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Your poems in the April Poetry are so mockingly, so
delicately, so unblushingly beautiful that you seem to have
brought back into the world a grace which (probably) never
existed, but which we discover by an imaginative process in
Horace and Catullus.

It was a true insight to ally Pound to the Latin, not to the Greek poets.

Certain of the poems in “Lustra” have offended admirers of the verse of the “Personae” period. When a poet alters or develops, many of his admirers are sure to drop off. Any poet, if he is to survive as a writer beyond his twenty-fifth year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express. This is disconcerting to that public which likes a poet to spin his whole work out of the feelings of his youth; which likes to be able to open a new volume of his poems with the assurance that they will be able to approach it exactly as they approached the preceding. They do not like that constant readjustment which the following of Mr. Pound’s work demands. Thus has “Lustra” been a disappointment to some; though it manifests no falling off in technique, and no impoverishment of feeling. Some of the poems (including several of the “Contemporanea”) are a more direct statement of views than Pound’s verse had ever given before. Of these poems, M. Jean de Bosschere writes:

Everywhere his poems incite man to exist, to profess a
becoming egotism, without which there can be no real
altruism.

I beseech you enter your life.
I beseech you learn to say “I”
When I question you.
For you are no part, but a whole;
No portion, but a being.

… One must be capable of reacting to stimuli for a moment,
as a real, live person, even in face of as much of one’s own
powers as are arrayed against one;… The virile complaint,
the revolt of the poet, all which shows his emotion,–that
is poetry.

Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.

Be against all forms of oppression,
Go out and defy opinion.

This is the old cry of the poet, but more precise, as an expression of frank disgust:

Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family.
O, how hideous it is
To see three generations of one house gathered together!
It is like an old tree without shoots,
And with some branches rotted and falling.

Each poem holds out these cries of revolt or disgust, but they are the result of his still hoping and feeling:

Let us take arms against this sea of stupidities. Pound …
has experience of the folly of the Philistines who read his
verse. Real pain is born of this stupid interpretation, and
one does not realize how deep it is unless one can feel,
through the ejaculations and the laughter, what has caused
these wounds, which are made deeper by what he knows, and
what he has lost….

The tone, which is at once jocund and keen, is one of
Pound’s qualities. Ovid, Catullus–he does not disown them.
He only uses these accents for his familiars; with the
others he is on the edge of paradox, pamphleteering, indeed
of abuse….

This is the proper approach to the poems at the beginning of “Lustra,” and to the short epigrams, which some readers find “pointless,” or certainly “not poetry.” They should read, then, the “Dance Figure,” or “Near Perigord,” and remember that all these poems come out of the same man.

Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark;
Thy face as a river with lights.

White as an almond are thy shoulders;
As new almonds stripped from the husk.