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62 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
is the best critic of the two. He is full of the middle ages and helps
me to get back to the definite and concrete away from modern abstractions.
To talk over a poem with him is like getting you to put
a sentence into dialect. All becomes clear and natural. Yet in his
own work he is very uncertain, often very bad though very interesting
sometimes. He spoils himself by too many experiments and has
more sound principles than taste." 10
Norman Jeffares, in his biography of Yeats, describes the initial
impact of Pound upon Yeats' work, during 1913, the first of the
three winters that Pound spent as Yeats' secretary:
"A bitter note underlies the strangeness of some poems which
Yeats wrote at the time, notably 'The Three Beggars,' 'The Three
Hermits,' 'Running to Paradise,' and 'The Hour Before Dawn'—
These are written in a style which seems Yeats' imitation of Synge,
and perhaps too by the influence of Pound's vitality and mockery.
They are at once remote and humourous poems, a strange combination.
'The Three Hermits' was written at Stone Cottage, March 15,
1913, where he had settled for the autumn with Ezra Pound, who
had become an intimate friend, and spent the two following winters
with him there. Pound read aloud to him when his eyes were bad,
and taught him to fence. 'I sometimes fence for a half hour before
the day's end, and when I close my eyes upon the pillow I see a
foil before me, the button to my face,' Yeats wrote of this rather
trying period, in his 'Essays.'
"His health was bad," continues Jeffares, "and affected his
spirits; in fact he became aware that he was fifty . . . Pound's
effect upon his poetry was to make it harsher and more outspoken,
says Mrs. William Butler Yeats. For instance, 'The Scholars' was
originally written, under Pound's influence, in 1915 in a harsher
vein than the final version, toned down when Pound was not there
to protest." 11
Jeffares also mentions another important element in the association
of Yeats and Pound, "the 'Noh' drama of Japan, to which
Ezra Pound had introduced him. He found these plays an incentive
to return to an early ideal of recreating the Irish scenery he loved
by means of an art form." 12
Richard Ellmann, in Yeats: The Man and the Mask, also has paid
lengthy tribute to Pound's influence: