Be against all forms of oppression,
Go out and defy opinion.

This is the old cry of the poet, but more precise, as an
expression of frank disgust:

Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family.
O, how hideous it is
To see three generations of one house gathered together!
It is like an old tree without shoots,
And with some branches rotted and falling.

Each poem holds out these cries of revolt or disgust, but
they are the result of his still hoping and feeling:

Let us take arms against this sea of stupidities. Pound ...
has experience of the folly of the Philistines who read his
verse. Real pain is born of this stupid interpretation, and
one does not realize how deep it is unless one can feel,
through the ejaculations and the laughter, what has caused
these wounds, which are made deeper by what he knows, and
what he has lost....

The tone, which is at once jocund and keen, is one of
Pound's qualities. Ovid, Catullus--he does not disown them.
He only uses these accents for his familiars; with the
others he is on the edge of paradox, pamphleteering, indeed
of abuse....

This is the proper approach to the poems at the beginning of