss. Whether we will or no we must
ask the ancient questions; Is there reality anywhere? Is there a
God? Is there a Soul? We cry with the Indian Sacred Book: 'They
put a golden stopper into the neck of the bottle: pull it! Let out
reality!' " 25
Despite his growing tolerance of terror, Yeats still found Ezra's
poetry too much for him. He wrote to Dorothy Wellesley on
September 8, 1935, "I'm tired, I have spent the day reading Ezra
Pound for the Anthology—a single strained attitude instead of
passion, the sexless American professor for all his violence." 26
The anthology was The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, published
in 1937. Yeats included Pound's "River Merchant's Wife",
"Canto XVII", and excerpts from the Propertius poem.
The talks between Yeats and Pound at Rapallo must have been
enormously interesting for them both. Each was secure in his reputation,
and could afford to speak frankly. The relationship was no
longer that of master and disciple, of Europe learning from
America, or vice versa.
Ezra quotes Yeats in the Cantos, "Nothing affects these people /
Except our conversation." 27
Certainly this communion of minds
was fraught with all sorts of possibilities. Even today, two and a
half billion people wait in fear of those two or three minds, now
active, who will sooner or later inaugurate a new and an even
bloodier struggle, by bringing forth a New Idea!
Ezra should not cavil at the revenge that the gods have wreaked
on him, for he has done great damage to their hitherto secure
Olympus. The mind of man is a force as violent as anything to be
found in nature, and is not civilization too but an idea, the manifestation
of man's idea of himself? Ah, protests Sadie Wetwash
(better known in the peerage as Lady Hailstone) from the rear
of the room, "Is not civilization really God's idea of man?" We