STODDARD MARTIN traces the connections and contrasts of two utterly different Americans

George Santayana and Ezra Pound would have known of one another for decades before they ever corresponded, let alone met. Twenty-two years apart in age, they were at least a generation distant in sensibility and more than that in temperament. But Santayana was a poet at heart, if a philosopher in the world, and Pound a poet in the world, if philosopher at heart. Both were mainly products of the American northeast, though neither was born there. Both were dropouts from academia and expatriates in Europe for much of their life, principally and finally in Italy. Santayana ended in a modest room in a convent in Rome under the care of the Little Sisters of Mary, Pound in a workman’s cottage in a relative backwater of Venice under the care of the mother of his daughter Mary.

T. S. Eliot had studied under Santayana at Harvard, and Santayana’s protégé Daniel Cory attended Pound’s Ezuversity in Rapallo in the early 1930s. The former may have provided a link between Pound and Santayana in thought, the latter would in person. A general impression had formed for each of the other before association. In 1928 we find Santayana, living in Paris, writing to a young man who has sent him some sonnets:

I have just been reading hard words written by Mr Ezra Pound on the subject of the sonnets in The Dial for this month ^[i]

He praises the young man for aperçus shared with Homer but chastises him for “rebelling” against his chosen form’s strict tradition of ten syllables per line. The letter continues:

Unless you can say these things better than Homer and company people will prefer to read about them in them rather than in you

It concludes:

Words, words, words are the foundation of everything – in literature. If you feel the force of each word, and its penumbra of association, the rest will take care of itself, and if ever you have anything to say, it will say itself for you magnificently

It is intriguing to speculate that this judgement may have been stimulated by Pound as much as by its recipient. Santayana’s last sentence suggests respect for an imagist method, but his view of a modernist treatment of Homer is ominous. He seems to be developing a response to a modernist aesthetic akin to Pound’s at this stage; later he will be more specific. In 1935 he writes to a young woman who has sent him her collection, praising her for “freedom from religion”, a “clear view of truth” and “naturalism” ^[ii]. As to her free verse, he cites Pound’s Quia Pauper Amavi, which he’s been reading:

You would deceive nobody into mistaking you for a real modern. Though your restrained voice may not attract attention so scandalously [as Pound’s], I am sure that you will give more pleasure to those who do hear you, and will be more gratefully received

Ouch. The versifier of the 1890s clearly finds it hard to adjust to what a new age is up to.

In 1936 Santayana writes to another admirer about Faulkner’s Sanctuary:

Like all these recent writers, the author is too lazy and self-indulgent and throws off what comes to him in a sort of dream, expecting the devoted reader to run about after him, sniffing at all the droppings of his mind. I am not a psychological dog and require my dog biscuit to be clearly set down for me in a decent plate with proper ceremony ^[iii]

Two months later, half-regretting his verdict, he qualifies it to the same recipient:

What I say about ‘droppings’ would be more applicable to other people – e.g. Ezra Pound – than to [Faulkner]

Ouch again. Such a reaction would not escape the courteous Santayana’s lips when he finally met Pound in 1939; but even given their frequent correspondence during the War, he could praise yet another young person who would send him unsolicited poems for not “threatening” his readers with

…the horror, for instance, of passing in Ezra Pound, who can write good verse, into the most vulgar journalese, and the most insolent irrelevance ^[iv]

That first meeting took place in Venice. Pound’s biographer David Moody records how Pound had written to Santayana, “whose clarity and integrity of mind he admired”, seeking “sidelights” on his “notes to [Guido] Cavalcanti (1) and one or two Chinese texts” ^[v]. They met at the Hotel Danieli, where the well-off philosopher liked to plant himself for a few weeks every year. Pound arrived with his 13 years-old daughter from her mother’s modest dwelling on the far side of the Grand Canal. Santayana, Pound would write to Eliot, “failed to see the connection” between Cavalcanti, Chinese ideograms and Scotus Erigena (2). Santayana for his part felt “talked at”, Moody surmises, and at one point he retaliated with a comment from The Education of Henry Adams which Pound would remember in Canto 74: “Teach? At Harvard?/Teach? It cannot be done”. Pound’s verdict on the visit, reported by his daughter years later, was that it was “a relief to talk philosophy with someone completely honest – a nice mind”.

