The well-known germophobe, T.S. Eliot,
was Pound’s answer to the excess of the previous day.
Science failed. Wagnerian primitives,
outlandishly dressed, now had their say.
Eliot’s hesitancy made sense in the rooms
full of adultery and French perfumes.
Lady Ottoline viewed the Romantic newsreel.
Better to empty that country completely.
And yet, all plans fail!
Wordsworth was reluctantly accepted;
Pol Pot was to administer the medicine.
I grew tall in an English fen.
Rimbaud whispered something to Delmore Schwartz.
Maidenform defeated the flappers—
breasts and children was what they wanted,
finally, not drugs and androgyny.
Your pitiful poetry.
Buddhism was cruel and real.
Mess apparently gave way to order:
Electronics, ideal.