The VOU club … performed by ideoplasty”: The VOU Club was formed in 1935 and comprised a group of Japanese poets led by Kitasono Katue (1902–78) with whom Pound maintained a thirty-year epistolary friendship. Several of Pound's poems appeared in translation in the club's avant-garde magazine VOU, published in Tokyo and edited by Katue. With Pound's help, an Italian translation of Katue's essay on ideoplasty was published in the January 1938 issue of the magazine Broletto. In that same month, the London avant-garde journal Townsman: A Quarterly Review published the Katue essay excerpted here, Pound's “Vou Club [Introduction],” and a number of poems by VOU members. Katue's concept of ideoplasty— the suggestive capacity of the imagination—is termed ōka kannen (応化観念, “idea adjustment”) in the Japanese version of his essay. In the Criterion of January 1938, Pound professes to know “of no group of poets in Europe or America as alert as Mr. Kitasono's Tokio [sic] friends. I mean to say as conscious of the day that we live in.”

What he says is not alien to something I once wrote re Dr Williams’ poems: Pound's essay on the American poet William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), published in the Dial of November 1928, intersects Katue's intuitive-rational combination of imagery and ideoplasty as an “exact method” for poetry. Pound wonders whether Williams might be at his best “retaining interest in the uncommunicable or the hidden roots of the consciousness of people he meets, but confining his statement to presentation of their objective manifests.”

Gaudier's sculptural principles: Cf. notes GK 63.

“The sick-bay where Nelson died … stava un poco ad agio”: The English naval commander, Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson (1758–1805), died on the battleship HMS Victory after being shot in the shoulder by a French sharpshooter at the Battle of Trafalgar on October 21, 1805. The makeshift sickbay where Nelson expired was in the cramped cockpit on the orlop deck situated below the waterline.