T.S. Eliot once suggested that the life of the mind depended upon three hundred people or so. Like many of Eliot’s remarks, the interest of this one depends less on the information it purports to contain than on the effect it can be counted on to produce. If you quote it, you will observe an instantaneous auto-taxonomy, which is like a saliva test only less messy. Your respondent will first decide, almost instantaneously, whether he would be one of the three hundred, or one of the rest. Usually he will be one of the rest, and in that case his next impulse is the interesting one. For either he will concede that a tiny creative minority safeguards by its deeds and its discourse our claim to be civilized, or else he will be very angry with Eliot for presuming to make such a snobbish remark. In the latter case, once you have him quieted down, you can try the effect of offering to enlarge the magic number—to five hundred, say, or five thousand, or to a number as large as the subscription list of the New York Review of Books. Still, you will be unlikely to placate him, because you will have touched off an equality jag, from which it takes time to get detoxified. If you are patient, though, you can probably get him to designate some individual whose creativity is not worth discussing, in which case of course it follows that the percentage of effectively creative people must be something less than one hundred. If you have pressed things that far you are sure to be accused of bad taste. You may also smoke out several hidden premises, one of which is likely to be that he regards himself as a member of the creative minority, only he feels sure that he is not part of the group Eliot was thinking of.
It is clear that part of the difficulty of this subject is the way it gets entangled in passion. For surely, if we can preserve a little detachment, one connection at least between creativity and inequality is too evident to require stating. We discuss creativity because we notice it, we notice it because it stands out from the average, creative people stand out because they are different, hence men considered in that regard are unequal. Sometimes they even act unequal, as when they state that they are in the minority. Ezra Pound in 1922 wrote his old Pennsylvania professor Felix E. Schelling to ask why Schelling had accused him of posing:
If I am unlike other people, how is it a pose? Isn’t it merely common honesty? There are twelve or more vols. to prove some slight biological variant between me and the other ex-Penn ’05 or ex-seminarists. Isn’t it nearly time that one allowed me the honesty of never having pretended to be otherwise?1
What civilization is left, he went on to say, “is exiled, driven in catacombs, exists in the isolated individual, who occasionally meets one other with a scrap of it concealed in his person or his study.” This seemed wrong to Pound, and one day he rebuked the grand old lady of classical studies, Edith Hamilton. She had heard of a great Confucian who wrote a letter such that only one other man in all China could understand it. “That is not very democratic, I’m afraid. That is aristocratic, like you, Mr. Pound.’’
To which Pound, “But it is democratic as long as it provides that any one may have the opportunity to learn enough to read that letter.”2
Which brings us round to the tricky word, “opportunity.” Let me first summarize my assumptions. I assume, what seems obvious, that any idea we dignify by the adjective “creative” somehow stands out from the common processes of intellection; that there exist certain individuals in whose minds such ideas—if ideas is what they are: “events” might be better—occur rather frequently; that these individuals are different enough from the rest of us to make meaningful some pondering of human inequality; that they constitute a kind of natural resource; and that consequently we want to know what we can about how they are fostered and cared for. And just here we are apt to encounter the doctrinaire advocate of equality. He is supple and resourceful. Though he does not deny that men are in some respects unequal, he does not give up talking of equality. Only now he says that he wants circumstances to be equal, so that precious inequalities may have a chance of showing themselves. Surveying the blackboard jungle at P.S. 109, he is apt to muse like Gray in the country graveyard:
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.
It was Eliot, identifying what he called “The Mute Inglorious Milton Dogma,” who observed that against the possible loss of an unfulfilled Milton, Gray had bidden us weigh our escape from some guilty Cromwell. Unequal opportunity may repress all sorts of phenomena, which is not a reason for valuing it but at least a reason for doubting that its opposite would generate the New Jerusalem. Eliot also reflected that it might be embarrassing to have a great many Miltons and Shakespeares; but “that danger,” he said, “is remote.”3
Let me take one further formulation from Eliot:
The Equality of Opportunity dogma, which is associated with the belief that superiority is always superiority of intellect, that some infallible method can be devised for the detection of intellect, and that a system can be devised which will infallibly nourish it, derives emotional reinforcement from belief in the mute inglorious Milton. This myth assumes that a great deal of first-rate ability—not merely ability, but genius—is being wasted for lack of education; or, alternatively, that if even one potential Milton has been suppressed in the course of centuries, from deprivation of formal teaching, it is still worth-while to turn our education topsy-turvy so that it may not happen again.
