Brancusi in turn received pugnacious support from the poet Ezra Pound: "I was sick to hear a bastard in New York made you pay duty on your sculpture. I could spit in the eye of the skinflint in charge of these matters." The writer ee cummings wrote a parody of Brancusi for Vanity Fair, describing one Ivan Narb – from Latvia, not Romania, but like Brancusi of agricultural stock. Cummings imagined Narb hoeing his father's potatoes on the outskirts of the town of Blurb: "Dreaming of the day when each animate or inanimate thing – a rose, a button, a cloud, an eyebrow, a mountain, a particular time of day, nay even a potato – would flower forth in new and cosmic forms." Brancusi was a celebrity. And the scene was set for a mighty and farcical cause célèbre.