III

POUND LATER CLAIMED that he first decided to be a poet when he was fifteen, that is, about the time he met Smith, and it may well have been this early friendship that led him to his discovery of his vocation. Certainly the white cravat and aesthetic garb that Pound took to wearing early in his university career, to the consternation of his more conservatively attired fellow-students, could well have been the product of his admiration for Smith. If his association with the Yeatsian art student did not influence his decision to be a poet – though it most likely did – it certainly encouraged him to act the poet, which he continued to do through all his London years. Pound became an artist in the tradition of dandy and showman established by Whistler, Wilde and Beardsley, outrageous but highly effective self-promoters. When Amy Lowell met him in 1913, she wrote to a friend: ‘I imagine that never, since the days of Wilde, have such garments been seen in the streets of London. He arrays himself like the traditional “poet” of the theatre.’³⁸ But Pound’s friendship with Smith undoubtedly played a crucial role in his early poetic career, opening up his horizons, enabling him to discover at an early age the heady world of aesthetic passion, and giving him his first close association with a fellow-artist.

Pound’s second friendship with an artist, this time a fellow-poet, was with William Carlos Williams, who came to the University of Pennsylvania in 1902. Word had got round that Pound was a literary type, and he was introduced to Williams as such. This was a very different kind of relationship from that with Smith, much more combative and wary. Though companionship was essential to Pound, friendship in the sense of an equal relationship was not something that came easily to him. He found the role of disciple (in the early days) or of guru and leader (increasingly) more congenial. In his relationship with Smith, admiring disciplehood seems to have played an important part; with Williams, Pound, although two years younger, did his best to condescend, though not entirely successfully. Williams was taken with Pound, it is true; ‘it just took one look and I knew it was it’. Before and after meeting Pound was, he said, like ‘BC and AD’, a compliment that oddly highlights how different they were.³⁹ For the forward-looking Williams perhaps the analogy of historical progress came naturally, but it was a curiously inappropriate simile to apply to meeting Pound, for whom AD was certainly not necessarily better than BC. Williams claimed later that as a student Pound was ‘completely indifferent’ to the present, and ‘absorbed, completely absorbed’ in ‘the romantic times’ of the past.⁴⁰ He never took Pound as seriously as Pound took himself; the real strength of the relationship, at any rate in those early years, seems to have lain in their sheer disregard for each other’s estimation of their work, combined with appreciation of their shared interest in writing. Pound, Williams wrote, ‘was not impressed’ by the poetry he showed him. ‘He was impressed with his own poetry; but then, I was impressed with my own poetry, too, so we got on pretty well.’⁴¹ Williams was writing imitation Keats and Pound imitation Pre-Raphaelite poetry, and they found identifying each other’s weaknesses easy.

Williams’ family had come to the States when he was a baby. His father was English, his mother Caribbean Spanish, of part Jewish descent. Williams’ home culture was in many ways European rather than American; he sometimes spoke Spanish at home, and had spent a year in a school in Geneva, and then in Paris. (‘I knew French which impressed Pound,’ Williams wrote later, ‘and he thought I knew more Spanish than I did. I never let on.’)⁴² His father was an advertising manager for a cologne manufacturer, never well off, but a man of culture. His mother, like H.D.’s, had wanted to be a painter, but also gave up that ambition on marriage. Williams studied dentistry, and later medicine, and, unlike Pound, was a hard worker, with little leisure outside his medical courses: he was pleased to have found someone with more time than himself for books and with enthusiasm for talking about them. Unlike Pound again, indeed to Pound’s amazement and disgust, Williams was to remain in the States, a central figure in non-expatriate American modernism. Williams and Pound sturdily continued for some years to pour scorn on the other’s work, particularly their respective first books. But they came to admire each other’s poetry: Pound helped Williams to get his second book, The Tempers, published in London in 1913 (though he was only prepared to admit to liking two of the poems), and was to ask Williams to contribute to the 1914 Des Imagistes anthology.⁴³ The imagist movement was to have a profound influence on Williams, whose poems were often more imagist than Pound’s own. Their sometimes cantankerous, always uneasy friendship was to last throughout their lives.

