up in both physical and intellectual terms. Joyce filled his works with references to literature, and scribbled in dialects and languages that make his books either a tease or a bad joke depending on your view. Pound slipped so many Latin and Greek-derived terms into his Cantos that one ends up reading more dictionary than poem. Lawrence's writing is so personal that it can on occasion exclude the reader almost entirely. These writers lay down their influences and the list runs on for chapters and not just pages. Nonetheless, they demand acceptance of their own individuality. Thus Eliot's comment to his friend Woolf: "You have freed yourself from any compromise between the traditional novel and your original gift" after Jacob's Room (1922).

Indeed, individuality is at the heart of modernism, and the reader therefore becomes a guinea pig for all sorts of abstractions. It becomes extremely hard to tell on many occasions whether the author is being serious, witty, referential, or just absurd. Are these books asking us to have an open mind in the sense that they are ready to accept alternative methods and ideas or in the sense that they are open to abuse by the Emperor's New Writers. In the case of Ezra Pound, I find it hard not to dislike his frequent use of dead languages and jargon. They take away my rights as a reader. Here are some 'memorable' lines from Canto IV:

"Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary stones,
ANAXIFORMINGES ! Aurunculeia !
Hear me. Cadmus of Golden Prows !...
Beat, beat whirr, thud, in the soft turf under the apple trees,
Choros nympharum, goat-foot, with the pale-foot alternative"

You can imagine what Bill Gates' word-processing package thinks of that. Red and green wavy lines appear everywhere. For once I see its point. I am sure that Pound knew exactly what he was up to, but does anyone else? He knows all too well that non-scholars will be made to feel hideously inadequate by poetry that demands an audience with the genius of the writer. What more would you expect from a fascist?

Eliot's The Waste Land employs equally frustrating methods, breaking into German in its twelfth line (!) and frequently quoting texts in their original language (some of his earlier poems had been in French). I have no quarrel with this multi-lingual approach, but it ensures that most of his audience will miss out on some part of his meaning. Joyce used it in a subtler and more effective (i.e. comprehensible) manner. Eliot and Pound seem too conscious of its power to make the reader feel like a philistine. Walt Whitman, who is comparatively plain speaking, and as genre-defying as any modernist, is in natural opposition to the later works of Pound. Yet, in one of Pound's most Whitman / Allen Ginsberg-like poems, he both acknowledges and tears down the divide between them:

"I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now it is time for carving.
We have one sap and one root -
Let there be commerce between us." ("A Pact")

This is the most affecting poem I have read by Pound and the most honest. It is also particularly moving for me because this is precisely the relationship I have always had with its author. I have the feeling that Pound and his fellows 'broke the new wood' and that I only reject them because they represent a past that is more exciting than the present. They have toiled harder, and created greatness by means of bloody-mindedness. Modernism stands proud and naked atop Mount Olympus but strewn with the confetti of books that they have read, mastered, and torn up.

So, is modernism merely a show of power? The authors were the critics, and that is dangerous in the extreme. Nepotism is at the heart of what they were creating, intentionally or unintentionally. Joyce was commended by Yeats, Pound was a friend of Williams, Eliot was a friend of Pound and Woolf, and the list goes on. The modernists' mutual respect gave them great power to control not only the direction of writing but the degree to which it was accepted. Eliot was in charge of Faber publishing, no less. Beyond this, his influential essays (see "Tradition and the Individual Talent") and coining of literary terms