We've all gone terribly quiet, perhaps understandably.

May I break the silence with what is I hope an innocuous enquiry about the
allusion in the following line from I think Canto 74 (quoted from memory):

Beauty is difficult, Yeats, sd Mr Beardsley

Terrell is not awfully helpful, merely telling me (again from memory) that
Beardsley was a 19th century illustrator.

What were Yeats and Beardsley talking about, and how did Pound come to know
of their conversation?

The reason I ask is that the lines have become something of a touchstone for
the apologists of difficulty in modern poetry; whereas I think they may have
misunderstood what Beardsley was saying, which was that precisely *because*
"beauty is difficult" he didn't bother trying. He wasn't defending his art
on the ground that its beauty could only be appreciated by the initiated
few.

I'm sure I've read somewhere about the source of these lines but at the
moment I can't see where: it's not in Terrell, Cookson, Kenner, or Makin so
far as I can tell.

Richard Edwards
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