Salutation The Second - Analysis

A parent talking to his unruly children

The poem’s central claim is that the speaker’s new poems are meant to be brazenly alive, even if that means being called vulgar, nonsensical, or childish. Pound stages this as a comic, affectionate pep talk to his own work: You were praised, my books, he says, because he’d just come from the country and was twenty years behind the times. The early praise wasn’t pure triumph; it happened because an audience was ready for something belatedly “new.” That small confession already makes the speaker both proud and suspicious of fashion. He won’t reject the earlier books—I do not disown you—but he demands loyalty back: do not you disown what comes after.

Modern poems without costumes

The speaker presents the new poems as stripped of period dress: without quaint devices, with nothing archaic. This is not just an aesthetic preference; it’s a challenge to readers who want poetry to arrive pre-approved by tradition. When he says, Observe the irritation, he’s almost enjoying the predictable backlash. The phrase frames the audience’s displeasure as a specimen in a jar, something to study rather than fear. The poems’ “nakedness” is thus both a vulnerability and a weapon: they refuse to hide behind antique manners.

The chorus of complaints he can recite by heart

Pound gives us the critics’ voices in a tight burst of quoted questions: Is this the nonsense we expect? Where is the Picturesque? Where is the vertigo of emotion? These complaints are revealing because they don’t ask for truth or precision; they ask for a familiar product. Even the nostalgic verdict—his first work was the best—is a way of keeping the poet in his place. The last jab, lost his illusions, tries to shame him for growing up, as if maturity were failure. The tension here is sharp: the public wants poets to be safely irrational and prettily overwhelmed, while the speaker wants poems that are alert, present-tense, and socially disruptive.

The turn: from defense to command

The poem pivots on a sudden release of energy: Go, little naked and impudent songs. After listing judgments, the speaker stops arguing and starts sending the poems out like street performers. The tone becomes gleefully insubordinate—Go with a light foot!—and even parenthetical, as if he can’t resist adding mischief: Or with two light feet. The repeated Go is not mere encouragement; it’s a decision to accept scandal as a measure of life. If the audience won’t grant legitimacy, the poems will take up space anyway, dancing shamelessly in public.

Rejuvenation by rudeness

What kind of “life” are these poems supposed to bring? Not comfort, but embarrassment. They must Greet the grave and the stodgy with thumbs at your noses, armed with bells and confetti like carnival interrupters. Even cultural institutions are targets: Rejuvenate even The Spectator, a name that stands for respectable, watchful taste. The speaker’s cure for cultural stiffness is deliberate indecorum: make cat calls, make people blush, and even Dance the dance of the phallus. By invoking Cybele and the indecorous Gods, he proposes a pagan counter-tradition—older than propriety, and therefore able to laugh at it. The contradiction is productive: he rejects quaint archaism, yet he reaches for ancient deities precisely because they authorize a world where “good taste” is not the highest law.

What does he want to destroy in the “practical people”?

When the poems are told to Ruffle the skirts of prudes and talk about knees and ankles, the goal isn’t simply to be dirty; it’s to expose how thin the veneer of propriety is. And when they’re sent to practical people to jangle their door-bells, the prank becomes philosophical: tell them you do no work and will live forever. Is that arrogance—or a claim that art refuses the accounting ledger? The poem dares the reader to notice that “practicality” can be its own kind of fantasy, just better dressed.

A manifesto disguised as a romp

By the end, the speaker is less concerned with being understood than with being unignorable. The earlier anxiety about timing—being behind the times—turns into a strategy: the poems will create their own time by forcing reactions. They will not provide the expected Picturesque or ready-made vertigo; instead, they will make the room uncomfortable, then wake it up. The “salutation” of the title turns out to be a rude hello: a greeting that startles the culture into remembering it has a body, a past, and a capacity for laughter.