One of the curious things about Pound in those years was that he somehow made sure that Smith and Williams never met, in spite of the fact that Williams was acutely interested in the visual arts, and spent his Sundays – apart from church – painting. One of Williams’ other close friends at university was Charles Delmuth, later well known as an artist: Williams met Charles Sheeler in New York after Schamberg’s death, in about 1919 or 1920, and they became lifelong friends, with Williams writing about Sheeler’s work, which like his own focused on American urban modernity – all that Pound rejected. Yet it was only in the 1920s that Pound mentioned his friendship with Smith to Williams. Even in his Philadelphian days Pound’s life was already sprouting compartments. The university was, for the most part, at any rate in his first two years, the scene of ignominy and hostility; his friendship with Smith, happiness and acceptance. Perhaps he didn’t want to risk letting the two worlds make contact. But it is an indication of the limitations of his friendship with Williams. Williams was to claim Pound in his autobiography as one of his own few ‘intimate’ male friends, but he also clearly reveals the complex mixture of emotions they aroused in each other:

He was the livest, most intelligent and unexplainable thing I’d ever seen, and the most fun – except for his often painful self-consciousness and his coughing laugh. As an occasional companion over the years he was delightful, but one did not want to see him often or for any length of time. Usually I got fed to the gills with him after a few days. He, too, with me, I have no doubt … He was often brilliant but an ass. But I never (so long as I kept away) got tired of him, or, for a fact, ceased to love him … What I could never tolerate in Pound or seek for myself was the ‘side’ that went with all his posturings as a poet.⁴⁴

Pound may have made a splash in his ‘posturings’ as a poet at the University of Pennsylvania, but academically he had two undistinguished years. He moved on to complete his undergraduate degree at the smaller, private Hamilton College in New York State. Hamilton had been attended by the Reverend Carlos Tracy Chester, until 1901 the minister at their local Presbyterian church, and now a family friend: he later organised the publication of some of Pound’s earliest prose in the Philadelphian Book News Monthly, where he was co-editor, and Pound would dedicate to him his third book of poetry, Exultations. The actual decision to move appears to have been mainly that of the seventeen-year-old Pound, made on the grounds that Hamilton would offer him a range of European languages unavailable to him on his course at the University of Pennsylvania, where taking on extra languages at the third year was not permitted. It was Pound himself who visited Hamilton in June 1903 and arranged to enter the following academic year. His mother (and possibly very briefly Pound himself ) had hopes that he would make it to the lucrative diplomatic service, and that prospect may have been what persuaded his parents to pay the much greater cost of Hamilton. In addition, they perhaps hoped he would work harder in a smaller place, and away from Smith.

After his June visit Pound had been full of enthusiasm for this new move; he was, he told his father, ‘delighted with about everything’. Yet in the autumn, his beginnings at Hamilton were not propitious. Having written to explain to his father how vital it was, in spite of the cost, to join a fraternity ‘or be out in the cold’,⁴⁵ he was not accepted by a single one, and remained one of the few non-fraternised outcasts, a humiliating and lonely position in the private college system. After some months he admitted to his father (‘You needn’t tell mother I’m feeling this way about things’) that he was ‘tired of the place’, with no one congenial to share with (‘all the fellows fit to room with are in the frats’). He even suggested a return to the University of Pennsylvania.⁴⁶ Yet he stayed on at Hamilton, in spite of his loneliness. He did not wish to give up his aim of proficiency in several modern languages, and perhaps even more significantly loved the work and thrived on the kindness and friendship of several of the professors. At Pennsylvania the languages he had worked on were Latin and German, and some Middle English. At Hamilton he added French, Italian, Spanish and Provençal, all of which he studied with a distinguished young Romance scholar, William Pierce Shepard. He also learnt a little Greek, though his Greek was to remain rudimentary, and Anglo-Saxon, to which he took greatly, sending his mother home lists of Anglo-Saxon works that she should read. Hamilton was not so ‘modern’ as the University of Pennsylvania, and therefore not so determined to prove that the humanities could boast as many facts as a science subject; philology was less important, and enthusiasm more.

Pound was especially drawn to medieval Romance literature, which the Pre-Raphaelites’ romantic recreation of the Middle Ages predisposed him to admire. Dante Gabriel Rossetti had led him to Dante and the early Tuscan poets, but it was Shepard who enabled him to read them in the original, and was undoubtedly the Hamilton professor from whom Pound learnt most. He was a withdrawn, ascetic man (Mrs Pound described him as a ‘smokedried skeleton’), but although in general absorbed in his work and unsociable, he made something of an exception for Pound, who reported home pleasant visits to ‘Bill’ out of school hours.⁴⁷ The teacher with whom Pound became most friendly, however, was Joseph Darling Ibbotson. Ibbotson, known by the students as ‘Bib’, taught English Literature, Anglo-Saxon and Hebrew. Pound does not seem actually to have learnt Hebrew, though ‘Bible Study’, presumably with Ibbotson, was one of several subjects in which he gained a distinction. He did a course on the ‘Literary and dramatic study of the Book of Job’, which was perhaps the foundation of his continuing admiration for, and possibly unconscious emulation of, the Old Testament prophets. A letter home to his mother in March 1905 is much more cheerful than any of the previous year:

Yesterday was quite a day. Two decent classes & two of tomorrows jobs done in a.m.

P.m. about two hundred pages of french on Raimon de Miravel troubadour of Provence.

Evening. Called on Bill [Shepard] he was pleased with what I had been about during week & is willing to give me some Dante which is not catalogued next term … Going on my homeward way at 10 pm I noticed Bibs lights ablaze & knowing that he is still mostly college boy despite his family & professorship I dropped in & we smoked & ate & talked an hour or two longer. All these calls were very pleasant. Today we have been hearing wonders about medical missions.⁴⁸

Were the medical missions just a sop to his pious mother? At this stage Pound himself still went to chapel, as he would duly report home, though more than once, as here, mentioning his attendance rather as a conciliatory afterthought. In another letter, after an excited account of a translation he had just done, he adds enigmatically ‘Prex [the principal, Dr Stryker] preached a philological sermon this morning’.⁴⁹ Pound was later to date the beginning of his move away from institutionalised religion to 1901, though he continued going to church for several years after that. Undoubtedly his meeting with Brooke Smith and his ‘advanced ideas’ in 1901 played a significant part in his ceasing to be an orthodox believer, though Pound blamed the arrival of a new and hearty minister, a writer of bad verses for the papers, for this apostasy. Till then he had been, he said, an earnest Christian, brought up to be a regular churchgoer by Homer and Isabel, themselves conscientious and devout Presbyterians. They appear to have belonged to the liberal branch of the American Presbyterian Church, which was relatively undogmatic, able to accommodate, for example, evolutionary theory. According to the historian Francis Prucha, American Presbyterianism’s chief belief was in the American way of life. Hence its liberal tolerance did not extend to Catholicism, although Emersonian Transcendentalism was quite acceptable. Pound had gone as a schoolboy with his parents to the Italian Presbyterian Mission in Philadelphia, for which Homer was a tireless worker, striving to transform easygoing Roman Catholic immigrants into strenuous American Protestant citizens.

Pound was later to blame his Presbyterian beginnings for his own unremitting missionary spirit, as he saw his compulsion to persuade all whom he met that their greater happiness lay in recognising that his views were right. During Pound’s absence at Hamilton, his parents were spending increasing time on the downtown Philadelphian missions, and both Homer and Isabel were clearly disturbed by their son’s growing enthusiasm for writers who purveyed the kind of backward Romish superstitions from which they wrestled to save the Italian immigrants. Pound’s obsession with the medieval past was very much at variance with American liberal Presbyterianism, whose progressive theology was already known, ironically in terms of their son’s future, as ‘modernist’. Isabel wrote to him, one deduces from Pound’s reply (Pound rarely saved his parents’ letters, unlike their hoarding of every scrap of his), urging him to attend to the moral and intellectual virtues of modern American culture, including modernist theologians and the Emersonians. Emerson was a great favourite of Pound’s mother, but Pound was bitterly opposed to his call for a specifically American poet who rejected the European past. Pound responded vigorously:

The joy I get from the mediaevalians [?] is this. You current eventers think you so god darn smarter than anybody else that is a comfort to go back to some quiet old cuss of the dark, so called quiet centuries, & find written down the sum & substance of whats worth while in your present day frothiness …

But for the love of right mercy & justice don’t try to show off modern literature & brain quality

Oh yes. ‘E’merson to make one think! (mainly to detect his limitations)

But find me a phenomenon of any importance in the lives of men & nations that you cannot measure with the rod of Dante’s alegory … until you can show me men of today who shall excel certain men some time dead, I shall continue to study Dante and the Hebrew prophets.⁵⁰

