Nikolay Nikiforov asks about Pound and Emerson.

In addition to the excerpt from the Cantos cited by Carrol Cox, there's "Dr
Williams' Position" (LITERARY ESSAYS OF EP, p. 389 ff.), which fits into a
number of discussions we've had recently, about Pound's "bholidigal
basshunts."
Tim Romano


       " [....] At any rate he [Wm. Carlos Williams] has not in his
ancestral endocrines the arid curse of
our nation.   None of his immediate forbears burnt witches in Salem,
or attended assemblies for producing prohibitions. His father was n
the rum trade; the rich ichors of the Indies, Hollands, Jamaicas,
Goldwasser, Curaocas [sic] provided the infant William with material
sustenance.  Spanish was not a strange tongue, and the trade profited
by discrimination, by dissociations performed with the palate. All of
which belongs to an American yesterday, and is as gone as les caves
de Moquin.
    From this secure ingle William Carlos was able to look out of his
circumjacence and see it as something interesting _but exterior_ ; and he
could not by any possibility resemble any member of the Concorc
School.  He was able to observe national phenomena without
necessity for constant vigilance over himself, there was no instinctive
fear that if he forgot himself he might be like some really unpleasant
Ralph Waldo; neither is he, apparently, filled with any vivid desire
to murder the indescribable dastards who betray the work of the
national founders, who spread the fish-hooks of bureaucracy in our
once, perhaps, pleasant bypaths."
       One might accuse him of being, blessedly, the observant foreigner,
perceiving American vegetation and landscape quite directly, as
something put there for him to look at; and his contemplative habit
extends, also blessedly, to the fauna.
    When Mr. Wanamaker's picture gallery burned in the dead of
winter, I was able to observe the destruction of faked Van Dykes, etc.,
_comme spectacle_, the muffler'd lads of the village tearing down gold
frames in the light of the conflagration, the onyx-topped tables
against the blackness were still more 'tableau' and one could think
detachedly of the French Revolution. Mr Wanamaker was nothing
to me, he paid his employees badly, and I knew the actual spectacle
was all I should ever get out of him. I cannot, on the other hand,
observe the nation befouled by Volsteads and Bryans, without anger;
I cannot see liberties that have lasted for a century thrown away for
nothing, for worse than nothing, for slop; frontiers tied up by an
imbecile bureaucracy exceeding 'anything known in Russia under
the Czars' *    without indignation. [...]

* Pound's note: "This comparison to Russia is not mine, but comes
from a Czarist official who had been stationed in Washington."