4pQonT

EZRA POUND 25
took me downtown, Polly triumphantly exclaimed, "I thought he
would like you!"
"How do you know?" I asked. "He didn't seem to pay much
attention to me."
"Oh yes," she said. "Why, he has given you your own day!" She
explained that this was quite unusual. Only a few of Pound's
friends were allowed a specific day of their own each week, and to
their knowledge, Pound had never extended this privilege to anyone
on his first visit.
I had first read Pound's Pisan Cantos because of the furor over
the Bollingen Prize in 1948, and from there I had gone on to the
earlier Cantos. Now that I felt the necessity of knowing more of
Pound's work, I found that this was not so easily done. Although
he had published some thirty volumes of verse and criticism during
the past four decades, they had been issued by obscure publishers
in small quantities and were not readily available. Fortunately, the
Library of Congress was at hand, but I discovered that nearly all
of his books were kept in the Rare Book Room. This was a rather
ornate room protected by velvet ropes, and the reader had to sign his
name in a ledger before being admitted. Once I began to order the
slender volumes of Pound's early work, I realized the precision and
the direction that had led so relentlessly to the form of the Cantos.
When I checked the listings of Pound in the guides to periodicals,
both in the United States and in England, I found many letters and
short articles that were not available in the collected volumes. A
letter that appears in The Nation of April 18, 1928, was of particular
interest. He characterized Henry Ford as the "epitome of the
American hired man." This struck me as a very apt summation.
Most of the great American fortunes had been founded by hired
men and tinkerers rather than by robber barons, as the scholars
who are so heavily subsidized by the Ford Foundation contend.
It was inevitable that the hired men should become easy marks for
professors and other confidence men, and that the hired men should
turn over their fortunes to these types so that the professors could
use this money to proclaim that the hired men were saps.
Pound's characterization of Ford as the American hired man
was an important revelation to me. It was the first time that I