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