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EZRA POUND 85
from attack. In reality, Pound has almost always been alone. His
furious activities as an unsalaried editor for various publications,
and his campaigns as an unpaid press agent for many talents over
a period of fifty years, would lead anyone to suppose that the
recipients of these favors necessarily would form a phalanx about
him. But this has never been the case. The editors of the periodicals
for whom he has toiled have always been glad to see him
ride off into the sunset, and the writers whom he has assisted,
when they were not to be found among his detractors, were
usually silent when he was attacked. His only "henchman" in his
career has been his wife, Dorothy Pound.
Amy Lowell had wrested a prize from Pound, the leadership
of the Imagist movement, but he did not consider it a loss. Indeed,
the young talents of the Imagistes had begun to bore him, and he
had sought more virile company. He found the Vorticists much
more stimulating.
His rival insisted on the spoils of her triumph. She banned his
name from her anthologies, but considering the quality of her selections,
this was of indirect benefit to Pound. She refused ever afterward
to mention him as a poet of consequence. In her long poem
A Critical Fable, an imitation of Byron's lambasting of his contemporaries,
she included Pound and Eliot as an afterthought. This
work, published in 1922, praised enthusiastically the poems of
Sandburg, Frost, H.D., Fletcher, and Hilda Conkling. Near the
end of the poem, as though performing a painful duty, she wrote,
Eliot fears to abandon an old masquerade;
Pound's one perfect happiness is to parade.
Eliot's learning was won at a very great price;
What Pound calls his learning he got in a trice.
Eliot knows what he knows, though he cannot digest it;
Pound knows nothing at all, but has frequently guessed it.
Eliot builds up his essays by a process of massing;
Pound's are mostly hot air, what the vulgar call 'gassing.'
Eliot lives like a snail in his shell, pen protruding;
Pound struts like a cock, self-adored, self-deluding . . . 22
The last line is an apt illustration of the effect that Pound had
upon lady poetasters. This poem continues its "Night Before