[Perhaps it’s because none of us considers this war a legitimate or an interesting subject for Art, not being the focal point of any fundamental emotion for any of the peoples engaged in it. Revolutions and civil wars are different ... but that is a long story. There never has been a real revolution yet: peoples have revoluted but they have never seemed to hold on to what they have fought for. By the time the revolution gets to be history they are back behind where they started, staggering under the same kind of burdens. They are really hunch-backs, but they think that which bends their backs can be unloaded. And civil wars, whatever their pretext, seem always to be the fight of the self-righteous uncultivated against the cultivated and the suave. I am not writing this as a “scholar of history.” I am just wandering on when I don’t very much want to. At least I do feel strongly that nine tenths of the stuff written is a rotten impertinence to be discouraged. Some reviewers call these efforts “deeply touching and of poignant appeal”. Consider the morbid deadliness of the U-Boat and then this poem:— You are a U-Boat you, You’re number 23, U-Boat you’re after me U-Boat this is not war, U-Boat you make me sore. There are three stanzas supporting this chorus which are a matter of abnormal crime. And this is the effort of a woman educated in one of the best colleges in the country.—_jh._] To “jh” Israel Solon, New York: I see in your last issue: “After reading your article ‘Push-Face’ in your June number I have torn the magazine to pieces and burned it in the fire. You may discontinue my subscription”. We would destroy you instead of falling upon his face for the one red moment you tendered him. What is one to say to this? Life would be hard to bear were it not that of this all life is made, by this all life destroyed. Louise Gebhard Cann, Seattle: ... Mr. Pound’s swashbuckling always sets me to crying, with my eye on the needy American public. “Encore! Encore!” But I am not tempted to reread him, except for the purpose of looking up in the dictionary the novel words he uses. However, since reading his Dialogue in the June _Little Review_, I have reversed my opinion; for I shall read that excellent chat between the student and Rabelais twice as many times as I read any one of John Davidson’s “Tête-à-têtes”. I intended to interject quite parenthetically before that no one who conscientiously reads the author of “Jodindranath Mawhwor’s Occupation” can fail to develop a vocabulary; and since the art of writing is the art of words,—that, given language, inevitably formal literature arises,—Mr. Pound is a high-pressure manufacturer of literature-matrix. The May number was certainly an achievement,—the sort of thing we’re hungry for; but we missed “_jh_”.