MR. EZRA POUND AS METRICIST.—Under the title of _Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry_, a whole book—really, however, only an essay—has been devoted to the work of this literary enigma. For this honour, if honour it be, Mr. Pound is indebted more to what he has preached than to what he has practised; for on his actual achievement, considerable though it is, not even in America could anybody have been found to write a book. Mr. Pound will not deny that he is an American in this respect, if in none other, that he always likes to hitch his wagon to a star. He has always a ton of precept for a pound of example. And in America, more than in any other country save, perhaps, Germany, it appears to be required of a man that there shall be “significant” intention, aim, theory—anything you like expressive of direction—in everything he does. There does not appear to me to be anything _very_ original in the creation of poetic images, or even in the employment of irregular metric; neither of them can be said to constitute a new departure in poetic technique. Yet Mr. Pound has elevated each of them to be the star of a cult, with the consequence that we now have professed “schools” of poetry, calling themselves Imagist or Verslibrist. These are examples of what I mean in saying that Mr. Pound loves to hitch his wagon to a star. It must be admitted that this habit of Mr. Pound has its good as well as its somewhat absurd side; there is only a step from the ridiculous to the sublime. It must also be affirmed, however it may reflect upon our English critics, that it is precisely the good side of Mr. Pound’s technique which they usually condemn. For the good side consists of this, that all the poets who can claim to belong to the school of Mr. Pound must display in addition to the above-mentioned defects, the certain and positive merits of study of their art and deliberate craftsmanship. No poet dare claim to be a pupil of Mr. Pound who cannot prove that he has been to school to poetry, and submitted himself to a craft-apprenticeship; and no poet will long command Mr. Pound’s approval who is not always learning and experimenting. Now this, which I call the good side of Mr. Pound’s doctrine, is disliked in England, where it has for years been the habit of critics to pretend that poetry grows on bushes or in parsley-beds. That poetry should be the practice of “a learned, self-conscious craft,” to be carried on by a “guild of adepts,” appears to Mr. Archer, for example, to be a heresy of the first order. How much of the best poetry, he exclaims, has been written with “little technical study behind it”; and how little necessary, therefore, any previous learning is. To the dogs with Mr. Pound’s doctrine! Let the motto over the gates of the Temple of Poetry be: “No previous experience required.” It will be seen, of course, how the confusion in Mr. Archer’s mind has arisen. Because it is a fact that the “best” poetry looks