“How often does the wild-bloom smell Over the mountained city reach To hold the tawny boys in spell Or wake the aching girls to speech? The clouds that drift across the sea And drift across the jagged line Of mist-enshrouded masonry— Hast thou forgotten these are thine? That drift across the jagged line Which you, my people, reared and built To be a temple and a shrine For gods of iron and of gilt— Aye, these are thine to heal thy heart, To give thee back the thrill of Youth, To seek therein the gold of Art, And seek the broken shapes of Truth.” The same Orrick Johns wrote this blatant bit of free verse in _Poetry_ a few months later. Both the paucity of ideas and the enlarged ego are very well shown here: No man shall ever read me, For I bring about in a gesture what they cannot fathom in a life; Yet I tell Bob and Harry and Bill— It costs me nothing to be kind; If I am a generous adversary, be not deceived, neither be devoted— It is because I despise you. Yet if any man claim to be my peer I shall meet him, For that man has an insolence that I like; I am beholden to him. I know the lightning when I see it, And the toad when I see it ... I warn all pretenders. But to see the tendencies of which we have spoken in their most exaggerated form it is necessary to go to Ezra Pound, the young self-expatriated American who wails because “that ass, my country, has not employed me.” His earlier work was clean-cut, sensitive poetry, some of it very beautiful. This for example: PICCADILLY Beautiful, tragical faces, Ye that were whole, and are so sunken; And, O ye vile, ye that might have been loved, That are so sodden and drunken, Who hath forgotten you? O wistful, fragile faces, few out of many! The gross, the coarse, the brazen, God knows I cannot pity them, perhaps, as I should do, But, oh, ye delicate, wistful faces, Who hath forgotten you? This, from _Blast_, the new English quarterly, is the latest from the same hand. The capitals are his own. The contrast needs no comment: SALUTATION THE THIRD Let us deride the smugness of “The Times”: GUFFAW! So much the gagged reviewers, It will pay them when the worms are wriggling in their vitals; These were they who objected to newness, HERE are their TOMB-STONES. They supported the gag and the ring: A little black BOX contains them. SO shall you be also, You slut-bellied obstructionist, You sworn foe to free speech and good letters, You fungus, you continuous gangrene. * * * * *