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Ezra Pound - Mr. Nixon
Work rating: Low

In the cream gilded cabin of his steam yacht
Mr. Nixon advised me kindly, to advance with fewer
Dangers of delay. `Consider
Carefully the reviewer.

`I was as poor as you are;
`When I began I got, of course,
`Advance on royalties, fifty at first,` said Mr. Nixon,
`Follow me, and take a column,
`Even if you have to work free.

`Butter reviewers. From fifty to three hundred
`I rose in eighteen months;
`The hardest nut I had to crack
`Was Dr. Dundas.

`I never mentioned a man but with the view
`Of selling my own works.
`The tip`s a good one, as for literature
`It gives no man a sinecure.

`And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece.
`And give up verse, my boy,
`There`s nothing in it.`

Likewise a friend of Bloughram`s once advised me:
Don`t kick against the pricks,
Accept opinion. The `Nineties` tried your game
And died, there`s nothing in it.

                                                   X
Beneath the sagging roof
The stylist has taken shelter,
Unpaid, uncelebrated,
At last from the world`s welter

Nature receives him;
With a placid and uneducated mistress
He exercises his talents
And the soil meets his distress.

The haven from sophistications and contentions
Leaks through its thatch;
He offers succulent cooking;
The door has a creaking latch.

                                                   XI
Conservatrix of Milésien`
Habits of mind and feeling,
Possibly. But in Ealing
With the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen ?

No, `Milésian` is an exaggeration.
No instinct has survived in her
Older than those her grandmother
Told her would fit her station.

                                                   XII
‘Daphne with her thighs in bark
Stretches toward me her leafy hands,`
Subjectively. In the stuffed-satin drawing-room
I await The Lady Valentine`s commands,

Knowing my coat has never been
Of precisely the fashion
To stimulate, in her,
A durable passion;

Doubtful, somewhat, of the value
Of well-gowned approbation
Of literary effort,
But never of The Lady Valentine`s vocation:

Poetry, her border of ideas,
The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending
With other strata
Where the lower and higher have ending;

A hook to catch the Lady Jane`s attention,
A modulation toward the theatre,
Also, in the case of revolution,
A possible friend and comforter.

Conduct, on the other hand, the soul
‘Which the highest cultures have nourished`
To Fleet St. where
Dr. Johnson flourished;

Beside this thoroughfare
The sale of half-hose has
Long since superseded the cultivation
Of Pierian roses.
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