Eliot’s statement of the dogmatist’s premises will bear repetition: “that superiority is always superiority of intellect, that some infallible method can be devised for the detection of intellect, and that a system can be devised that will infallibly nourish it.” England’s “11+” examination, which purports to sort out candidates for intellectual nourishment from youngsters only fit to be taught a trade, is a formal implementation of such premises. Whether it presupposes congenital inequality, or rather, as I suspect, elementary teaching of so abysmal a quality that by adolescence substantial numbers of its products are fit only for the slag-heap, this system surely claims to be rendering England a service in segregating the superior children for more of the kind of education they have survived so far. (It seems worthwhile to note in passing that when you have directed a large part of the population to trade schools, you have tacitly promised them a living when they emerge, and that when they strike later because their jobs will not feed them you are poorly situated to argue.)
How few creators came out of literacy factories! There is even evidence that they may have been bad for the potentially creative.
But I am interested in what happens to those superior intellects. I shall not trouble to observe that in the years since the “11+” system was introduced England has not been exactly jumping with Miltons. Perhaps Miltons are not what she requires at this juncture, and for all I know she may be getting what she requires. I am simply going to draw a couple of distinctions, and then proceed to argue that there may be nothing worse for the potentially creative mind than being given the opportunities we are apt to suppose it requires.
The distinctions are simple ones, and need not detain us. The first is simply the obvious distinction between affording opportunities and installing a system of filters which manifests nothing more than the judgment of the experts who operate it. An opportunity which some test score forbids you to avail yourself of is no opportunity at all. The other distinction, easier to intuit than to define, is that between creativity and intelligence: between a Milton, say, and a highly literate person (which Milton also was). Pound’s reply to Edith Hamilton postulated opportunity for anyone to learn enough to read a difficult text. He did not imply that all citizens should be forced to acquire that learning, and he also did not imply that whoever had acquired it would then be qualified to incur the world’s gratitude, for instance by writing a Paradise Lost. There are things you can teach and also things you can not, not even if the appetite of the learner is very strong. For centuries the British public schools demonstrated that one thing that could be taught was the way of writing verse in Latin. I do not remember ever seeing it claimed that one line of this verse would be worth anybody’s reading.
How few creators, in fact, came out of those literacy factories! There is even evidence that they may have been bad for the potentially creative. Coleridge and Anthony Trollope, to name two, both left memoirs which tend to suggest that the education they received was in many ways something to be recovered from, like smallpox which makes you forever immune to smallpox, but is a wasteful way of gaining that immunity. It seems probable that if we could in some way detect a potential Milton, and then rush to his aid with all our resources, we should almost certainly ruin his potential for being a Milton, though he might make quite an acceptable department head.
The simplest reason for thinking so is that creativity is always disruptive, whereas opportunities once someone sets out to provide them have a way of turning into bodies of regulations we are cautioned against disrupting. When I say that creativity is disruptive I do not mean only that Beethoven was quarrelsome, nor even that music could never be the same after Beethoven, though the latter is part of what I mean. Rather I want to suggest that the most intimate process of creating entails a disruption, since otherwise the creative act could be arrived at by the formulae we know already.
Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation has described a process he calls “bisociation,” and noted that it resembles the process by which men make jokes. Bisociation is uniting what custom forbids us to unite. If Newton had been content to leave the apple in its usual category, a botanical object, and the moon in its usual category, an astronomical object, he would not have arrived at universal gravitation. Instead he “bisociated” moon and apple, seeing them as they had never been seen before, in a single category, that of bodies possessing mass. It was a kind of punning, or a kind of rhyming, as when Eliot joined “come and go” with “Michelangelo” in a way no one who has heard it has ever forgotten. We may posit that Eliot was paying idle attention to the sound of Michelangelo’s name, which is not a topic for art historians and would probably annoy a teacher, much as Newton was attending to the apple’s mass, which is not a topic for botanists and would seem perfectly idle to a farmer. And subsequently something happened, a creative event, which drew on varied resources of knowledge, Eliot’s or Newton’s, in a way that demands our close attention lest the curious license at the heart of the creative act be confused with ignorance. There are always people who suppose that the less they know the freer their minds are to create.
Unhappily just at this point the biographer of Eliot or Newton has to guess, which is apt to render the analysis suspect. So I shall leave them temporarily and give you an example from my own experience. Such minor instances of creativity as I have experienced I can at least talk about with some confidence, and my narrative may solicit confirmation by recalling to you experiences of your own.
