SOURCE: “Preface to Discrete Series (1934),” in Paideuma, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring, 1981, p. 13.

In the following preface to Oppen's Discrete Series, originally published in 1934, Pound praises the poet for his craft and sensibility.

I. We have ceased, I think, to believe that a nation's literature is anyone's personal property.

Bad criticism emerges chiefly from reviewers so busy telling what they haven't found in a poem (or whatever) that they have omitted to notice what is.

The charge of obscurity has been raised at regular or irregular intervals since the stone age, though there is no living man who is not surprised on first learning that Keats was considered “obscure.” It takes a very elaborate reconstruction of England in Keats' time to erect even a shaky hypothesis regarding the probable fixations and ossifications of the then hired bureaucracy of Albermarle St., London West.

II. On the other hand the cry for...