When Ezra Pound arrived in London he was greeted as an American cowboy, abrash outsider offering poetry Punch satirized as blending "the imagery of theunfettered West, the vocabulary of Wardour Street, and the sinister abandon ofBorgiac Italy" (in EPM 174). Outspoken, oddly dressed- he would occasionallywear a sombrero for a 1909 lecture series- Pound was, nonetheless, self-assured.His appearance was operatic and poetic at the same time, preferring flowingcapes and open-necked shirts, but his speech was "Amerukun," filled withidioms and neologisms unheard of in London. As one observer wrote, with"his rimless pince nez, his Philadelphian accent and his startling costume, partof which was a single turquoise earring, [he] contrived to look every inch apoet. But his unorthodox ideas and direct approach to art made him morethan an image as he challenged the stodginess of late Victorian culture and theindulgencies of the Decadents as he set out a modernist map that T. S. Eliot,Yeats, Joyce, Lewis and others would follow.
An afternoon visit to the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in Sussex on 18 January1914 illustrates how Pound first straddled and then rattled the age, causingYeats to remark that "Pound has a desire personally to insult the world.2 Thepurpose of the afternoon was to acknowledge Blunt and his contributions topoetry. On the day of the visit, in the company of Yeats, Richard Aldington,T. Sturge Moore. E S. Flint, and Victor Plarr, Pound and the others honoredthe poet with a small reliquary box designed by Gaudier-Brzeska containingpoems by the poets. Blunt was gracious in accepting the gift but turned theimage of a naked Egyptian woman on the box to the wall the next day andcommented that in the poems themselves he could not recognize "anythingbut word puzzles" (in McDiarmid 164). Pound was the anonymous author ofall of them, although Blunt did not know it (GAL C131).
