Footnotes

• ʻYOUR BOOK ON EMINENT VICTORIANS' – EZRA POUND TO HIS FELLOW ICONOCLAST, LYTTON STRACHEY. Eminent Victorians had appeared on 9 May 1918. It helped mark the break between the wartime generation and their Victorian predecessors and is widely seen as a precursor to the modernism of Eliot, Joyce and Pound himself (whose own essay in the genre, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, was to appear two years later: ʻThere died a myriad,/ And of the best, among them,/ For an old bitch gone in the teeth,/ For a botched civilization... For two gross of broken statues,/ For a few thousand battered books').
  
  Pound's long and admiring review was published in the New Review in October 1918, and opens: ʻMr. Strachey, acting as funeral director for a group of bloated reputations, is a welcome addition to the small group of men who continue what Samuel Butler began. The howls going up in the Times Lit. Sup. from the descendants of the ossements are but one curl more of incense to the new author... For most of us, the odor of defunct Victoriania is so unpleasant and the personal benefits to be derived from a study of the period so small that we are content to leave the past where we find it, or to groan at its leavings as they are, week by week, tossed up in the Conservative papers. The Victorian era is like a stuffy alley-way which we can, for the most part, avoid... Mr. Strachey, with perhaps the onus of feeling that the "Spectator" was somewhere in his immediate family, has been driven into patient exposition. The heavy gas of the past decades cannot be dispersed by mere "BLASTS" and explosions. Mr. Strachey has undertaken a chemical dispersal of residues' (ʻAn Historical Essayist: Lytton Strachey on Left-Over Celebrity', collected in Instigations of Ezra Pound, 1920).