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