SOURCE: Gill, Jonathan. “Ezra Pound and Langston Hughes: The ABC of Po'try.” Paideuma 29, nos. 1-2 (spring/fall 2000): 79-88.

In the following essay, Gill discusses correspondence that took place between Ezra Pound and Langston Hughes from 1931 to 1951.

For sheer chutzpah, nothing beats Ezra Pound's letters. Pound wrote to Louis Zukofsky in a Yiddish-English that rarely stopped short of offense, addressed James Joyce in a mock Irish-English, and communicated with his publisher James Laughlin in an ornery Yankee-English. Nowhere, though, did Pound test the patience of a correspondent more than with Langston Hughes. Pound not only addressed the premier African American poet of the twentieth century in black English, but at one point in a 1951 letter went so far as to correct as inauthentic Hughes's own language—the phrase “I ain't got another thing in the U.S.A. on which to lean,” from Hughes's book Simple Speaks His Mind...