A Recantation
admission from the house-top. He is healthy, he is ardent for anybody's clever verbal shift that adds a new trick to the stock of expression, he is fertile in new tricks himself, and he is learned in the originals of literature of other lands besides our sandy one. At least he is more learned than I am. He knows things I want to know. I envy him a little, but I begrudge him nothing, because what he has and knows he has the knack of shipping in an open package without the aid of refrigeration or injurious preservatives. What his secret is I know not, but it is the informing breath of all literature that lives.
I once wrote you a letter about Pound that I thought was clever. I remember one of my gems was a comment on a batch of his poems in Poetry as "the scrapings of his palette." Well, I say now to myself then, what if they were the scrapings of his palette—if the colors were such as I had never used before, nor heard of! I don't know how to use them now, hut I am trying to, which is to my credit, I believe. As I expect to make a success of it, I hasten to acknowledge my debt freely and in admiration.
I may still reserve an opinion that he prints too much, but I am not sure that is not a feeling somewhat mixed with envy. His worst stuff (as I see it) at least shows a healthy enthusiasm for his own experiments, and the allowable exasperation of a brave artist who, on looking up from his lonely and exhausting task, meets the stupid indifference of superficial people. In all the years I have been humming pretty tunes to myself and calling them poetry, he has been
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