In many ways this reads much like the arguments Pound would be having in his first years in London, defending his love of past writers against the claims of the present. Though from this letter it hardly sounds as if he were as yet giving up his Christian faith, however robustly Pound rebuffed his mother, he must have felt troubled by the problem of reconciling his admiration for the Catholic Middle Ages, both on the one hand the passionate amours of the troubadours and on the other the paradisal visions of Dante, with a Protestant faith whose chief dogmatic requirements were to uphold conventional morality and oppose Roman Catholicism. Pound might have learnt from Smith of the strong precedent among the nineties poets for conversion to Catholicism, but such a move would have been considerably more unacceptable than agnosticism among the Philadelphian middle classes. Yet if Homer and Isabel feared that Pound would go over to Rome, they were mistaken. By the time Pound got far enough away conceivably to contemplate such a thing, the personal, and indeed cultural moment had gone. As Yeats was later famously to describe the end of the 1890s:

Then in 1900 everybody got down off his stilts: henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic Church; or if they did I have forgotten.⁵¹

Pound became neither a Catholic nor a decadent. For all his later admiration for ‘Latin Order’ as a principle, he would scarcely have been happy submitting to church discipline. He, like Yeats, like H.D., like many he was to meet in London, was to be drawn to more esoteric yet inclusive beliefs, reinventing rather than either simply accepting or rejecting Christianity.

In the meantime, for Pound, as for many before him, part of the attraction of the aesthetic doctrines he absorbed at this stage was that they helped loosen the grip of conventional Christianity without necessarily shedding the religious spirit altogether. For all the ultimately secular and sceptical basis to Pater’s thought, aestheticism was not called ‘the Religion of Beauty’ for nothing. Aestheticism made it possible to escape Christian dogma without giving up a sense of the spiritual or the ineffable; it made it possible to hold on to parts of Christian symbolism or tradition whilst discarding its dogmatic imperatives. In the Provençal poets, with their quasi-heretical cult of love, which Pound believed, following Pater, was partly a revival of pre-Christian traditions, he found a religion to his liking. Like the works of Dante, Provençal French was not generally on the Hamilton timetable, and Shepard had in this case too agreed to a request from Pound for special tuition. Provençal literature occupied a special place for Pater; these poets, whom he praised in his essay on ‘Aesthetic Poetry’, in The Renaissance and elsewhere, he argued had emerged at the ‘exquisite’ moment when the Renaissance was born within the Middle Ages:

Here and there, under rare and happy conditions, in pointed architecture, in the doctrines of romantic love, in the poetry of Provence, the rude strength of the middle ages turns to sweetness, and the taste for sweetness generated there becomes the seed of the classical revival in it, prompting it constantly to seek after the springs of perfect sweetness in the hellenic world.⁵²

This combination of ‘rude strength’ and ‘sweetness’ must have appealed to Pound. It is certainly the version of the Provençal poet that he himself was to present – vigorous yet tender, spirited yet spiritual, fighters as well as melodious poets. But what must have attracted him even more in his state of defiant social outcast and lonely aesthete was Pater’s further description of the Provençal poets as ardent rebels against their society, heretical, beauty-loving spirits, tinged with paganism, fighting against a moralistic, oppressive authority. Pater identified them as ‘antinomians’, a description, incidentally, that has been persuasively attached to Pound, in theological terms an antinomian being one who insists that God speaks directly to him or herself, and refuses to bend to church dictates.⁵³ Pound’s belief that he, as a poet, was, like the troubadours, a follower of ‘a strange rival religion’ in opposition to the modern world and its values began in those early years and remained deep.

For the next seven years, most of Pound’s poetry was to consist of translations, pastiches, recreations and reinventions of the poetry that he had found through the Pre-Raphaelites and the aesthetes, and that Shepard had enabled him to read. The method he used with Shepard in studying these poets was to write translations of their work in verse that replicated their complex rhyme schemes, a poetic strategy that he would in one way or another employ frequently in his later career, finding a form that, if it did not replicate, echoed the original. Pound gave a warm tribute to Shepard at the beginning of his 1910 book on what Pater would have called ‘medieval Renaissance poetry’, The Spirit of Romance: ‘My thanks are due to Dr Wm. P. Shepard of Hamilton College, whose refined and sympathetic scholarship first led me to some knowledge of French, Italian, Spanish and Provençal’.⁵⁴ The importance to his imagination of these poets was to remain to the end; the late Cantos are still threaded with them.