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EZRA POUND 79
for protracted periods, the result was often non-literary, and the
parting inevitable. What woman, after all, could watch this redmaned
rooster strutting about and still think logically about his
ideas? Consequently, his associations with lady writers and editors
degenerated into Strindbergian battles between the sexes, with
Pound achieving a series of Pyrrhic victories.
After having obtained possession of a suffragette publication,
which in itself was an ironic event, he could hardly have supposed
that he would be vulnerable to an attack from a female poetaster.
Yet this was the threat which now loomed on the horizon. Miss
Amy Lowell, wealthy, eccentric, cigar-smoking sister of the President
of Harvard College (of whom Oliver St. John Gogarty wrote,
"Dr. Lowell came to visit me wearing a frock coat and brown
shoes, and the brown shoes distracted me so that I cannot remember
what was said." 13 ), was on the high seas. She had been
a common, or garden variety, lady versifier until March, 1913,
when she spied Pound's Imagist principles in Poetry. She had
dashed off an Imagist poem, and set out for London. She arrived
there in the summer of 1913, armed with her contribution to the
Imagist movement and a letter of introduction from Miss Harriet
Monroe.
Pound was not impressed by Miss Lowell's Imagist poem, but
he charitably agreed to include it in the anthology he was then
compiling. The new recruit was soon chafing at the bit, and she
found an ally in John Gould Fletcher. Both Fletcher and Miss
Lowell were annoyed by Pound's brusque manner, and also by
his refusal to spend his time in that age-old amusement of poets,
that is, sitting down and reading their poems to one another. Pound
had no time to spend in listening to poets read their verse. He
usually snatched the manuscript from the hand of the genius,
glanced over it, scribbled a suggestion or two, blue-pencilling the
most soaring lines, and handed it back. What really sensitive soul
could bear such treatment?
Amy Lowell was seeking a sympathetic listener who could
appreciate her verse. She invited Fletcher to visit her in her
sumptuous suite at the Berkeley, and the two poets discovered
that they had much in common. They were accustomed to paying
their way, that is, footing the bills for the publication of their