Here we might pause to consider the social milieu. Santayana was not only well-off but well-connected. Less than a decade before, he had given away John D. Rockefeller’s favourite granddaughter in marriage to the Marquis de Cuevas when her father, Santayana’s dear friend the philosopher Charles Strong, failed to turn up ^[vi]. Santayana was of an echelon of American expatriate depicted in Henry James, whose brother William had been his instructor and colleague in the philosophy department at Harvard ^[vii]. A lifelong bachelor, Santayana was unencumbered by practicalities such as might interfere with aesthetic or intellectual pursuits. An admired stylist in English, he was also fluent in his native Spanish and French and to large extent Italian and German. Respected by almost all with whom he came into contact, he was belittled only by a few British empiricists such as Bertrand Russell – hardly a mark against him for the increasingly Anglophobic Pound. He was, in short, a character to appeal to the poet on many bases: American, expatriate, linguistic. He was also a socially desirable mark for an Idaho-Yankee arguably less secure in pedigree and definitely less so in income.

A crucial connective would be the War, during which both writers were essentially trapped in Italy ^[viii]. This was not wholly a matter of hardship: both were confirmed Italophiles, and Santayana at that time was politically indifferent as between liberal democracy and fascism. But everyone in situ in Italy at the time would share in the deprivation of heat and electricity and food as it grew, and Santayana’s chronic bronchitis worsened. What he and Pound had most in common perhaps was being cut off from funds in the UK and US and from ability to communicate with publishers. Santayana’s manuscripts had to be smuggled out to Scribner’s via the Vatican and the American embassy in Madrid. During this era, Pound was much in Rome, as we know, and visited the philosopher who, we are told, was

…impressed by Pound’s unusual appearance (his mass of frizzy red hair) and manner… Some of [his] letters, like his radio broadcasts for the Mussolini government, Santayana found incomprehensible

To Cory he would write in May ’41:

Pound was here yesterday, quite mad… Complains of people’s utter ignorance of economics, and says that it is the root of all trouble. And half his speech is indecipherable to me. I wonder if he is understood when he speaks through the radio. Why does he talk that way? Is it incapacity, or inspiration? Perhaps 9/10th the one and 1/10th the other

Such a critique is scarcely surprising. Santayana’s early writing on literature had attacked a vogue for Browning and Whitman in America of Pound’s youth.

It is a mere euphemism… to call this perpetual vagrancy a development of the soul… Crude experience is [its] only end, the endless struggle [its] only ideal… self-serving subjectivity… poetry of barbarism… stepchild of German romanticism and idealism ^[ix]

No fan of the transcendentalists, Santayana was in favour of objectivity vs. “emotional slither” and of an authorial use of personae to disguise personal “vent”. In such principles we may see elements of his later attraction to, bemusement by, and repulsion from Pound. “Santayana was capable of sensing danger where others felt only excitement” in the revolt against “old fogeyism in the Edwardian era”. Not for this patrician poet-philosopher to inveigh against effeminacy in American letters such as the author of Patria Mia would. Yet both had fled some tendency common to their formative tradition.

What brought them together was almost certainly one-sided: Pound’s desire for a grand old man’s imprimatur, as Moody implies. In an attempt to provide a pointer for the poet’s elusive paradiso, Santayana lent Pound a copy of his Realms of Spirit, fourth and most recently finished part of his magnum opus on religious impulses and much else. Evidently sceptical that Pound might actually read the book, Santayana writes in afterthought,

Please keep in mind that I don’t believe anything existent can be defined, only indicated; so that all sorts of different figures or words pointed at are better than any one name… Spirit is not an independent substance or centre with a persistent individuality: only a spark of light ^[x]

He goes on to report that he has been perusing a volume by the historian Brooks Adams, Henry’s racially biased brother, which Pound had apparently recommended to him, and states that he is disappointed by its “lack of philosophy”. Such flickers of incompatible mindset may be reflected in a paragraph Pound would insert a year later into one of his Rome Broadcasts, about Marx and materialism ^[xi]:

George Santayana calls himself a materialist. It rather shocked old William James. Ole William told young George, he was younger at that stage of world history, that his, Santayana’s philosophy was organized rottenness. I cannot agree with fuzzy old James. It appears to me that George Santayana rather agrees with Thomas Aquinas. I mean the materialist Santayana ends up by writin’ a book called The Realm of Spirit [sic]. I occasionally plunge into the work to calm my heated mind. I mean when I am not up to Confucius and Mencius. And Thomas Aquinas says somewhere that the soul is the first ACT of an organic body. Well, I ask George Santayana what THAT means. And he says entelechy, which seems to me to be dodgin’ behind a Greek word. But anyhow, a materialist definition of the soul seems to be that it is the first act, or first action, or first condition of an organic body. Don’t ASK me. I am merely trying to show how far the word or idea materialist can be stretched by people who play with abstractions

Santayana’s copy of Realms of Spirit, apparently his sole one, was never returned ^[xii] – lost in Pound’s flight following the fall of Rome, we assume, or during his later incarceration for treason. There is no clarity about how much Pound read of it or of Santayana’s earlier work, such as Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923), which might have contained much to Pound’s taste. Communication between the two broke off until May ’46, by which time Santayana was back in funds and being fêted for a novel and a fragment of autobiography which had become bestsellers in the United States as he shivered through to the War’s end. To Pound, now shut in but not shut up in a ward for the insane at St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington D.C., he writes: “I am glad to hear directly from you” ^[xiii]. He goes on to discuss Pound’s Ballad of the Goodly Fere, which he caricatures as a picture of “Christ qua gangster [that] only makes me laugh”. This leads him to speculate that his own recent work on “the idea of Christ as pure spirit in the flesh… would perhaps turn your stomach.” Good-natured badinage, but not without spike. Shortly afterwards, Santayana asks his publisher to send Pound a copy of his book The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, which Pound has requested in a letter written “partly in Chinese characters” ^[xiv].

An individual of Santayana’s courtesy could not fail to respond to a fellow writer, especially one in trouble, but often it was not easy. A month after the preceding, we find him writing to Dorothy Pound thanking her for posting Ezra’s “letter telling me that p. 6 of my book had reconciled him to the frivolity of the rest.”^[xv] “I have also received his new canto,” Santayana reports, “and should have written to him about it if a ray of light from it had been able to pierce my thick skull. But really I can’t catch the drift of his allusions.” He adds that Pound’s “subjectivity” resembles his own in his autobiographical People and Places, if at a distance. This remark seems motivated in part, if not all, by politesse. To his publisher, Cory and others he vents.

From Ezra Pound I continue to receive communications: the last was stark mad: a few scattered unintelligible abbreviations on a large sheet of paper, and nothing else. Yet the address, although fantastically scrawled, was quite correct and intelligible. His madness may be spasmodic only ^[xvi]

At around this time Santayana’s attention was drawn to Robert Lowell among young American poets, and he struck up a correspondence with him rivalling that with Cory. One of their first exchanges is about Pound. “I have received a letter of his”, Santayana tells Lowell,

…with a Chinese character in the middle of the page, and below, in ‘traditional’ English the maxim: ‘Respect the intelligence of a cherry that can make cherries.’ I am touched by his remembering me, as I have not answered one or two earlier letters that were wholly unintelligible ^[xvii]

In a subsequent letter he asks Lowell why Pound favours Propertius (3); this is in prelude to observing,

It is a pity that he prints so many mistakes in his foreign languages, even in the Greek alphabet. I thought some passages in these ‘Cantos’ [the Pisan] very good; but why so much trash? I must write to him ^{[ xviii]}

This about sums it up. Pound has a soupçon of recognisable quality for Santayana but is shoddy and unintelligible, and he would really prefer for the poet to take a hint and stop pestering him with missives, but then rather repents a lack of grace in the sentiment.

For one of Santayana’s fastidiousness, it boils down to taste. “I don’t agree in taste at all with Ezra Pound,” he remarks to another correspondent,

…whom Eliot (once a pupil of mine) thought the ‘best of workmen’, quoting Dante about the most artificially laboured of Provençal poets… Matters of taste are matters of sympathy ^[xix]

Rowing back again towards repentance, he adds that differences in taste are “not a sin”. To another correspondent in 1950 he complains of an article in The TLS alleging that “the chief benefit of Browning for our times” is that he “inspired the early poems of Pound” ^[xx]. “He, who was as good a dramatist as Shakespeare!” Santayana fumes in defence of a bard whom, as we have seen, he attacked roundly when an aspiring young poet. In a letter to his publisher about his own Christ book, Santayana varies the complaint, deploring that the work of Browning, which provides “a better (because more cheerful) moral guide than the Sermon on the Mount” should “survive only as a contributor to the poetry of Ezra Pound!” ^[xxi]

