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EZRA POUND 197
and Italy, but your writings are known wherever English is read.
Your feet have trodden paths, however, where the great reading
public could give you few followers—into Provençal and Italian
poetry, into Anglo-Saxon and Chinese. From all of these excursions
you have brought back treasure. Your translations from the
Chinese, for example, led one of the most gifted of contemporary
poets (Eliot) to call you the inventor of Chinese poetry for our
time. Your Alma Mater, however, is an old lady who has not
always understood where you were going, but she has watched you
with interest and pride if not always with understanding. The larger
public has also been at times amazed at your political and economic
as well as your artistic credo, and you have retaliated by
making yourself—not unintentionally perhaps—their gadfly. Your
range of interests is immense, and whether or not your theories of
society survive, your name is permanently linked with the development
of English poetry in the 20th century. Your reputation is
international, you have guided many poets into new paths, you
have pointed new directions, and the historian of the future in
tracing the development of your growing mind will inevitably, we
are happy to think, be led to Hamilton and to the influence of your
college teachers. You have ever been a generous champion of
younger writers as well as artists in other fields, and for this fine
and rare human quality and for your own achievements in poetry
and prose, we honor you."
Archibald MacLeish wrote an article about Pound which appeared
in The Atlantic Monthly of June, 1939, and Pound had
some interesting talks with him about literary matters, but he was
not, at this juncture, much interested in literature. He had developed
his ideas to the extent that he believed he could present
them convincingly to his countrymen, and he hoped that by convincing
them, he could avert the outbreak of the Second World
War, or failing that, at least persuade the United States to keep
out of it, and thus confine the conflagration to Europe. This was as
vain and quixotic an undertaking as Ford's Peace Ship had been
during the First World War, but this kind of optimism runs in the
American grain. Some day, perhaps, Pound will be honored for this
effort.