The Verse Revolutionaries

ELKIN MATHEWS PUBLISHED from what Ernest Rhys described as ‘the smallest shop in the world’ in Vigo Street, just off Regent Street, on the corner of Savile Row, whose tailors must have been well beyond the pockets of most of Mathews’ customers.³⁸ The tiny bookshop – tiny in size that is, but stuffed with books from floor to ceiling on shelves and in piles – doubled, Pound was to discover, as an unofficial club for aspiring writers. In the late 1880s Mathews had joined forces with John Lane, the other publisher whom Pound had approached, in a publishing firm that brought out all the leading nineties poets under the imprint of the Bodley Head. They specialised in printing beautifully designed, limited editions of poetry, although they had some prose on their list too. Poetry was not selling as well as earlier in the century, and the fine limited editions were, paradoxically, a way of making poetry pay. Generous margins and large type were used to keep the typesetting costs down. The high-quality paper they were able to buy as cheap ends of rolls. They didn’t pay authors much in royalties, but the copies were not expensive, so their limited runs, calculated to meet the small market that still existed, sold well. Their literary adviser was the flamboyant Richard Le Gallienne, one of the Rhymers’ Club, known as ‘Narcissus’ in literary circles – according to Mathews, ‘neither Byron nor Shelley looked more the poet than he did’ – and on his recommendation, the Bodley Head published such writers as Le Gallienne himself, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Radford, Walter Crane, Arthur Symons, John Addington Symonds, Francis Thompson, John Todhunter, John Davidson, Oscar Wilde – including the edition of Salomé illustrated by Beardsley which had shocked Pound so much – as well as the Book of the Rhymers’ Club in which Yeats appeared.³⁹ For a while all went well, and the shop acquired the nickname of Parnassus because there were so many poets to be found clustered around it. In the public perception the Bodley Head was associated with all that was decadent, as Owen Seaman’s parody, ‘Ballad of a Bun’, vividly illustrated. This parody mocked – or perhaps castigated – Davidson’s ‘Ballad of a Nun’, a highly disturbing, though compelling, poem about a self-flagellating nun tormented by sexual fantasies. The nun eventually manages to lose her virginity and her ‘passion’s hoard’, but is saved from punishment by the Virgin Mary, who kisses her and calls her ‘sister’. Seaman’s poem went:

Mathews, ‘a gentle Lamb-like figure’, as Le Gallienne describes him, was on the whole remarkably tolerant of ‘decadence’ in poetry, but there were times when he felt it went too far.⁴¹ The partnership between Mathews and Lane had begun to crack by 1893. Mathews became, according to James Nelson’s history of his career, alarmed by Oscar Wilde’s increasing lack of discretion, both in the publication of ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’, which overtly treated ‘Uranian’ love, and by the fact that Wilde had seduced one of their clerks. But, paradoxically, the coup de grâce came the next year when Lane failed to tell him there was to be a dinner to celebrate the first issue of the Yellow Book, the notorious quarterly he would continue to publish until 1897. Lane suavely presented the unknowing Mathews’ apologies, and took all the credit for bringing out the controversial volume for himself. They separated in late 1894. Parnassus, the Athenaeum reminded its readers, had, after all, two peaks, a joke that must still have been circulating in London when Pound arrived, for he was to repeat it almost fifty years later, when he described his arrival in London from Venice with A Lume Spento, ‘copies of which DEEPosited with Elkin Mathews and “Indigo” Lane, the two peaks of Parnassus’.⁴² Mathews kept the Vigo Street shop, Lane the sign and imprint of the Bodley Head. Wilde for a while was thoroughly fed up with both of them, and planned to call the two menservants in The Importance of Being Earnest Lane and Mathews, though in the end he took pity on the gentle Mathews and named them Lane and Merriman.⁴³

Mathews continued to publish elegant ‘belles-lettres’, which he defined as ‘essays, poetry, drama, and that higher fiction in which the educated classes may be supposed to take an interest’.⁴⁴ He went on publishing the Rhymers and their associates – Dowson, Johnson, Selwyn Image, Michael Field (pseudonym of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Fiona Macleod and Yeats, including The Wind Among the Reeds, the collection Pound admired so much. Mathews had, in fact, himself attended the Rhymers’ Club meetings. He was deeply sympathetic to the Celtic Revival, and had been for some years a neighbour of the Yeats family in Bedford Park, the aesthetic hotbed of west London, so he had many personal links with these writers. But sales of poetry, after the Wilde trials in 1895 and the public turn against the decadents, had declined still further; the counter-decadent, pro-British National Observer, edited by W.E. Henley, whose journalists were nicknamed by Max Beerbohm ‘the Henley Regatta’, thundered:

There must be another trial at the Old Bailey, or a coroner’s inquest – the latter for choice; and of the Decadents, of their hideous conceptions of the meaning of Art, of their worse than Eleusinian mysteries, there must be an absolute end.⁴⁵

The only kind of poetry to flourish was the stirring imperialist strain that emerged from the ashes of decadence, like that by Rudyard Kipling, William Watson and Henry Newbolt, the last of whom luckily published several hugely popular volumes with Mathews. (Mathews never published any Rudyard Kipling, but in the highly successful run of exquisite children’s books that Mathews began to bring out in the late 1890s, after he had become a father himself, he brought out verses by Kipling’s mother and sister.) Mathews, however, was still dedicated to the cause of aesthetic poetry, and he conceived the idea of a series of slim, paper-wrapped volumes, still beautifully designed but cheaper yet again. The first was a Shilling Garland series, followed by several more, of which the most extensive was the Vigo Cabinet series, in which over 150 volumes appeared, generally at one shilling or 1s. 6d. In America Pound had of course known some of the Bodley Head’s and Mathews’ authors through the books pirated by Thomas Mosher, though the edition of Salomé that shocked him so much was probably the one brought out by the authorised American firm, Day and Copeland.

