4pQonT

184 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
voice of the race, which wells up from its historic consciousness
like the tones of a Delphic oracle.
Prose is, like architecture, a frozen music, and a final expression
of a people, whereas poetry is international, because it can more
readily employ rhythms from other races. The difference in the
authoritative forward movement of the sentence may be perceived,
by those who have the ear for it, in the statement "Prose is, like
architecture, a frozen music." Compare this, for sound, with the
manner in which most writers would render this sentence: "Prose,
like architecture, is a frozen music." The juxtaposition of "Prose"
and "is" sounds a monolithic overtone, whereas the second and
more conventional rendering is merely conversational in tone.
As a poet, Pound could burst all the bonds of poetry (in
reality, he returned it to more basic melodies which had been
weakened by fatty degeneration) with his Imagist Manifesto of
1912, by demanding that the poet compose to the musical phrase,
rather than to the metronome. Yet long ago, he went beyond that
manifesto. The later Cantos are composed to the musical phrase
of the idea, so that he may be termed the first poet of the Space
Age.
Iris Barry remarked, in The Bookman, October, 1931, that
"Pound himself is invisible, and, save for his own poetry, comparatively
inaudible nowadays. He pontificates rarely, has few disciples,
as though in the immense effort of his from 1912-1919 he
had done all that (had in truth done more than) could be expected
of anyone and were glad of the years from thirty-five onward to
till his own plot."
Pound was not as invisible as Miss Barry supposed, for he was
carrying on his accustomed vast correspondence. In July, 1931, he
wrote to Hound and Horn: "Life wd. have been (in my case) much
less interesting if I had waited until Joyce, Lewis, D. H. Lawrence
etc. complied with what my taste was in 1908. Oh HELL, how
shall I put it. My son, elucidate thine own bloody point of view, by
its contrast to others, not by trying to make the others conform."
This is quite a plea for tolerance, but it is one which is beyond
the capabilities of most editors or readers.
In recognition of Pound's services to the editors of little magazines,
Gorham Munson wrote in The Saturday Review of Litera-