Ezra Pound's Canto 18 begins with Kublai Khan, the first emperor of the Yuan Dynasty, who undertook and indeed had the power to complete the coining of money, that is, the establishment of a new currency system.1 Despite the use of the word "coin," the reason that Pound pays attention to such a historical figure as Kublai is that he was among the first to issue "paper" money; "They take bast of the mulberry-tree, / That is a skin between the (...) wood and the bark, / And of this they make paper". Apart from the physical production and printing of paper, however, the basic and more essential prerequisite for the issue of paper money—and for its successful circulation and distribution—is to make paper money... (shrink)

"The chief characteristic of poets," writes I. A. Richards in his well-known essay, "Science and Poetry," "is their amazing command of words".1 By this Richards does not mean that poetry can be written "by cunning and study, by craft and contrivance," that is, by "the technique of poetry added to a desire to write some"; his point is rather that "the ordering of the words" must spring from "an actual supreme ordering of experience." The true vocation of "genuine poetry" consists (...) in its attempt to give the reader "a response which is as passionate, noble and serene as the experience of the poet." It is, in other words, only by being "the master of experience" that a poet can be "the master of... (shrink)