Ezra Pound: ‘We have found our new Greece, suddenly. As the sense of balance came back upon Europe in the days before the Renaissance, so it seems to me does this sense of a saner stillness come now to us in the midst of our clangour of mechanisms.

The “mens sana in corpore sano,” the ethic of Odyssey, came then upon the tortured habits of mediaeval thought, and with no greater power for refreshment.

I am not saying this hastily, nor in an emotional flurry, not from a love of brandishing statement. I have had a month to think it over.

Hearing his first Greek professor, hearing for the first time the curious music of Theocritus, coming for the first time upon that classic composure which Dante had a little suggested in his description of limbo, Boccaccio must have felt, I think, little differently from what we have felt here, we few who have been privileged to receive the work of Mr. Tagore before the public have heard it.’