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PARTISAN REVIEW
ignorant of what Adams is talking about or the situation in which he is
involved ." Stock, following Kenner, quotes two passages without com–
ment. The fact is that Kenner's commentary on the six lines comprised in
these two passages amounts to the only specific explication given
to
the
Adams cantos since their appearance. Kenner wrote as follows:
When we read in Canto LXII,
"Routledge was elegant
'said nothing not hackneyed six months before'
wrote J.A.
to
his wife,"
it is less important
to
know who Routledge was and what he talked
about than
to
apprehend the quality and energy of John Adams'
critical mind. Impatience of platitude and exact knowledge of what
was
hackneyed six months before are qualities sufficiently rare
10
statesmen
to
justify the chisel-cut effected by these lines.
Now let us see just what kinds of instruction in Adams's character, in
American history, and in poetics the Poundians have imbibed from the
Adams cantos. Line one: the characterization of Routledge-actually Ed–
ward
Rutledge-is
not by Adams. Line two: "Said nothing not hackneyed
six months before" does not refer to Rutledge. Line three: the quoted
remark did not appear in a letter by Adams "ro his wife . " Three lines, three
errors.
In the first line Adams is referring to the greatest speech of his career:
that delivered on July 2, 1776 in defense of the Declaration of Indepen–
denLe . Self-deprecatingly, he wrote to his friend Samuel Chase that in this
speech he had been neither eloquent nor original: he had merely sum–
marized the six-month old hackneyed arguments in favor ofIndependence.
In contrast, Rutledge of South Carolina was "described by Patrick Henry as
the most elegant speaker in the first congress."
How can Pound, and in turn the Poundians, have so garbled this
significant but easily grasped moment in American history? Did Pound
experience difficulty in interpreting his "historical documents" ? Not at all.
For he was quoting entirely from volume I of the
Works o/john Adams,
and
this volume consists of a biography of Adams by his grandson, Charles
Francis Adams. It is Charles Francis, in fact, who has quoted and "jux–
taposed" Patrick Henry 's observation on Rutledge with Adams's observa–
tion on his own speech in the letter
to
Chase . Only a man in a frenzy of
solipsism could succeed in garbling Charles Francis Adams's straightfor–
ward presentation of this comparison. But
to
bestow on Pound's misquota–
tion the dignity ofcalling it garbled would be to suggest that an intellectual
.;
r
