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EZRA POUND 281
sumptions, but not dissent for its own sake—dissent for the sake
of the ideal of order in men's lives."
Many American critics have been somewhat less enthusiastic.
Louise Bogan, poetry editor of The New Yorker, said, in reviewing
Section: Rock-Drill, in the issue of September 1, 1956, "At
present, Pound has no direct imitators. The contemporary generation
writing in English has learned from him, it is true; the
rules he formulated for the Imagists, more than forty years ago—
directness, naturalness, and precision—still hold. The actual form
of the Cantos, however, now seems slightly fossilized—praiseworthy
of note as origin and as process but with no truly invigorating
aspects."
Donald Stauffer said of the Cantos, in The Saturday Review,
March 22, 1947, "Pound's Cantos cannot win many readers because
the images and rhythm, faultless in themselves, are not
sufficiently attached to significant thought."
Perhaps the "significant thought" is not stated simply enough
for Mr. Stauffer, for it is certainly there. The clarity of this line,
which is repeated in Rock-Drill,
Our dynasty came in because of a great sensibility. 20
seems to escape this type of critic, to whom it is as incomprehensible
as the Chinese characters that accompany it.
Some of his critics like Pound's poetry but shrink from his crisp
style of literary criticism. Yet Horace Gregory, in reviewing
Pound's Literary Essays in the New York Times, July 4, 1954,
said of this book, "It represents a 'maker' of contemporary criticism
and if since 1900 a better book of its kind has been written,
the world has yet to learn of its publication."
Despite such enlightened criticism, his work still meets with
much of the same old "sour grapes" that have been his lot since
the beginning of his career. Robert Graves is typical of the "sour
grapes" school of criticism. He commented on Pound's revival of
Provençal poetry as follows:
"I don't claim to be an authority on Provençal, but Majorcan,
which my children talk most of the time, and which I understand,
is closely related to it. When my thirteen-year-old boy was asked