4pQonT

EZRA POUND 63
"In putting his principles into practice, to use 'a speech so
natural and dramatic that the hearer would feel the presence of a
man thinking and feeling:' Yeats had signal assistance from Ezra
Pound. Pound had breezed into London in 1908, confident and full
of information about obscure literature, persuaded that Yeats was
the best poet writing in English, but that his manner was out of date.
The poet must be a modern man, he must be clear and precise, he
must eliminate all abstractions and all words which sense did not
justify as well as sound. Everything must be hard and concrete, a
statement of Ezra Pound, not a musical composition by Debussy.
"Pound himself was a very mixed personality," says Ellmann.
"His instincts, as he once remarked, were to write in the manner
of the 1890's, but he curbed and scorned them. He was now very
much the man of the new movement, the organizer, busy from the
time of his arrival in separating both living and dead poets into the
readable and the unreadable. His strong prejudices were directed
partly against all that seemed to him stodgy, such as the poetry of
Wordsworth, and on one occasion he is said to have challenged a
reviewer on the Times to a duel for having too high an opinion of
Milton. Pound and Yeats got along well from the first, with the
younger man assuming towards the older a mixed attitude of
admiration and patronage. 'Uncle William,' as he called him, was
making good progress but still dragging some of the reeds of the
90's in his hair. Pound set himself the task of converting Yeats to
the modern movement, and had many opportunities from 1912 to
1916 to apply pressure. In 1912 he impudently altered without
permission some poems which Yeats had given him to send to
Poetry Magazine; Yeats was infuriated but then forgave him. During
the winters of 1913-14, 1914-15, and 1915-16, Pound acted
as Yeats' secretary in a small cottage in Ashdam Forest in Sussex,
reading to him, writing from his dictation, and discussing everything.
It was Pound who, knowing that Yeats had spent six or seven
years trying to write the Player Queen as a tragedy, suggested that
it be made into a comedy, with such effect that Yeats completely
transformed the play at once. At Ashdam Forest, Pound would
have liked to read contemporary literature to Yeats, but Yeats insisted
on Sordello and Morris' Sagas. Pound would frequently urge
Yeats to make changes in words or lines so as to get further away