Thursday, November 04, 2021
An Ill Day
Ezra Pound, Literary Essays (New York: New Directions, 1954), pp. 270-271:
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[I]t would be an ill day if men again let the classics go by the board; we should fall into something worse than, or as bad as, the counter-reformation: a welter of gum-shoes, and cocoa, and Y.M.C.A. and Webbs, and social theorizing committees, and the general hell of a groggy doctrinaire obfuscation; and the very disagreeablizing of the classics, every pedagogy which puts the masterwork further from us, either by obstructing the schoolboy, or breeding affectation in dilettante readers, works toward such a detestable end.Webbs = Sidney and Beatrice Webb, well-known socialists of the day.
