Ezra Pound on James Joyce

Pound to John Quinn
May 1920

Joyce - pleasing; after the first shell of the cantankerous Irishman, I got the impression of the real man who is the author of Chamber Music, the sensitive. The rest is the genius; the registration of realities on the temperament, the delicate temperament of the early poems. A concentration and absorption passing Yeats - Yeats has taken on anything requiring the condensation of Ulysses. Also, great exhaustion, but more constitution than I expected, and apparently a good recovery from the eye operation.

He is, of course, stubborn as a mule or an Irishman, but I failed to find him at all unreasonable. Thank God, he has been stubborn enough to know his job and stick with it. 

1931 Postscript:  "I respect Joyce's integrity as an author, as he has not taken the easy part.  I never had any respect for his common sense or intelligence, apart from his gifts as a writer" - Pound in the New Review

Pound - On Package Words

Partisan Review: Where do ignorance and innocence end and the chicanery begin? 

Pound:There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent. 

The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these package words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.