ABSTRACT
The Ripostes of Mr. Pound is the fourth book of his own verse that has come to me for review, and it seems to me an opportune moment to say a few words about Mr Pound's art, as a whole. La versification, said Marmontel, est une mosaïque dont il faut remplir le dessin. 1 It is a common error in England to suppose that poetry is versification, thus defined. Mr Pound's work is a vehement protest against this stupidity; he has sought to prove by example that poetry is, what its name implies, creation, and not the kindergarten art Marmontel thought it to be. Moreover, from the Personae to the Ripostes, there is evidence of a determination towards a mastery of his medium; he is one of the few people in this country who do care for poetry as an art, and not merely as an accident, or the lazy pleasure of expressing one's twopenny-halfpenny personality in the easiest possible manner. Mr Pound has served a long apprenticeship in the technics of his craft, and with the sapphics of 'Apparuit,' the 'free' rhythm of 'The Return' and 'Δώρια' (all in Ripostes), he has attained a skill in handling words that is astonishing to those who understand. The sapphics of 'Apparuit' and the alliterative verse translation from the Anglo-Saxon of the 'Seafarer' (also in Ripostes) complete his analysis of the development of the poetic art from the Middle Ages to the present which was begun in the Spirit of Romance, a prose work, and continued in the experiments in polyphonic rhyme of the Canzoni and in the translations from Arnaut Daniel, not yet published in book form. The book Canzoni (which, by the way, is a masterpiece of quiet, patient irony) contains five poems in forms never before attempted in English, the rhyme schemes of which had been considered too difficult for the language and incompatible with its genius. Nor must it be supposed that all this is a formal accomplishment merely; one does not get poetry into the shape of 'Δώρια,' for instance, or of 'The Return,' without the genuine impulse; no amount of clever shamming, or borrowed ornament, or mosaicism will produce the effect of a rhythm of this kind. Mr Pound has earned the right to put his poetry into any form he pleases; he has given his vers libre a solid basis in tradition, and may laugh at the critics. The laugh has all along been on his side. The vers libre was not, after all, invented by Whitman, nor even by Gustave Kahn,
