CANTOS CX-CXVII

I am writing to resist tlie view that Europe and civilisation is going to Hell. If I am being “crucified for an idea”—that is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated — it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever other cultures, in whatever universahty. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer? One has worked on certain materials trying to establish bases and axes of reference.

Ezra Pound. Interview with Donald Hall. Paris Review 28 (June 1962): 48.

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