You have really said a good deal and diagnosed the trouble with nearly all the art
and literature of the past thirty years.
I ought – precisely – to have written ‘Propertius soliloquizes’ – turning the
reader’s attention to the reality of Propertius – but no – what I do is borrow a
term – aesthetic – a term of aestheticattitudefrom a french [sic] musician,
Debussy...
I ought to have concentrated on the subject – (I did so long as I forgot my
existence for the sake of the lines) – and I tack on a title relating to the treatment
- in a fit of nerves – fearing the reader won’t sufficiently see the super-position[,]
the doubling of me and Propertius, England to-day and Rome under Augustus.^57
Or as one of Pound’s letters to a young poet later yelled, Hardy’s
success came from his single-minded focus on ‘CONTENT, the
INSIDES, the SUBJECT-MATTER’.^58 It is perhaps only another version
of his insistence on direct treatment of the thing, of directing all one’s
mental faculties onto the ‘what’ rather than the ‘how’. But by allowing a
separation of the poem’s content from the deliberate ‘concentrated’
mental treatment of it, Pound unwittingly diagnoses the problem with
the aestheticist and symbolist doctrines which justified their art by iden-
tifying exactly those two things, and whose insistence that the mental
impression was being directly transcribed had underwritten so much
modernist formal innovation, and so much criticism of everybody else’s
‘rhetoric’.^59 By admitting Hardy’s un-Paterian division between treatment
and subject, Pound has effectively hamstrung a good deal of his own
earlier criticism. Or perhaps this is what is being tacitly acknowledged in
the single sentence at the top of the first page, apparently disconnected
from the rest of the letter: ‘“Good,” “Bon,” “Bonto,” or very probably
“Uugh” as Jacob said when the angel finally blessed him.’
Hardy’s indifference 181