A few weeks ago I was preparing a paper on rhyme, and examining the practice of the Provençal poets who devoted some three successive generations to exploring what nuances might be extracted from a limited stock of rhymes, used over and over: for instance flor, cor, amor, doussor—flower, heart, love, sweetness. Since I am not only not a Provençal expert but was writing for a lecture audience that would probably contain none, I kept repeating the meanings of the four words just as I have done now—flower, heart, love, sweetness—whenever I had occasion to rehearse the list. And it suddenly occurred to me that I was writing, again and again “heart” next to “flower”—Hallmark greeting cards. That leap to greeting cards was what Koestler would call the bisociative instant. And almost simultaneously I realized that it was not a joke at all but historically explicable. For as Provençal faded its tradition moved into Italy, to be incorporated by Petrarch and others into the vogue of the newfangled sonnet. One of the witty conventions of the sonnet was to explicate and justify with reasons the clusters of imagery that it employed, and these sonnets by the hundred were translated into English, and many more were imitated in England, rehearsing and rehearsing fanciful reasons why a flower, for instance, should be mentioned in the same breath as a heart; so that what had been clusters of Provençal rhymes became clusters of English poetic commonplaces. Which means that hearts go with flowers because the two words rhymed in Provençal.
It is very much like a joke. I believe careful study would show that it is true. And as far as I know it has never been proposed before, so whether true or not it answers to at least a minimum definition of a creative insight.
To transform this kind of bright idea into a tract of responsible history would require some rather routine labor which I have not gotten around to commencing. That kind of labor can even be assigned to someone else, and I am frequently told that that is what research assistants are for, though I have never mastered the knack of programming one. What interests me just now, though, is where the bright idea itself came from. It did not come out of total ignorance. As a student of English literature, I know as a matter of course that the imagery of Elizabethan poems tended to be imported from Italy, by translation and imitation. And some years ago, because a different job demanded it, I had occasion to work through a number of Provençal poems, learning just enough of the language to follow them, and noticing the evident fact that the troubadours had clusters of preferred rhymes on which they specialized their attention. I also knew, because a colleague once told me, that much troubadour poetry was at Petrarch’s command, and supplied him with images, the same images the Elizabethans imported into England. And I have said that I was writing a lecture on rhyme, which naturally involved the troubadours because they were the first systematic exploiters of rhyme in Europe. I had even suggested, earlier in my paper, that rhymes tend to suggest ideas to poets, quite as often as they help them perfect the expression of ideas they have already. But the idea that the greeting-card industry, after seven hundred years, is still exploiting notions that were suggested by rhymes in a tongue long obsolete was certainly not anything I had expected to come upon, let alone part of the information I had when I started. It was especially not the kind of idea that would occur to a specialist whose education had laid out before him all the extant learning in Romance philology, if only because the more expertly you are thinking about Romance philology the less likely you are to permit the Hallmark Company to pop into your thoughts. In fact it was precisely my lack of equality with that specialist that permitted me to have so unspecialized a notion.
This seems a very slight incident on which to base a plea for nonuniformity. I am quite aware, moreover, that nonuniformity and inequality are not the same thing. But it seems to be of diagnostic interest, so much does it resemble what we can find out about more distinguished instances of creativity, when we can learn anything about them at all. And the pertinence of nonuniformity to our topic is at any rate easy to demonstrate. The tacit if not the formal aim of educators is to get everyone in the classroom to believe the same thing, whether that the revolution commenced in 1776, which purports to be a fact, or that words mean what the dictionary says they do, which has the status of a categorical proposition. (It is possible, by the way, to doubt both statements; John Adams said the revolution began in the minds of the people, as much as fifteen years before Lexington.) Now insofar as the educator achieves his objective—insofar, in short, as everyone remains content with the adequacy of what he has learned—the kind of event we call “creative” is unlikely if not impossible. If on the other hand, like an up-to-date fellow, he strives to leave the impression that nothing is known for sure, creativity will again be unlikely, for want of sufficient pressure of information to fill the crack that opens in one of those bisociative moments.