Santayana’s ill-temper may have been exacerbated by a concurrent episode with the poet Peter Russell, an acolyte of Pound’s who turned up at his door soliciting a passage for his journal NINE from the old man’s translation of Tibullus.^[xxii] Russell went on to publish an article about the visit, “An Afternoon with George Santayana”, which Santayana found “a surprising travesty of what I said to him, especially about Mr T. S. Eliot and Mr Ezra Pound.”^[xxiii] What in fact had he said about the two poets? In an exchange with Lowell about Racine, Santayana would chide that, whereas Racine’s work had plot, Lowell’s was like Pound’s: in danger of “furnish[ing] landscape splendidly, but leav[ing] us confused about your plot and characters.”^[xxiv] Later when Cory reports that Lowell has called Pound “a great man”, Santayana responds crossly.^[xxv] Later still, in a letter to an old Oxford acquaintance, he sheds some light on emotions lurking beneath these reactions:

I have recently become deeply interested in the new American poets. I have long known Ezra Pound, and I saw him often here during the war, but was never reconciled to his ways in speech or in writing. But Robert Lowell from the first attracted me for various paradoxes that I found realised in him; and his rugged personality now that I have seen him, has not frightened me away ^[xxvi]

The response is fundamentally based on aesthetics. Pound was antipathetic to Santayana in a way that Lowell was not. A streak of homoeroticism may lurk in it, also an affinity for the echt-New England patrician Lowell’s reaction against the Puritanism of his background in favour of an older Catholic tradition.^[xxvii] Despite the Europhilia of his expatriation, Pound would rarely strain for a quietude or “Ewig weibliche” (4) (Mariolatry) intrinsic to this and congenial to Santayana. That said, it is worth noting that Santayana’s last effort veered like much of errant Ezra’s towards this world and its politics. A year before his death, Santayana wrote to his publisher, then preparing his book Dominations and Powers:

I have received a comparatively clear letter from Ezra Pound in which he writes ‘What about this book of yours? Are your publishers trying to suppress your indecorous opinions? Or is it merely the usual American tempo – molasses flowing uphill below zero?’… To disperse his morbid fears, will you please add his name and send him a copy… with my compliments? ^[xxviii]

A month later he reports to Lowell:

Pound has written me quite intelligibly and in a placid mood, on receiving my book. I am very glad I sent it to him ^[xxix]

After Santayana’s death in 1952, it was left to Cory to collate his papers and publish what of them appeared not to deserve oblivion. There was sufficient money and academic interest to provide annotated editions; Cory in 1963 also published a memoir based on the vast bulk of letters the philosopher had written to him since their first meeting in 1927. From these one cannot fail to see that Santayana never stopped struggling to come to terms with the expatriate moderns who dominated poetry in his later years. His friend Logan Pearsall Smith had warned Cory when a young man in London not to “go slumming with such an eccentric fraud [as Eliot]”^[xxx]; Santayana would repeat this in various housebroken guises:

Eliot is entangled in his own coils. How can he publish such an indecent article as that of Ezra Pound in this number of The Criterion? ^[xxxi]

He deprecates Eliot for finding Pound “magnificent” and questions the value of his judgement overall. The Uses of Poetry and the Uses of Criticism he judges damningly “English” –

I don’t think Englishmen are inclined to think, unless there is something wrong with them ^[xxxii]

After Strange Gods, he would find more impressive, but remarks with faint praise: “Eliot is honest and brave, but limited.”^[xxxiii] Murder in the Cathedral elicits the quip,

England is becoming stranger and stranger to me, and less and less appealing. I once loved it so much that this is rather a tragedy ^[xxxiv]

Eliot, it seems, could feel the vibrations. Cory prodded him into publishing an essay on Santayana’s later philosophy but reported his impression that Eliot was reluctant to revive interest in the Hispano-American for an English audience.^[xxxv] No doubt aware of the antipathy of Russell & Co. – “nothing original in Santayana: all Plato and Leibniz” ^[xxxvi] – the politic Eliot may have felt it rash to sail against a prevailing wind. Reception and response of this kind in England might suggest a growing similarity between Santayana and Pound, but if so, it did not lead to solidarity. Cory, in Santayana’s pocket, refused Eliot’s request to review Pound’s Guide to Kulchur; and Santayana would scold Cory for encouraging Pound to send him the book, saying that he would return it at once as he was only an admirer of “putrid Petrarch” or “miserable Milton” ^[xxxvii]. Politic himself, Cory did manage to cajole Eliot into letting him review Realms of Truth for The Criterion ^[xxxviii], so perhaps Eliot’s view of Santayana was in fact more favourable than it appeared, or improved over time: after he closed The Criterion, he would join Pound in inviting the philosopher to help them launch a journal about education; Santayana declined the honour, and the idea was dropped.^[xxxix]

