III
        In 1932, Ezra Pound published in Milan, under the imprint of John
Scheiwiller, an anthology-with-commentary of British and American
poetry from Arthur Symons through the work of the New Masses poets.
This anthology, titled Profile and carrying as a sub-title "An
Anthology Collected in MCMXXI," was intended as a guide to the new
English-language poetry for Italian readers.  Issued in an edition of
only 300 copies and never subsequently reprinted, Profile has received
virtually no attention from Pound's biographers or critics. But Profile
seems to me an interesting and important work in several respects.
First, it represents Pound's most systematic effort to assemble an
anthology, not of the poetic "tradition" in the broadest sense (From
Confucius to Cummings claims that role), but of what Pound saw in 1931
as some defining texts of the symbolist-imagist-vorticist tradition
within which he himself was writing. Des Imagistes had offered a
cross-section of the poets working in this tradition, circa 1913, but
Profile offers a considered retrospective survey of the "new
Anglo-American" poetry, over a twenty year period. In this respect the
selections from Symons, Colum, Joyce, "Carlos Williams," Ford Madox
Ford, Hulme, H.D., Aldington, Yeats, Eliot, Moore, Loy, and Cummings
are of considerable interest to anyone who wants to understand what
Pound thought of the work of his immediate predecessors and his closest
literary associates. But Profile is also of interest for its attempt to
trace the development of the Anglo-American avant-garde into the work
of a new generation of poets that was emerging in the 1920s. During the
1930s and thereafter, Pound's increasing concern with economic and
political issues diverted his attention away from poetry; and in the
1940s and 1950s, while younger poets like Olson, Creeley, and Blackburn
made pilgrimages to St. Elizabeths, Pound showed little interest in
their work. But in 1931, for the last time in his career, he still read
with sympathy the work of younger poets, and he still saw himself as
the arbiter of "the new" in poetry.  In this respect Pound s decision
to allocate six pages each to Louis Zukofsky and Basil Bunting seems
remarkably percipient.  Archibald MacLeish is here too, but he receives
only three pages.  Further, the five pages that Emanuel Carnevali
receives, the seven pages given to a selection from Joseph Gordon
MacLeod's The Ecliptic, and the poem by Parker Tyler all suggest that
these writers might deserve fuller attention.
        But I am here especially interested in the thirteen pages of
selections from the New Masses with which Pound's anthology ends. Why
was Pound drawn to New Masses? Writing in Pagany in 1931, Pound
indicated that he was interested in any journal which recognized that
"Literature does not exist in a vacuum.  My commendation of 'Morada'
was largely due to Morada's seeming to be aware of literature as part
of the general and social existence" (EPPP V 263).  The principle that
Pound here articulates guided him, as Michael Coyle has argued,
throughout his literary career; and Coyle has described at some length
(121-47) the rush of popularizing "ABCs" and "Guides" in which Pound,
especially during the 1930s, gave voice to his concern for "the general
and social existence." Immediately after his commendation of Morada,
Pound goes on to express some reservations about New Masses: "The New
Masses group seems rather in need of a declaration analogous to
Mussolini's remark: Possession of a Fascist membership card does not
confer literary genius on the holder" (EPPP V 263).  Clearly, Pound was
at least mildly put off by the Party-line dogmatism of New Masses.
Nevertheless, it also seems apparent that Pound was attracted to the
insistence of all the Left journals of the period, including New
Masses, that literature is inseparably intertwined with "general and
social existence." He also shared the conviction of these journals that
conditions in the United States called for a "revolution," although he
gave his own twist to this term: "I see no need for a revolution in the
mere forms and mechanism of American (U.S.A.) govt. I see many reasons
for a social and intellectual revolution" (EPPPCP V: 274).   In 1930,
writing at some length about Mike Gold and New Masses in Morada itself,
Pound declares that "The communist party in America small as it is is
certainly to be prized above rubies and above Argentine bonds; it at
any rate believes something better could exist and is vociferously
aware of certain defects in the general organism" (EPPPCP V: 258). At
the same time, Pound characteristically complains about the refusal of
the Communists to "understand economics."  With respect to Mike Gold
himself, Pound praises "Mr Gold's 'Jews Without Money'" as "a distinct
contribution to 'the subject,'" although he also makes clear that he is
unhappy about Gold's refusal to see the light on Mussolini: "Mr Gold is
infinitely better at realism about New York, which he knows, than in
legends from Italy" (EPPPPC V: 256).