The young Einstein came to doubt the adequacy of classical physics, which is a way of saying that his educators failed to convince him irrevocably of certain categorical propositions. Men have doubted such things before Einstein, in part through not having learned them very well. Pound has an entertaining account of an American crank discoursing of non-Newtonian matter:
By the lawn of the senior elder
He continued his ambulation:
“Matter is the lightest of all things,
“Chaff, rolled into balls, tossed, whirled in the aether,
“Undoubtedly crushed by the weight,
“Light also proceeds from the eye;
“In the globe over my head
“Twenty feet in diameter, thirty feet in diameter
“Glassy, the glaring surface—
“There are many reflections
“So that one may watch them turning and moving
“With heads now down and now up.”
He went on toward the amateur student of minerals
That later went bankrupt;
He went on past the house of the local funny man,
Jo Tyson that had a camera. His daughter was bow-legged
And married the assembly-man’s son. . . .4
This fellow, called Lusty Juventus, is unlikely to alter our view of the universe. The young Einstein on the other hand possessed quantities of classroom information he could not have done without. In particular, he could not have formulated his subtle dissent from classical theories if he had not known very clearly what the classical theories were. The fact—certified by his biographers—that Einstein deeply resented his teachers and their methods is pertinent but need not be romanticized. It tells us only that the connection between education and enforced uniformity was painfully engrained in his mind, so that later it was easier for him to doubt part (but only part) of what they taught him.
We may speculate, though, that if some helpful expert had been at hand to confront the six-year-old Einstein with a battery of tests, and had discerned the direction in which his talents lay, we might still be in ignorance of mass and energy. For the next step would have been to secure for the boy the best possible teaching in mathematics and physics, not from the tyrants at the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich but from the kind of teacher of whom most of us remember at least one. And the ideal fulfilment of such teaching would have been to turn him into a highly accomplished mathematician and physicist according to the most approved models, unlikely to disturb the repose of this colleagues by pondering such foolish questions as what a beam of light would look like if you were travelling as fast as it did. One can imagine, in short, the creativity being educated right out of Einstein by the teaching his talents deserved. One can also imagine the delight of the man who ran the tests, at having helped rescue from potential oblivion a mute inglorious associate professor.
One can imagine. There is no way to know. Experiment can tell us nothing about unique cases, which have by definition no control group. We can only say that in his life as he lived it Einstein seems to have benefited by being badly taught, though not too badly. Yet it seems pointless to conclude that available knowledge should therefore be as badly taught as possible. Millions of students at this moment are being taught something or other very badly in hundreds of thousands of schools, and we see no sign that the bad school with its bad teaching can claim to be a genius-factory. The response of millions of students to bad teaching is to disconnect their minds forever from all engagement with what ineptitude once tried to force on them. That was likely the recourse of Einstein’s schoolfellows, who enjoyed equality of opportunity with him, and have not been heard of since.
Nor can we even explain creativity as an unpredictable response to miseducation, tempting as it might then be to leave things as they dismally are in the hope of occasionally harvesting an Einstein or two. The education of T. S. Eliot would seem to have been in most respects satisfactory; at least I know of no sign that it dissatisfied him while it was going on. At the Smith Academy in St. Louis, at the Milton Academy and even at Harvard he received an admirable grounding in languages and in literature. He learned Greek and Latin, French and German; he read history and philosophy; he studied Dante canto by canto, picking up Italian in the process; he was instructed in the Jacobean dramatists and the metaphysical poets; he was a member of Josiah Royce’s famous seminar; and he emerged from Harvard so far from discouraged, in fact so wedded to the academic life, that it seemed his manifest destiny to live out his years there as a professor of philosophy, a capacity in which he might well have rivaled William James in eminence. The route to a chair at Harvard passed in those days through the German graduate schools, so it was perfectly normal for Eliot to be installed, in the late summer of 1914, in the university town of Marburg, where the war caught him.
Yet we know the rest of the story. Even after the war he never went back to America except on visits, and by the time of the first of these visits—to lecture at Harvard, as it happened—it was 1931 and he was internationally famous. The ground of his fame was not the philosophic work which in fact he had slowly abandoned. It was poetry, and one poem in particular which none of his Harvard mentors would have been likely to recognize as a poem at all, so lacking was it in unity and decorum: The Waste Land, as much a scandal as The Rite of Spring.
