POUND, EZRA. Typed letter signed ("E Pound" -- a large, blue-pencil scrawl) to the book reviewer and critic Harry Hansen, Rapallo, 23 January 1928. 4 pages, 4to, double-spaced, with a few holograph insertions and several corrections, some slight marginal tears. A fine (though not untypical "Rapallo rant") letter on the state of literary culture (or lack of it) in America, in which Pound mentions Amy Lowell, H.L. Mencken, and discusses The Nation, Dial, and his own Exile: "...America will remain provincial as long as it takes ANY idea 10 or 20 years to get into public print (as distinct from Exile or other semi-private contraption). It may interest you to know that the late Amy [Lowell] considered that I had gone completely lunatic when I exposed the idea to her [of 'subsidizing capable writers or artists']...There is no intelligentzia in America, in continental sense: people alive both to literature and to civics and ideas...there comes a point when government by sonzofbitches, for sonzofbitches butts into the writer's affairs, his own private affairs, and at that point he shd. rize up and raise HELL, and organize and define the nature of bitch...If you can find efficient blow:hole, I may attempt to dry your tears and can Exile (which doesn't, by the way eat into my revenues)...Fourth number a vacuum re/which I am open to constructive suggestions. Fifth number planned [none was published]...[H.L.] Mencken dont seem to want action, just wants country to remain a damn ass so that he can draw caricatures of it..."