New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1933. Pp. 22; “From T. S. Eliot,” 16-17 1
I don’t think that the publication of Ezra’s Cantosin this country needs any word from me or from anybody else. It is rather an impertinence. There was a time when it did not seem unfitting for me to write a pamphlet, Ezra Pound, His Poetry and Metricbut Ezra was then known only to a few and I was so completely unknown that it seemed more decent that the pamphlet should appear anonymously. 2 I owe too much to Ezra to be a critic. (I wish that the manuscript of The Waste Landwith Ezra’s criticisms and still more important, his excisions, thank God he reduced a mess of some eight hundred lines to about half its size, might some day be exhumed. John Quinn had it. 3 As a masterpiece of critical literature.) I have preached the Cantosfor some years now to young practitioners as well as tried to tell them what I owed to Pound in London, Paris, Excideuil and Rapallo. 4 (It shall not all be told.) One result is that – I blame no one – my copy of the Cantoshad disappeared and I want them to be re-published so that I may have another copy. I find that, with the exception of Mauberley, there is no other contemporary – with disrespect for none, for I include myself – whom I ever want to re-read for pleasure. 5
