This issue is very similar to the last one. Mostly it is
continuations of earlier columns. I’ll probably make this one quick.
Pound quote-of-the-month: “Irritation with the general
asininity is a passion common enough in great minds, and sufficiently
pardonable to the intelligent, but it is not, after all, the highest of human
emotions. And scorn, which is a very fine thing indeed, is not the one thing
essential."
That’s from his review of the French poet Jammes—who I must
look up and read, if only for the ticklish vertigo of Pound’s declaration that “a
man reading Jammes about A.D. 2500 might get a fair idea of our life, the life
of A.D. 1913.” Ghostly prospective archive!
Pound made me think of Walter Benjamin again with this one: “Jammes’ work resembles the Musee du Louvre
more than the Acropolis; but after all, the highest symbols of national desire
and of our present civilization are our great picture galleries.” Reminds me of Henry James’ Adam Verver stocking a museum in “The Golden Bowl.""
In “Readers and Writers” Orage explains that The New Age is being boycotted by the
other journals because it is too critical. Paranoia? Truth? “I find it
necessary to state that I am not complaining on behalf of this journal.”
The best thing in the whole issue? The caricature of Ezra
Pound on the last page.
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