Writing from England in 1914 (for Poetry Chicago) Ezra Pound was in characteristically pessimistic but fighting mood:

America is like England, America is very much what England would be with the two hundred most interesting people removed. One's life is the score of this two hundred with whom one happens to have made friends. I do not see that we need to say that the rest live under them, but it is certain that what these people say comes to pass. They live in their mutual credence, and thus they live things over and fashion them before the rest of the world is aware. I dare say it is a Cassandra-like and useless faculty, at least from the world's point of view. (`The Prose Tradition in Verse')

Among the score of friends who made up Pound's life at that time were Ford Madox Hueffer (a review of whose Collected Poems was supposedly the main purpose of Pound's essay) and Allen Upward whose The Divine Mystery had been enthusiastically reviewed by Pound in The New Freewoman the preceding November. Pound told his American readers that, like Hueffer, Upward was one of the despised and neglected seers of contemporary London:

Of course, if you think things ten or fifteen or twenty years before anyone else thinks them you will be considered absurd and ridiculous. Mr Allen Upward, thinking with great lucidity along very different lines, is still considered absurd. ...