        In Pound's comments on New Masses, I detect a perhaps slightly wistful
desire to point the way for this new generation of writers, combined
with a certain uneasiness about what these people might be up to.
Pound, by his own testimony, courted New Masses assiduously. Writing to
Contempo in late 1931, he complains that "The New Masses suppresses me
with more vigor than the more allegedly conservative organs.  If you
can dig out the typescripts I have sent them during the past years
invited and uninvited you will have enough for several issues of your
journal" (EPPPCP V: 319).  Here are some young, brashly rebellious
young people who refuse to pay attention to "grampa" or who pay
attention only at times.  The torch of "revolution" is passing to a new
generation, and Pound feels some ambivalence about the change.  The
thirteen pages of selections from New Masses in Profile represents, I
would argue, Pound's attempt to come to terms with this new generation;
and he does so primarily by declaring that here is something new and
potentially intriguing, something distinctively different from the
"new" of his own generation.
In introducing his selections from New Masses, Pound suggests that the
poetry of this new generation has in some way moved beyond the
individualism of his own generation:
I have been for some time under the impression that almost every number
of the New Masses contained at least one good poem, class poetry, the
personal authorship of which did not matter.  e. g. I never remembered
which poem was by which author.  There seemed to be a general content
with a certain drive.  In going back over such issues of New Masses as
I still posses (sic), I find it rather difficult to gather enough
material to <<participate my impression to others>>.  A great deal of
the New Masses verse seems to be merely the art poetry or the arty
poetry of young intelligentzia trying to manifest sympathy with a
party.  This, I take it, is because poetry is not greatly concerned
with what a man thinks; but with what is so imbedded in his nature that
it never occurs to him to question it; not a matter of which idea he
holds but of the depth at which he holds it. (Profile 129-30)
An "arty" poetry, driven by ideas even, perhaps, ideology rather than
by the total selfhood of the poet: about such a poetry Pound has some
misgivings.  (Do I hear an echo of Yeats, a frequent visitor to Rapallo
during the years around 1930?) But a poetry almost anonymous, a poetry
that issues not from individual "geniuses" but rather speaks as the
voice of a "class" this may be, Pound suggests, something new and
intriguing.
        After his introductory comments, Pound prints "FOUR POEMS FROM THE NEW
MASSES 1930-1931." Two of these come from the collections of "poems by
working class poets" that the journal regularly published.  Here are
some sections from "Blood and Iron":
Have you ever caught a red hot chip
Somewhere between the navel and the lip?
Did you lose an eye when a piece of steel
Flew from the goddamned emery wheel?
                  ....................
Did the pulley lathe chatter and turn
And the miller grunt and stew
Because the mandrel was out of true?
If you can answer "yes" to these questions,
                Then you are, Bo, since you insist,
                A sometime lousy machinist. (130)
Of this four-poem sequence, Pound wryly comments, "I don't know that
these poems can be regarded as more rebellious than Orrick Johns' <<I
knew my father well and he was a fool>>; or as having more
revolutionary passion than that displayed by a man called, I think,
Arturo Giovanitti along about 1913" (133). Pound then gives us a longer
and more distinctly "literary" text titled "3 or 4 American Heroes,"
which shows some evidence of the influence of Pound or perhaps of
Pound's 1930s-epoch imitator, Archibald MacLeish. There are, Pound says
"good men in the group" of New Masses writers. Once again he singles
out Mike Gold for special praise, although he does not print any of
Gold's work: "Mike Gold's prose stands by itself" (135). But Pound's
emphasis throughout these selections is on the presumed anonymity of
these writers.  The editor identifies the authors only at the end: H.J.