Eliot’s work, it is not too much to say, was made possible in a very direct fashion by the opportunities he enjoyed, the education he received: opportunities to be sure not shared by all young Americans but certainly by an impressive number of youths who went to good schools and to Harvard though they never did anything comparable to writing The Waste Land. (We may feel sure that many of them wrote verses when they were young, as Eliot did.) And as for that turning point in the story of his early life, the discovery of Arthur Symons’ book on the Symbolist Movement, it loses some of its absolute quality when we reflect (1) that the book was after all not unknown in literate circles, (2) that the strategy Eliot derived from it, the superimposition of Symbolist procedures on English ones, had already been tried in England by the very fin-de-siècle poets he was to recall finding tiresome. And though it is true that no one else had singled out Jules Laforgue as a candidate for that sort of superimposition, the fact remains that Laforgue, an irretrievably minor poet, was useful to Eliot for only a short time, and has left no discernible impress on The Waste Land of 1921 however useful he was to the poet of “Prufrock” in 1910.
Though the movements of genius are fundamentally mysterious, still we may learn a few things from Eliot’s career. One has to do with his decision to remain in England once the fortunes of war had taken him there. For it was a decision. He completed his doctoral dissertation, but elected not to return to Harvard for the few formalities that would have secured him the degree and a safe income. Instead for years he coped in England with poverty, and even accepted being disinherited by his father, who had no patience with the chancy literary career his youngest son was making efforts to pursue. As to why he stayed in England, there can be no simple answer, but part of an answer is that he tried to imagine himself writing poetry of any importance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and decided that it would be next to impossible. He had written part of “Prufrock” there, but he was by now past being Prufrock, who may be characterized as an insecure young man protecting himself with revery and irony from the importunities of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Eliot, in short, was commencing to do about 1918 what Einstein did at a much earlier age: making use of his classroom heritage while cutting himself loose from its unspoken premises, including the subtle premise, entangled with much American intellectual history, that the place for an Eliot was Harvard College.
In the essays of The Sacred Wood of 1920, as much as in the verse of The Waste Land of late 1921, we can discern a similar subversive intent, easily localized in such a sentence as the one that proclaims Hamlet “an artistic failure,” itself an extension of a question he had asked in a previous year: “Who, for instance, has a firsthand opinion of Shakespeare? Yet I have no doubt that much could be learned by a serious study of that semi-mythical figure.”5 To doubt that a first-hand opinion of Shakespeare exists is not a way of flattering your professor. And The Waste Land? In part—in part—The Waste Land is “a skit,” as Eliot told Arnold Bennett though no one seems willing to believe him. Complete with its footnotes, complete with the lines numbered so that the footnotes may readily be traced, equipped with study aids as though it were already in a textbook, it brings with it in that respect as in so many others the look of eloquent death, a modern poem thinly disguised as a classic for the taste of a time that prefers its poetry dead, and its memories “draped by the beneficent spider,” or the diligent noter of sources. One question this learned poem asks is the uses of learning, forcing the reader to play the role of Quester among the broken images of an arid place. It is like the Chinese letter concerning which Pound said to Edith Hamilton that it presupposes the possibility that anyone may acquire enough education to read it, and possibly one test of a decent school system is that it should make available the resources which will permit any student to read The Waste Land who desires to do so. That means making Vergil and Dante and The Tempest available, and Chaucer and three or four important languages, and some knowledge of how to read the etymologies in a large dictionary and perceive the place of Sanskrit roots in our heritage. That is not too much to ask of a system that professes to cater to the intellectual needs of youths old enough to drive cars and father children. But the high schools that offer these resources must be few indeed, and one justification for their absence is apt to be that they get in the way of equality of opportunity.
This means in practice, not letting anyone learn too much, one way to create a demand for teachers being to make learning seem very slow and difficult, while suggesting at the same time that only sensitive and diligent teaching can foster what is routinely called “creativity.” But one thing we may learn from such stories as Eliot’s and Einstein’s is that we know next to nothing about how to go about promoting the liberation of creative potential. It is impossible to show that a person who isn’t creative might have been; equally impossible to demonstrate that creativity when it has demonstrated itself might have been aided by better classroom ventilation, or by early detection through a system of tests. I have hinted more than once that a tester might have spoiled everything; the Chinese have a parable about the farmer who kept pulling up the young plants to see how they were growing. I hope no one is going to draw the complacent conclusion that we shall do best to keep everything just the way it is. It does no discernible good to talent to starve it, nor to anyone to withhold from him the enlightenment for which he has an appetite. I content myself with affirming that efforts to foster creativity are unlikely to do any good at all, and that loose thought and loose talk about the matter are more likely to impair everyone’s education than to benefit anyone’s.
