The Egoist, Feb 16 1914

The Egoist does not disappoint. This issue, again, has a lot of great content.

Most notable (besides the continuation of Portrait) might be Pound's contribution, "The New Sculpture," a futurist manifesto (or very close kin) about the immanent takeover of the world by an artistic aristocracy. This is the first manifestation of angry-Pound I have encountered, which is a pretty significant centennial. Up to this point, he's been content to adopt a superior attitude that was predicated on distance and quotation. Now, he's yelling: "Modern civilisation has bred a race with brains like those of rabbits and we who are the heirs of the witch-doctor and the voodoo, we artists who have been so long the despised are about to take over control" (68).

Pound attacks Greek art and the psychological-realistic novel. This points to a deep fissure between his outlook and that of Richard Aldington. Aldington reviews de Gourmont and Conrad: his review of Conrad's Chance makes a distinction between Conrad's adventure tales and this more-psychological text. Aldington draws a comparison to Lawrence Sterne, praising the novel's long flashback. Fractures.

Amy Lowell contributes imagist poems of the John Gould Fletcher genre, with added weight of morals. Some, though, are quite good: the rhythmic play of "The Pike" is nice. The weirdest and best, though, is "The Precinct. Rochester." It's a portrait of a Roman wall at Rochester cathedral, and fits best the Egoistic worldview: "People who say:/ They are dead, we live !/ The world is for the living."/ Fools ! It is always the dead who breed." (69).

The editors continue their attack on ideas, this time through a perverse reading of the decalogue.

Correspondence contains a couple interesting letters: one on the normalcy of the sex drive, in women in particular. It takes an anti-suffrage turn.

Another unfavorably compares The Egoist to The Freewoman, because The Egoist has become obsessed with "art" instead of life.

Dissatisfying post... must get on, though.