ABSTRACT
This record of a poet's dealings with his time is full of appropriate acerbity, expressed with an economy which is disdainful. Mr. Pound for some time now has been reduced to throwing his gifts at the heads of his generation; he has made sure beforehand that the bourgeoisie would not applaud, dreading their approbation, justly, more than their resentment. There is no doubt that he is right; it may be, too, that Philistia is more deeply wounded by something which puzzles it than by something which hits it palpably. One could still wish, however, that the condemnation of our age which is implicitly damning in this book had been explicitly so. The result would have been more illuminating, if not to the Philistines themselves, then to their enemies, who would thus have been strengthened. Mr. Pound's H. S. Mauberley is cryptic, one feels, out of pride, and out of courtesy for the few who will listen to him—a courtesy which takes the form, almost unique in our time, of not assuming that the listener is such a dunce that everything needs to be explained to him. It is a kindness which will not be appreciated simply because it will not be seen, for reading has become a special branch of laziness.