Disillusionment with England and its bien-pensant certainly grew in Santayana during the War and after. He would express qualified regard for works by Cyril Connolly, Karl Popper, Arnold Toynbee and others ^[xl], but Russell would continue to annoy him, prompting the remark, “I feel how inhuman these high-principled self-righteous people are” ^[xli]. He recalls with contempt a “personal shamming involved” in mixing with such English folk, citing not only Russell but Lady Ottoline Morrell ^[xlii]. Reading Osbert Sitwell moves him to inveigh, “This aristocracy deserve[s] to disappear more than the French” ^[xliii]; and C. S. Lewis earns his disdain for a “cheap way of summing things up in two words and announcing that all else is effete”. ^[xliv] The scars of war, as for Pound, may have added intensity to these reactions; but there is substance in them as well. The “error of British empiricism”, Santayana would muse, “is that it reduces ideas from essences to perceptions” ^[xlv] – a crucial distinction, leading him to reflect, “That traditional British philosophers dislike me is perfectly natural”.^[xlvi] In his view Russell et al had “missed the bus… for all [their] talent and omnipotence.”^[xlvii] In the end “science is only a side development” to religion; “the bulk of human experience is incorrigibly poetical”; and “the important thing [is] to retain a sense of piety”.^[xlviii]

The extent to which a half-broken and aged Ezra Pound would come to similar attitudes is debatable. As Santayana in later years laboured to understand more of the method of his two “great” American expatriate successors ^[xlix], so perhaps Pound came to aspire to a touch of a grace he could not have failed to glimpse in their grand predecessor. Perhaps this is part of why, when the foremost disciple of Santayana visited him in Venice in 1966, Pound chose the moment to remark that he had

…botched it… I picked out this and that thing that interested me, and then jumbled them in a bag. But that’s not the way to make… a work of art ^[l]

This verdict, reported by Cory, has disarmed or qualified formidable criticism for many, as would the equally famous aside reported by Allen Ginsberg not long after about “that stupid suburban prejudice [which] spoiled the whole thing”. But how much an otherwise substantially laconic old man genuinely meant these apparent repentances is anyone’s guess. It is plausible that, as is probable at his first meeting an eminent, well-heeled philosopher three decades before, Pound may in part have been trying simply to charm his interlocutor with a becoming humility and/or imitative courtesy.

In the words of Will Durant^[li], whose vastly popular writings on philosophy Pound would have known of more than a decade before that meeting, Santayana had

…the soul of a Spanish grandee grafted upon the stock of the gentle Emerson; a refined mixture of Mediterranean aristocracy with New England individualism… the accent of some pagan scholar come from ancient Alexandria… resolved to subject all ‘the phases of human progress’, all the pageant of man’s interests and history, to the scrutiny of reason

Santayana recognised that “the poetry of [myth] helps men to bear the prose of life”; that “to love one’s country, unless that love is quite blind and lazy, must involve a distinction between the country’s actual condition and its inherent ideal”; and that “the great evil of the state is its tendency to become an engine of war… [for] no people has ever won a war”. He despised the waste of capitalism, which destroys self-realisation, yet abjured collectivist doctrines of innate equality. Ultimately he valued the importance of detached judgement and “wisdom [that] comes by disillusionment”.

All this, Durant sums up, “[wrote] itself down quietly, in statuesque and classic prose [with] an undertone of sweet regret for a vanished world”. It is hard not to see in it a marked resemblance to conditions of being and thought that an often agitated, unruly and tormented Ezra Pound yearned after in his own manner.

