INTRODUCTION

On my eighteenth birthday my brother-in-law gave me a copy of the Yale edition of Pound's essays, Make It New . That, together with Polite Essays and Pavannes and Divisions (which last I had bought for myself in Gordon Cairnie's Grolier Bookshop), became a tacit measure for the practice of such writing as is here collected. Or—better—it made very clear to me the rhetorical possibilities, and, even more, the factually passionate engagement that was, so I felt, a necessity in any such discussion.

It was Pound, of course, who so scathingly qualified "books about books," and spoke of critics "busily measuring the Venus de Milo," etc. His energetic contempt for almost all of that critical writing which had been my reference in college was, to put it mildly, bemusing. Finally, his insistent sense was that one must depend upon oneself to learn whatever proved requisite. There was no one else to do it for you.

Although I hadn't the least sense of how to proceed, writing was my concern and commitment early on. I worked at it intently and almost incrementally began to gather a company who were met, for the most part, in the pages of the little magazines to which I applied with my own work. Given the time, and the enclosing orthodoxy with respect to either poetry or prose, there seems little wonder in the fact my early essays have an embattled manner. I was quite certain that we faced an indefatigable army of resistance, a sense I've never really been able to persuade otherwise. Clearly, a good deal of my critical disposition had to do with an imagination of moral context, that there were those who furthered the light and

those who did not; and I was hardly objective, nor had thought to be, in my proposals of value. Yet, as Edith Piaf said, "Je ne regrette rien  . . ."

In addition to Pound there were a number of others significant, as Williams certainly. To this day I deeply resent the bowdlerized edition of his Selected Essays , in which he was persuaded, as he then told me, to avoid complicating reference to Eliot and to attempt a comfortably generalizing context of 'subjects,' e.g., Dylan Thomas. He had hoped that his publication by a major house would make him more known but whatever the fact, it seems now a sad detour with such essays as "Letter to an Australian Editor" or "With Rude Fingers Forced" still without place. In any case, I so emphasize it because there can be no such discretion finally, of the author or of anyone else.

Then D. H. Lawrence was immensely important to me in the intensely affective disposition of his various arguments and demonstrations. I was much impressed that he would stop a novel's action cold in order to discuss his own imagination of a proper marriage. Edward Dahlberg had an even more impassioned rhetoric, a prodigiously self-wrought language of judgment. My imagination of the active context of critical proposition would make a foursquare 'table' of Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature , Dahlberg's Can These Bones Live , Williams' In the American Grain —and the classic work of my own contemporary, Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael . The so-called common denominator would be the articulately generative nature of the writing itself, in each case a formal authority equal to that in other engagements of prose, or in poetry.

Still I had or have no belief such as the late forties or early fifties entertained, i.e., that criticism constituted the active literary accomplishment of this century in American literature. I think that was said in the New York Times Book Review around 1950, but it seems a very long time ago. Rather I felt with Pound that the active critical work would come from those defined in the arts relating, and that their criticism, so to speak, would follow their writing otherwise as 'the two feet of one biped.' Such has seemed the case.

Reading back now over what I've written, the only regret seems an obvious one. I wish that far more might have been made apparent, noted, simply proposed. Again Pound's quotation of de Gourmont has the same abiding clarity as when I first read it all those years ago: Franchement d'écrire ce qu'on pense, seul plaisir d'un écrivain  . . . It has been mine here.

Finally I thank all who so generously contributed to this book's occasion, and none more than Donald M. Allen whose editing of two collections of my essays previously gave me an absolute model for this present one. Whatever coherence is here comes from his advice and example. Michael Davidson proved once again an excellent friend with his useful suggestions. His sense of possible materials was especially helpful. William McClung, Marilyn Schwartz, Jeanne Sugiyama, and especially Barbara Ras were classic 'friends of the family' all along and their exceptional editorial capability makes the Press a singular one in all respects. Then there is Holly Hall, Head of Special Collections at Washington University, St. Louis, and her patient staff. Much here was located by fact of their care. Closer to home, Michael Boughn of the State University of New York at Buffalo has managed to find things I long ago had forgotten existed and has been impeccably patient with all my demands. The real pleasure is that it was and remains a common world.

ROBERT CREELEY
BUFFALO, NEW YORK
JANUARY 14, 1988