I dunno, folks, but this quote sure sounds like elitist snobbery of the
highest order.  Perhaps snobbery elevated to the level of art?
Bill Wagner
 
Martin Knepper wrote:
>  
> Dear Cindy,
>  
> EP's 1914 rejection of the Whitman-taken motto of the Harriet Monroe
> Magazine 'Poetry' looks like a clue to me.
> The motto was 'To have great poets there must be great audiences too'
> and Pound argued against this by saying that 'the artist is not
> dependent upon the multitude of the listeners. Humanity is the rich
> effluvium, it is the waste, the manure and the soil, and from it grows
> the tree of the arts...This rabble, this multitude - does not create
> the great artist. They are aimless and drifting without him.' (Poetry
> Oct 1914)
>  
> The tree of the arts...
>  
> 'It was you that broke the new wood
> Now it is time for carving.
> We have one sap and one root
> Let there be commerce between us.'
> (Pact)
>  
> About this time - I do not know the exact date when he wrote this poem
> - he was working on his first, later rejected 3 Cantos, meaning he was
> leaving the highly densed (over?)aesthesised provençale miniatures
> reaching his peak of art as a writer of a long song of history and
> man's part in it.
> And poems like 'Ortus', 'Come my cantilations' or 'Salutation [1-3]'
> he wrote about this time ('I beseech you learn to say 'I'/...for you
> are no part, but a whole/No portion, but a being.') would not have
> been possible, I think, without his shocklike insight into the
> parallels between Whitman's and his own 'poetical mission' which among
> others creates a new and important persona for him: the preacher for
> the masses, a role he would have strictly rejected 1 or 2 years ago.
>  
> Just some unsorted ideas hope its a right trace.
> books used: Carpenter, A serious character (Life of EP)
> Personae in the bilingual german edition tr. E. Hesse
>  
> Love
> Martin