Harry

“That is of course a purely eighteenth-century, patriarchal, and un-Native American model of civilization. One might even call it European, if it were not that the monarchical European way, in Jefferson’s view, was ‘to keep [the people] down’ by hard labour, poverty, ignorance,”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“HIC | JACET | FISCI LIBERATOR’, ‘here lies the Treasury’s Liberator’. However, in Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s fully documented account of the Bank war, in his Thirty Years’ View, or A History of the Working of the American Government (1854), the hero is unquestionably President Jackson, and Van Buren is not seen to play a leading role, in part because while Vice-President he chaired the Senate Debates and could have no voice in them. (That difference raises the question of historical accuracy to which I will return.) The first third of canto 37 weaves together thirty or more items, most of them things said by Van Buren or taken up by him over the many years from 1813 when he was a New York state senator to 1840 when he was President. The passage is a prime instance of Pound’s method of adding one detail to another without providing the conventional syntactical and logical connections, in order to allow a more complex web of relations to develop. Banks fraudulently failing, wealthy landowners and factory owners, high judges and the Chief Justice himself, senators, financial speculators, all are implicated in defrauding immigrants of the value of their banknotes, in driving settlers off the land they would cultivate, in denying workers the vote, in preventing local government of local affairs, and in ‘“decrying government credit. |…in order to feed on the spoils”’.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Jefferson would civilize the Indians, but not in ‘the ancient ineffectual’ way of religious conversion— The following has been successful. First, to raise cattle whereby to acquire a sense of the value of property… arithmetic to compute that value, thirdly writing, to keep accounts, and here they begin to labour; enclose farms, and the women to weave and spin… fourth to read Aesop’s Fables, which are their first delight along with Robinson Crusoe. Creeks, Cherokees, the latter now instituting a government.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Everybody wants to see me. Everybody insists on talking to
me. People pester me and they pester others with inquiries about what I
am doing. How am I? Am I quite well again? Do I still go for my walks in the
country? Am I working? Have I finished my book? Will I begin another soon?
"A skinny monkey of a German wants me to translate his works. A wild-eyed
Russian girl wants me to write an account of my life for her. An American
lady wants the very latest news about me. An American gentleman will send
his carriage to take me to dinner -- just an intimate, confidential talk, you
know. An old schoolmate and chum of mine, of ten years ago, wants me to read him all that I write as fast as I write it. A painter friend I know expects
me to pose for him by the hour. A newspaper man wants my present
address. An acquaintance, a mystic, inquires about the state of my soul;
another, more practical, about the state of my pocketbook. The president
of my club wonders if I will make a speech for the boys! A lady, spiritually
inclined, hopes I will come to her house for tea as often as possible. She
wants to have my opinion of Jesus Christ, and -- what do I think of that new
medium?...

"Great God! what have I turned into? What right have you people to clutter
up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for
your companion, confidant, and information bureau? What do you take me
for? Am I an entertainer on salary, required every evening to play an
intellectual farce under your stupid noses? Am I a slave, bought and paid
for, to crawl on my belly in front of you idlers and lay at your feet all that I
do and all that I know? Am I a wench in a brothel who is called upon to lift
her skirts or take off her chemise at the bidding of the first man in a tailored
suit who comes along?”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer