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EZRA POUND 69
These lines conclude Pound's great soliloquy (Yeats has remarked
that all that is great in modern literature is soliloquy) in
which he examines his past career to see if he has committed the
sin of vanity.
Yeats provided a roast peacock as his contribution to the Blunt
festivities. Although Masefield was unable to be present, the others
enjoyed themselves, and ate heartily. Most of them had two helpings
of the peacock, which had been brought before them in full
plumage, and when that was gone, Blunt had a roast beef for them.
The press had been notified by the specialist in public relations,
Pound, that the award was to be presented to Blunt, and the occasion
caused widespread public indignation. Blunt was then as controversial
a figure as Pound is today, and the poets were denounced
when they returned to London. The Times quoted one critic as saying,
"A man at the Foreign Office says he will never speak to any of
those men again." 22
Pound's association with Yeats produced a phrase that critics
have been using ever since, the "later Yeats". Hart Crane, in a
letter to Allen Tate, May 16, 1922, says that he has read and
admired Yeats, "the later poems," he adds. 23
Douglas Goldring,
who knew both Pound and Yeats well, has written, "The 'later
Yeats', who is now so universally admired, was unmistakably influenced
by Pound." 24
It was the "later Yeats" who received the Nobel Prize in 1923.
There have been many critical judgments on the effect of Pound's
onslaught against the complacency of the "Collected Yeats" of
1908. T. R. Henn says, "Pound's mind and talk offered many
things; pity for the underdog; a studied violence of language; an
attempt to combine classical pattern and form in the intensity of
the last Romantics." 25
Although Pound has never referred to any assistance that he may
have been able to render Yeats, the contribution has not gone
unnoticed. The distinguished poet Valentine Ironmonger has suggested,
in a letter to The Irish Times, November 3, 1952, that no
better use of a Yeats Memorial Fund could be made than to turn it
over to Ezra Pound, so that he could live out his last years in any
place of his choosing, and in the comfort he has earned.