Pound, Ezra. "A Pact".

Summary and Analysis

In the poem Pound comes to terms with Walt Whitman and accepts him as a poet. After all Pound's Cantos can also be seen as a formally open series of poems which draw from the motifs of Whitman's "Song of Myself", but render them in an objective way.

The speaker addresses Whitman and announces that he makes a pact with him. He says he has detested him for a long time enough, but now he turns to him as a grown child to his father. He realizes that it was Whitman who broke in the new ground.

The speaker realizes that both Whitman and himself have the same root and proposes to establish a "commerce" (i.e. "relationship"). Pound's address to Whitman is only figurative, the latter was long dead when Pound composed the poem.