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60 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
gave Yeats "a hell of a bawling out" for some of his archaisms, and
that Yeats turned over his manuscripts to Pound for correction. 5
The second letter was written to Richard Eberhart, October 23,
1953. When they first met in London, Yeats asked for Ezra's
opinion of his poetry. "Ezra was forced to say that he admired them
greatly, as was the truth, but that they were marred by a deforming
inversion of the phrase which was deplorable. Yeats at once set
about correcting the defect and worked diligently at it for several
years." 6
There may be some over-emphasis in Williams' phrase "bawling
out", but there is little doubt that with one swoop, the hawk,
Pound, brought Yeats down into the modern world.
John Butler Yeats wrote to his son on February 11, 1911,
"Quinn met him [Pound] and liked him very much. The Americans,
young literary men whom I know, find him surly, supercilious
and grumpy. I liked him myself very much, that is, I liked his look
and air, and the few things he said, for tho' I was a good while in
his company, he said very little." 7
Yeats' desire to bring poetry back to the common people
prompted him to take rooms at 18 Woburn Buildings, in a rather
dangerous neighborhood in London. He no longer frequented the
Rhymers' Club at the Cheshire Cheese, but met his friends at his
"evenings". Not only did the "common people" show no interest in
poetry, but Yeats' visitors objected to traveling through the slum
area. As the months went by without incident, they mastered their
fears, and Yeats enjoyed a goodly company.
John Masefield, who was a regular at Yeats' "Mondays", has
described the quarters as they were in 1910, when Pound was in
attendance. The rooms were decorated in a somber range of blues
and browns. The walls were hung with engravings by William
Blake, with two large portraits of Yeats by his father, and a painting
of Sligo Harbor by his brother Jack, which bore the title
"Memory". Against one wall stood a blue wooden lectern, which
supported, between two giant candles, the Kelmscott Press Chaucer.
A dark high wooden settle jutted out some five feet into the room,
with shelves of books behind it. At the opposite wall was a red
earthenware tobacco jar, with an embossed design of writhing black