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282 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
to compare a Provençal text with Pound's translation, he laughed
and laughed and laughed."
This type of criticism might be passable at a literary tea, but
amazingly enough, it comprised part of a lecture that Graves
delivered at staid old Trinity College, England, and was one of
the supposedly scholarly Clark lectures given at that school. These
talks were published under the title of The Crowning Privilege
in 1955. One can only wonder how the faculty and students at
Trinity College received the news that Pound's poems had been
judged for all time by a thirteen-year-old boy who spoke a dialect
related to Provençal. It seems that literary criticism in England
has abandoned the sober scholarship of T. S. Eliot, and is now the
playground of thirteen-year-old boys.
Graves himself has always puttered about in the classical world
like an ancient country squire stalking about his garden. His
standards of criticism, depending as they do upon the intellectual
support of a much younger generation, leave much to be desired.
Pound ignores such snide approaches to his work. After all,
scholars like Robert Graves use their intellects as most men use
their stomachs, that is, to digest things for which they have a
preference. They react with acute indigestion when attempting to
absorb something that is not part of their regular diet. It is not
out of place to observe that such scholars practice a sort of intellectual
nudism, and parade about in the world of ideas clothed
only in their ignorance. The spectacle is not a classical one.
Ezra has been sustained all these years against this type of
critic by what may best be described as insouciance. In Blast, in
1914, he announced that he was going to be around for a long
time, much to the dismay of his enemies. He entitled this declaration
"Salutation the Third":
LET us deride the smugness of "The Times":
GUFFAW!
So much for the gagged reviewers,
It will pay them when the worms are wriggling in
their vitals;
These are they who objected to newness,
Here are their tomb-stones.