In 1939, Pound wrote to a student of his in defense of the Cantos, and his own status as an American poet:

I don't have to try to be American. Merrymount, Braintree, Quincy, all I believe in or by. …

… Am I American? Yes, and buggar, the present state of the country, the utter betrayal of the American Constitution, the filth of the Universities, and the — system of publication whereby you can buy Lenin, Trotsky (the messiest mutt of the lot), Stalin for 10 cents and 25 cents, and it takes seven years to get a set of John Adams at about 30 dollars.

… And as to “am I American”: wait for Cantos 62/71 now here in rough typescript.

One hardly thinks of Vachel Lindsay as relevant in our times. Still, once in a while, a voice makes itself heard, talking about him as a poet that matters—somehow. Allen Ginsberg, a good many years ago, pointed to Lindsay's pertinent use of sounds and, although he probably did not make enough of what they had most in common (i.e., their belonging to an emphatically American line of bardic seers and their belief in the prophetic nature of poetry), he pulled Lindsay out of the oblivion he had fallen into among practicing poets. More recently, Jerome Rothenberg, in his introduction to Revolution of the Word, deemed part of his work worth salvaging, “the intermedia work combining poetry with dance, film, hieroglyphics”; and indeed, however restrictive and at times inaccurate this description—Lindsay never “combined poetry with film,” for example, in the strictest sense of the terms—its merit is great for it takes Lindsay out of the worn rut of “evangelistic jazz” and “rhythmic preaching” he had been pushed into by critics as little apt to discern the new and fecund in him as they were eager to corner him into a reputation that served their own purposes. The fact is that Lindsay is far from resembling his by now stereotyped image, and in the following pages I would like to consider enough elements to make more manifest one or two of the most neglected or distorted aspects and purposes of his endeavor.

The excitement generated by modern American fiction is only partially suggested by Jean-Paul Sartre's 1946 statement that “The greatest literary development in France between 1929 and 1939 was the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, and Hemingway. … To writers of my generation, the publication of The 42nd Parallel, Light in August, and A Farewell to Arms evoked a reaction similar to the one produced fifteen years earlier by the Ulysses of James Joyce.” Sharing with Ulysses the technical virtuosity that was to mark “modern” fiction wherever it occurred, the novels of these American novelists set precedents that few writers today have forgotten. Faulkner, Hemingway, and Dos Passos became the prototypes for that new animal, the new American artist, the modernist who was fascinated, sometimes to the point of obsession, with method. As Gorham Munson recalled about a party in the early 1920s, the writers had split into two factions, the younger “as usual discussing the everlasting topic of form”; the older airing “their views on anti-religion.”

In an old creation myth, the androgyne stretches out and folds over itself to create a void in which the universe is born. This image is illuminating when one reflects on the poetic endeavor of Allen Ginsberg during the last thirty years. When the poet speaks of the “poem of life butchered out of their own bodies,” as he does in “Howl,” he signifies something about the creative effort expended in his own poetry and about the struggle of self to articulate a “true philosophy of life.” The ambiguity of the phrase “poem of life” is instructive as well, for it indicates a commitment to art and life as mutually informing categories. As the struggle for articulation is the struggle of the self to assert—or discover in the sense of revealing—its being in the world, the writing of poetry becomes a mode of self-creation. It becomes, in the terminology of existentialism, a “life project.”