VARIETY
This Is Yeats Speaking
T
HIS IS
William Butler Yeats. I
want to speak to my friends in
America about a thing which trou–
bles me even now, though I have
recovered leisure, and know more
than I did about structure, mathe–
matical and otherwise.
It is my friend Ezra Pound–
who has made so many beautiful
things. You Americans, you have
"him now on trial. I remember I
warned him once about politics,
not as you think, that we poets
should stay out of it, I said simply,
do not be elected to the Senate of
your country. I was thinking of
my own experience. I merely ob–
served, you and I are much out of
place as would
be
the first com–
posers of Sea-shanties in an age of
Steam.
I am not very interested in your
hysteria, or his. We of Ireland have
lived with treason long. It is not
as dramatic as Ezra thinks, he has
always been in these things as in so
much American, exterior, moral.
When he shouted, and now I hear
you shout, I stoop down and write
with my finger on the ground.
I do not know that any of us
of my generation, and few of yours
-I too a revolutionist-under–
stand the contraries which are now
engaged. William Blake observed
that oppositions do not make true
contraries.
It was our glory, Pound's and
mine, I except Eliot-tradition is
too organized with him, his uncer–
tainty before chaos leads him to
confuse authority with orthodoxy-
139
to reassert the claims of authority
in a world of whiggery. It is true
what Pound said, we men of the
mind do stand with the lovers of
order. We value it, with what labor
we purchase it in our work. We
opposed ourselves to a leveling,
rancorous, rational time.
What a man of Eliot's words
would call our sin was the oppo–
site of his. Willing as we were to
oppose and go forward, we did not
seek true contrary. Because of your
irascible mind, Pound, and because
my bones always took to comfort
like a retainer's, you were ever in
haste, and I sometimes, to think
these men who marched and
preached a new order-we of our
excitable profession are attracted
to sick men and buccaneers-had
taken that other chaos of men's
lives up in their hands, had worked
to master it as we do ours, and .
could shape what men now need,
rest, an end to this sea of question.
I understand this, at the distance
I have acquired, I have Troilus'
vantage, from the seventh sphere
to look back on Diomed and Cres–
sid both.
It was Pound's error to think,
because he was able to examine
with courage and criticize elo–
quently the world we have inher–
ited-Rapallo was a place to escape
the knots of passion, it was the
village in the Chinese poem to
which the official retired, inhabited
by old men devoted to the classics
-Pound thought this power, nec–
essary to us men who had to make
the language new, also gave him
