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EZRA POUND 323
him as I have. It was only right that this knowledge should be used
to serve as his introduction to all those who wished to benefit by
his work. I was convinced that Pound, a necessary guide to students
of writing, needed a map so that newcomers to his thought could
steer their course into the Cantos through the Scyllae and Charybdae
of Imagism, Vorticism, and various other "isms", real or
imaginary, with which he is said to have been associated.
It was principally due to our conversations at the ward that I
had gone so deeply into his work, and I resolved to lay out a chart
of the essential Pound so that other students would not overlook
it. Few of his visitors had read the complete Pound, nor did he
expect it. It was a rare occasion when he directed some student to
read one of his books. He was always more interested in which he
termed the "agenda" than in his past work.
Many "literary" visitors who came out to the hospital with the
expectation that they would be treated to priceless reminiscences of
duels with Gaudier, lunches with Joyce and parties with McAlmon,
went away disappointed. Invariably, Ezra talked about his current
social, political and economic studies, the material of the Cantos.
If the visitor insisted on returning the conversation to these sightseeing
tours in the Bohemias of the past, Ezra would fall silent and
patiently gaze past the offender.
One of the few who succeeded in getting any anecdotes from
him was Virginia Moore, who included these stories in her biography
of William Butler Yeats. Others who brought up something
that Ezra had said four or five decades ago would brusquely be told,
"All that stuff is in my books. I'm too old to go over it again." But
he was never too old, or too tired, to discuss his current interests
for hours at a time.
He always remained on the alert for anything that one of his
"students" might turn up in additional researches, and at times,
there were four or five of us with permanent desks in the Library
of Congress as we carried out our assignments. These included the
entire works of Alexander Del Mar, Louis Agassiz, John Adams,
Thomas Jefferson, and, for those who could read German, Frobenius.
One of the weaknesses of present-day scholarship is the
practice of referring to only one or two volumes of the output of an
important thinker. We never went to an author without ordering his