T. S. Eliot
LETTERS TO EZRA POUND
MS
Yale
2 February [1915]
Merton College, Oxford
My dear Pound,
I am very glad to hear from you
1 ,
and it is certainly very kind
of you to make these efforts
2
on my behalf. I enclose a copy of the
Lady,3 which seems cruder and awkwarder and more juvenile every
time I copy it. The only
efH'ieftment
enhancement which time has
brought is the fact that by this time there are two or three other
ladies who, if it is ever printed, may vie for the honour of having sat
for it.
It
will please you, I hope, to hear that I had a Christmas card
from the lady,
4-
bearing the "ringing greetings of friend to friend at
this season of high festival".
It
seems like old times....
I have been reading some of your work lately. I enjoyed the ar–
ticle on the Vortex
5
(please tell me who Kandinsky
6
is). I distrust
and detest Aesthetics, when it cuts loose from the Object, and
vapours in the void, but you have not done that. The closer one keeps
to the Artist's discussion of his technique the better, I think, and the
only kind of art worth talking about is the art one happens to like.
There can be no contemplative or easychair aesthetics, I think; only
1.
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
(1885-1972),
American poet and critic. TSE had
called on him at 5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington, on
22
September
1914,
with an introduction from Conrad Aiken.
2. Above these smudged words TSE added 'excuse tea' which he had spilt on them.
3. 'Portrait of a Lady'.
4. Miss Adeleine Moffatt, the subject of the poem, lived behind the State House in
Boston and invited selected Harvard undergraduates to tea. During a visit to Lon–
don in
1927
she asked the Eliots to dine, offering 'a modest choice of dates to
sacrifice yourselves on the altar of New England', but they were away.
5.
'Affirmations ... II . Vorticism',
New Age,
XVI, ii
(14
January
1915), 277-8.
6.
Wassily Kandinsky
(1886-1944),
Russian painter and writer on art; a founder of
the abstract movement.
Editor's Note: Excerpted from
The Letters of
T.
S.
Eliot. Volume I.
1898-1922,
edited
by Valerie Eliot. Copyright
<C
1988
by S.E.T. Copyrights. Published by Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
