BK. Ezra Pound

19. ‘Remy de Gourmont’. Fortnightly Review NS 98 (December 1915): 1159-66.

	Reprinted in Literary Essays and Selected Prose.

In discussing Gourmont’s ability to write successful poetry ‘of our own time’, and the general failure of contemporary poets to do so, Pound draws an example from his friendship with Itô (Ap): ‘I am, let us say, in an omnibus with Miscio Itow. He has just seen some Japanese armour and says it is like his grandfather’s, and then simply running on in his own memory he says: “When I first put on my grandfather’s helmet, my grandmother cried . . . because I was so like what my grandfather was at eighteen.” You may say that Itow is himself an exotic, but still, there is material for an hokku, and poetry does touch modern life, or at least pass over it swiftly, though it does not much appear in modern verses’. Reprinted in 29, 62, and 73.