One link between creativity and inequality is that the creative event, given certain minimum conditions, seems to pay little heed to opportunities, or even to perceptible endowments. Mozart was performing at the age of six; Einstein at the same age could barely speak, and on being asked what profession the boy might adopt, his headmaster replied that it didn’t matter, since he would never make a success of anything. James Joyce came from a drunkard’s family; Eliot was an Eliot. They have this in common, that all of them eventually insisted on learning all that they could, though Joyce so far as we can tell had barely one decent teacher; yet it was the judgment of Eliot himself, who knew the man well and knew the language well, that Joyce at forty was “the greatest master of English since Milton.”
Certainly geniuses, like everyone else, routinely encounter unnecessary obstacles, and one of the themes of civilization is the removal of nuisances we can perceive to be unnecessary. Sewers and running water are a blessing, and so are accessible books and decent teachers. It is chiefly necessary not to suppose that we can do more than we can; that is a prerequisite for doing anything. A small school in a small California town boasts an Australian teacher who has made his home there for years, and is not only fluent in Greek, Latin, French, German, and two other languages—I forget which they are—but gifted at imparting them. I learned about him by asking one of my graduate students how he came to be so fluent in German. I also thought to ask if any more pupils from that little school had come so far; “Four of us,” he said, “that I know of”; all in languages. For a teacher like that to be available where he is constitutes rank inequality of opportunity for a few million other young Californians. I don’t know what’s to be done about that, beyond suppressing him.
Nor is anything to be done about the fact that human lives are lived amid entangled loyalties and obligations. Pound, who got out of Crawfordsville, Indiana, had the blessing of parents who wanted their son to seize the opportunities he could find, even though opportunity took him to Europe, far away in those days before jets. (Ezra was treated better than was Eliot, whose family disinherited him.) The fanciful young man he presented to us under the pseudonym of Lusty Juventus, with his talk of matter rolled into balls, whirled in the aether, was obviously doomed to be a smalltown crank, perhaps for want of proper education. Pound also remembered another man he knew at Crawfordsville when he was teaching there:
I knew a man, flat corn-lands run mile on mile,
Born on a farm, he hankered after painting,
His father kept him at work, no luck,
Married and got four sons,
Three died, the fourth he sent to Paris. And this son:
Ten years of Julians’ and the ateliers,
Ten years of life, his pictures in the salons,
Name coming in the press; and when I knew him:
Back once again in middle Indiana,
Acting as usher in the theatre,
Painting the local drug-shop and soda-bars,
The local doctor’s fancy for a mantlepiece:
Sheep! jabbing the wool upon their flea-bit backs.
“Them sheep! Them goddamd sheep!!” Adoring Puvis,
Giving his family back what they had spent on him,
Talking Italian cities,
Local excellence at Perugia; dreaming his renaissance. . . .6
“Giving his family back what they had spent on him”: and not an unsympathetic family either, since he had gone to Paris in the first place to fulfil an ambition that had been his father’s. The trouble was not his family; the trouble was that “local excellence at Perugia”—a small Italian town—was not to be matched in Crawfordsville. There is no remedy for that except making Crawfordsville another Perugia, which is not to be thought of except in the daydreams of robots. There is no law—Perugia is there to remind us—that requires small towns to be dull. But every place on the earth has the burden of its history, and a man can live in only one place at a time, and his roots may be where his family brings in its corn crop, and if he chooses not to leave there, then that is the inequality he accepts. In Perugia too they’re deprived, if what you want is cornfields, and it’s hard to show that the one place or the other either fosters or inhibits creativity. Pound’s man in Crawfordsville had had the education he wanted, and after that it wasn’t Crawfordsville that prevented him from being Indiana’s Andrew Wyeth.
Hugh Kenner was a Canadian literary critic and author of The Pound Era (1971). This article is based on a paper presented at the national meeting of the Philadelphia Society held in Chicago, April 13–14, 1973, the theme of which was “Equality.”
- The Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. D.D. Paige, 1950, p. 181. ↩︎
- E. Mullins, This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound, 1963, pp. 307-9. ↩︎
- T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 1949, p. 105. ↩︎
- Ezra Pound, Canto XXIX. ↩︎
- T. S. Eliot, “Observations,” Egoist, May 1918, p. 69. The essay on Hamlet is now in Selected Essays. ↩︎
- Ezra Pound, Quia Pauper Amavi, 1919, p. 27. ↩︎
