Late in his career, Emerson used this little story to size up what he called “the ambition of individualism,” a subject he could claim, mutatis mutandis, to know a little something about. But so could Ezra Pound, of course, who in the Cantos seems to take the possibility of clapping copyright on the world more seriously than even Emerson himself could have imagined. And Emerson's image of the bitten world holding the biter fast by the teeth is, in an almost uncanny way, an accurate image for the death struggle in which Pound found himself at the Disciplinary Training Center outside Pisa, when the bitten world of history – not Pound's ideal history of a fascist “city of Dioce” built upon the timeless principles of a Confucian order, but the real history of the Second World War and the lunar rubble of liberal democracy's triumph over fascism – would not let Pound disengage himself from the ideological commitments he had latched onto in his poetry, prose, and radio speeches.

Emerson's little parable, however, is not, finally, about the price one pays for one's ideological positions; it is not even an admonition about the dangers of politicizing one's cultural practice.