Editor’s Notes

1. Guido Cavalcanti, c. 1255-1300, a major Florentine poet who wrote love lyrics in the dolce stil nuovo (“sweet new style”)
2. John Scotus Erigena, 810- c. 877, Irish philosopher whose translations helped promote Greek patristic writings
3. Sextus Propertius, 55-43 BC-after 16 BC, author of four books of poetic elegies, most famously Cynthia 
4. Ewig weibliche – “eternal feminine”, a concept popularised by Goethe in Faust

Author’s Notes

^[i] 10 July 1928 to (Unidentified) Rubin. The Works of George Santayana, volume v, book 4 (1928-32), edited by William Holzberger et al (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003)

^[ii] 19 January 1935 to Sylvia Bliss. The Letters of George Santayana, edited and with introduction and commentary by Daniel Cory (London: Constable, 1955), 290

^[iii] 22 June and 3 September 1936 to Robert Shaw Barlow. Ibid,312, 314

^[iv] 8 December 1949 to Cornel Lengyel. Ibid, 387

^[v] Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and his Work, volume III ‘The Tragic Years, 1939-72’, A. David Moody (Oxford University Press, 2015), quoting Pound to Santayana, 8 December 1939, and to Eliot, 18 January 1940, as well as Mary de Rachewiltz in Discretions (1971), 127-8

^[vi] See Santayana: the Later Years: a portrait in letters, Daniel Cory (New York: Braziller, 1963), 26-7

^[vii] He disliked James and an atmosphere of intense masculinism encountered at Harvard. Ibid., 41

^[viii] See Works vol. v, book 7 (1941-47), Preface

^[ix] See Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), edited by William Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp Jr (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990), Introduction by Joel Porte, xix-xxi

^[x] Works, v, 7. Letter of 29 June 1942

^[xi] Radio Broadcast #102, 26 June 1943

^[xii] See Works, v, 7. Letter to John Hall Wheelock of 23 January 1947

^[xiii] Ibid., Letter of 19 June 1946

^[xiv] Ibid., to Wheelock, 6 October 1946

^[xv] Ibid., Letter of 24 November 1946

^[xvi] Ibid., See letter to Wheelock, 16 January 1947

^[xvii] Works, v, book 8 (1948-52), letter of 1 March 1948

^[xviii] Ibid., letter of 29-30 December 1949

^[xix] Ibid., letter to Bysshe Stein of 1 September 1949

^[xx] Ibid., letter to Cyril Coniston Clemens of 10 January 1950

^[xxi] Ibid., to Wheelock, 3 January 1950

^[xxii] Ibid., see letters to Russell and Cory of 15 August and 25 October 1949

^[xxiii] Ibid., see letter to Stefan Shimanski, 8 December 1949. The article had appeared in World Review (London: xii ’49), 45-7

^[xxiv] Ibid., letter of 25 December 1950

^[xxv] Ibid., letter of 1 March 1951

^[xxvi] Ibid., to John Brett Langstaff, 13 June 1951

^[xxvii] Alluded to in the letter to Lowell mentioned in note 25 above

^[xxviii] Works, v, 8, letter to Wheelock of 25 March 1951

^[xxix] Ibid., letter of 25 April 1951

^[xxx] Later Years, 27

^[xxxi] Ibid., 120. Pound’s essay was about Housman

^[xxxii] Ibid., 128

^[xxxiii] Ibid., 130

^[xxxiv] Ibid., 155

^[xxxv] Ibid., 142-43

^[xxxvi] Ibid., 268

^[xxxvii] Ibid., 188

^[xxxviii] Ibid., 192

^[xxxix] See ‘“It doesn’t . . . matter where you begin”: Pound and Santayana on Education’, by Martin Coleman, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, volume 44, number 4 (Winter 2010), 1-17. Coleman finds Pound ‘genuinely fond’ of Santayana and that the two had enough in common for such a collaboration to make sense. Among other things, he cites the apprehension both had that pressure of social life, money and the ‘business of the universities’ could prelude proper thought and creativity and encouraged young teachers to write and lecture on subjects which they had not yet properly mastered. He also sees similarity between the two in the foundational principle of what Santayana labelled ‘animal faith’

^[xl] See Later Years, 257, 262 and passim

^[xli] Ibid., 264

^[xlii] Ibid., 267

^[xliii] Ibid., 264

^[xliv] Ibid., 281

^[xlv] Ibid., 272

^[xlvi] Ibid., 285

^[xlvii] Ibid., 292

^[xlviii] Ibid., 312, 315 and 330

^[xlix] He reports to Cory, for example, that reading Eliot on Pound in Fiera Letteraria ‘really throw[s] some light on the mystery of their kind of poetry.’ Ibid., 266

^[l] On these late utterances of Pound’s, see, for example, Moody, 799-802

^[li] See The Story of Philosophy: the lives and opinions of the world’s greatest philosophers, Will Durant (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926; The Pocket Library, 1954), 488-508