4pQonT

318 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
attack against the homestead. The nine-field system stimulated Lung
to say, 'Nothing better than share, nothing worse than a fixed tax,'
and it has been part of the Chinese mind for 3000 years."
In 1957, I informed Ezra by letter that I was starting a new
poetry magazine in Chicago. He responded with some advice on
October 31, 1957:
"Poetry of Kishago, Harriet's nose rag always DEAD cause
tried to separate poetry from language/ ONLY use for ploot mag
of poetry/ IF concentrated on meaning of words/ ploot COULD be
induced to print great literature /i/e/ Coke and Blackstone as
such. The Duke of Hamilton het up to reprint fine edtn/ Blackstone
"but nex think u know, is found stiff on floor of his club and
rushed to Swiss clinic/ unapproachable since then, must be 3
years ago
"that I never shd/ have seen Coke text till yester. is enough to
make me want to assassinate all the pore fat heads who participated
in giving me a better educ in 1902 than yu pore bastids can
get the tenth part of now after the spew deal and 50 year brain
wash."
Coke is one of Pound's more recent passions. He was notably
irritated because his educators did not refer him to the legal basis
of Anglo-Saxon civilization, but he overlooked the fact that they
probably would have referred him to it, if they had known about it.
Coke was a much more important influence on the framers of
the Constitution than was the Magna Carta, but scholars prefer
the Magna Carta because it is shorter and much easier to read
than the works of Coke. The ignorant public does not know that
most scholars are abominably lazy—the works of "history" that
they produce please everybody because they include so few facts,
and refer to so few sources. A genuine contribution to knowledge,
such as Dr. Pitirim Sorokin's brilliant thesis on the importance of
the contract in our economic and social structure, is ignored, although
he identifies (or perhaps because he identifies) the degeneration
of modern society with the erosion of contractual obligations
during the twentieth century by the advocates of Rousseau's
"social contract".
The references to "ploot" (plutocracy) in Ezra's letter were