Krier (our machinist), James A. Miller, Bob Brown, Russac, and Horace
Gregory author of the "American Heroes" poem (136).  And these poets,
he cautions us, are best read as a group, not as individual writers: "a
good deal of the New Masses poetry is better taken in sympathetic
context than separate" (135-6) unlike, we may presume, the work of such
poets as Eliot, Williams, and Pound himself.
        Pound's insistence on the "anonymity" of these poets seems a little
exaggerated.  There is, for instance, a clear difference between the
insistently "working class" idiom of Krier and the late-modernist idiom
of Gregory.  Furthermore, Gregory certainly developed a voice of his
own, and Bob Brown became one of the most consistently experimental if
still, largely unrecognized writers of the epoch.  But Pound is riding
a thesis, and he is clearly pleased to find, in Gellert's collections
of folk songs, a confirmation of that thesis.  "Along with poems
virtually anonymous," he declares, "the group has printed actual songs
of the negro to which no individual authorship can be assigned" (136).
And Pound follows this statement with a sequence of selections from
Gellert's three collections, eight poems or six pages in all the same
amount of space as he gives to the "virtually anonymous" poems
discussed above.
Pound's treatment of this material is, to say the least, a little
careless.  In three instances Pound leaves out several stanzas of the
poems he selects.  Of course, our editor may simply be exercising the
collagist's privilege to cut and paste, but I suspect carelessness: in
all three cases the gap comes at a point where we move from one column
to another of the original text, and I cannot but think that perhaps
Pound was snipping clippings to give to the printer and simply didn't
notice that the song began on or was continued on an adjacent column.
While such behavior suggests a certain failure to respect the integrity
of these texts (there's no identifiable artist here, and so no one to
protest such mistreatment), I am also impressed by Pound's
determination to minimize the differences between these "folk" texts
and "literature."   Pound strips away Gellert's commentary, to give us
simply the songs themselves, as a numbered sequence.  The implied
distinction between the anthropological data that Gellert sees himself
as collecting and "literature" with worker's poetry as perhaps an
intermediary category thus disappears. All is art OR is evidence about
the "general or social existence," depending on your preference.  All
is (almost) equally anonymous.  And if anonymity is the goal, a poetry
that will speak for and to "the masses" rather than the individual,
then the actual anonymity of the "Negro songs" seems in fact preferable
to the lingering artiness of the self-proclaimed "proletarian"
writers who claim to speak for a class, but who still insist on signing
their work.  In these recognitions, Pound has, I think, not only
brought into focus some contradictions in the whole "Proletarian
Literature" project but has also, by suggesting what a truly "mass" art
might look like, gone decisively beyond the New Masses group itself.
        I also suspect that Pound was impressed by the sharp imagery and
precise diction of these songs:
White folks eat de apple
Nigger wait fo' core  (136)
Or
De Lawd make preacher
big an' fat
Sleek an' shiny
Lak a beaver hat  (137)
Along with phanopoeia, the songs offer melopoeia, in the form, first,
of crisp, hard driving rhythms and precisely tempered vowel modulations:
Cawn pone, fat meat
All ah eber git to eat
Better'n ah gits at home
Better'n ah gits at home (138)
We also get long, serpentine rhythms, syncopated by carefully placed
caesuras:
Trouble neber lyin' dead on de bottom, dis heah Worl'
Ev'ythin' you cain' see shinin, ain' no gol'

Walkin' 'longside de track, hungry an' wantin' to eat
Dog dead tired, shoes wore out, burnin' blistern on mah feet (139)
And Pound also found here wit aplenty, or logopoeia:
White man go to ribber
Couldn't get 'cross
Jump on top de nigger's back
Thought he was a horse

Nigger say to white man
Ah has on'y two legs jes' lak you
A'n' fo' ah lets you ride me
Ah has to grow de odder two (138)
What did Pound find in these anonymous songs?  In a word, he found
poetry.