4pQonT

86 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
Xmas" rhythm with several other references to the men whom
she hated. She said of Pound and Eliot, "Each one is a traitor, but
with different reasons." 23
This was an interesting prediction, for
Eliot would later be attacked for giving up his American citizenship,
and Pound would actually be indicted for treason.
Miss Lowell did include one grudging line of tribute to Pound
in A Critical Fable. She wrote of him,
Few men have to their credit more excellent verses. 24
In a long letter written on July 7, 1923, to May Lamberton
Becker, listing the contemporary American poets whom she considered
worthwhile, Miss Lowell listed a dozen or so whom she
considered pre-eminent, including such names as Maxwell Bodenheim,
but she did not mention Pound. 25
In reviewing Pound's association with the Imagist poets, Eliot
wrote in 1946, "If it had not been for the work that Pound did in
the years of which I have been talking, the isolation of American
poetry, and the isolation of individual American poets, might have
continued for a long time. I am not forgetting Miss Lowell, but it
seems to me that the work she did in putting over American poetry
upon an American public, was on a lower level. She was a kind
of demon saleswoman; and unless my memory of her methods is at
fault (for it is a great many years since I read her Six American
Poets) they were more enthusiastic than critical. If today it is a
matter of course that London should take an interest in poetry
published in New York and that New York should be interested in
poetry published in London—not simply in the decorated reputations,
but in the new verse—this is largely due to what Pound
achieved for poetry." 26
Pound now dubbed his former movement "Amygism". To
parody what it had become in the hands of female versifiers, he
wrote a satirical piece entitled "Papyrus", which is here reproduced
in full:
Spring. . . .
Too long . . .
Gongula. . . . 27