Though Mathews’ heart was in the nineties, by the time of his death in 1921 he had published a remarkable number of works by early modernists, or, as in most cases one should say, early works by modernist writers, in 1905 and 1907 publishing plays and prose by Synge, and in 1907 James Joyce’s book of poems, Chamber Music. He was to publish most of Pound’s books up to 1920, as well as Ford Madox Ford (then Hueffer), F.S. Flint, William Carlos Williams, Richard Aldington, Nancy Cunard, and the Cubist Poems by the avant-garde American artist and poet Max Weber. He did, it must be admitted, also turn down some famous volumes – Dubliners and Prufrock and Other Observations among them – and some of the later Pound he found hard to stomach. In spite of his initial caution, however, he was enthusiastic about the early Pound. Even during that first autumn, he occasionally asked Pound home for a meal and the night: Mathews had now moved from Bedford Park to the then village of Chorleywood, in Hertfordshire. His eleven-year-old daughter Nest was shocked by how thin Pound was, how ‘pallid’ and ‘spotty’, and noted in her diary: ‘I think Mr Pound is a very sickly young man’.⁴⁶ Perhaps the kindly Mathews thought the same.

Whatever the state of his health, Pound’s spirits may have dipped. Apart from the publication of ‘Histrion’, he was receiving little encouragement. Mathews was still making no commitment to the ‘San Trovaso’ manuscript that Pound had put together in Venice, and it had been rejected outright by Dent. Pound’s parents were criticising his poems as they had criticised his prose, his mother in particular complaining they were all far too self-absorbed, and suggesting that Kipling would be a good alternative model; both H.D. and Williams had been discouraging about A Lume Spento. Pound set about defending himself. To his mother he insisted that he wanted to write dramatic, not descriptive verse; after all, he pointed out, Shakespeare nearly always wrote in the first person. What he said to H.D. is lost, but to Williams, though touchingly grateful to him for reacting at all (‘I am dam glad to get some sincere criticism any how’), he wrote 19 pages refuting his objections.⁴⁷ Williams had complained – much to Pound’s indignation – that many of the poems had ‘bitter personal notes’, and were full of ‘poetic anarchy’, which laid them open to condemnation in the ‘eyes of too ruthless public’[sic]. Pound admitted to the collection’s being rather sombre, though he assured Williams it could have been worse – he had ‘[k]ept out of it one tremendously gloomy series of ten sonnets à la Thompson of the “City of Dreadful night”.’ Williams had also accused him of ‘unconstrained vagabondism’, to which Pound responded: ‘If any body ever shuts you up in Indianna for four months & you don’t at least write some unconstrained something or other, I give up hope for your salvation.’ He pointed yet again to his use of a persona to deflect the charge of writing ‘personal’ poetry, and says he does not care about the public (‘damn their eyes’). In Williams’ condemnation of his poetic anarchy Pound came up against the charge constantly levelled at him in the early reviews: Pound, who thought of himself, with some justification, as a tireless experimenter with complex and subtle forms, was repeatedly charged with formlessness.⁴⁸ (The reception of the Cantos would repeat this pattern.) ‘Sometimes,’ he told Williams stiffly, ‘I use rules of Spanish, Anglo-Saxon, & Greek metric that are not common in the english of Milton’s or Miss Austin’s day.’

Williams had also attacked the collection for lacking the ‘ultimate attainments of poesy’. Pound responded indignantly, ‘I wish no fooling that you would define your ultimate attainments of poesy’, and then went swiftly on to give his own:

1. To paint the thing as I see it.

2. Beauty.

3. Freedom from didactisism

4. It is only good manners if you repeat a few other men to at least do it better or more briefly. – utter originality is of course out of the question.

The first three of these still closely follow Pater, who, besides advocating the pursuit of beauty for its own sake, had emphasised the capturing of a subjective impression in art, arguing that ‘in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is’.⁴⁹ But in Pound’s fourth point, one might note, he is going beyond Pater; in asserting that ‘utter originality’ is out of the question, he is making not just a modernist, but almost a postmodernist admission.

As a coup de grâce, Pound had said dismissively to Williams: ‘I doubt however if you are sufficiently au courant to know just what the poets & musicians & painters are doing with a great deal of convention that has masqueraded as law’. Quite which artists Pound has in mind here would be interesting to know, because at this stage he was not yet so au courant himself with contemporary experimentation. Music he might have known a little about from Kitty – she took a keen interest in avant-garde composers – and although he had apparently read little Whitman, he did know at least one vers libre poet, W. E. Henley, a gritty poet of contemporary life, as well as the anti-decadent editor of the National Observer. Henley’s work had made an impact on him while still in America, though he never appears to have mentioned him in any positive way after he reached England: perhaps he discovered Henley was too much associated with Kipling and imperialism to be altogether someone he wanted to acknowledge as an influence. That vigorous, masculinist writing, however, probably had more impact on Pound than he liked to think. While he had been at Hamilton, Pound had mentioned to his mother he had borrowed from the library two of Henley’s most innovative and powerful collections of poetry, London Voluntaries and In Hospital, which like so much contemporary French writing made the modern city its subject matter, and both of which included poems that experimented with a form of free verse, generally one that still used some rhyme, but in an irregular and free way, with no fixed metre. Pound was not yet to acknowledge any concern with free verse, but he did send a poem based on Henley to Mary Moore. In 1908, Pound preferred complex, esoteric verse schemes, but the Zeitgeist was against his conscious preferences: although always musical and rhythmic, Pound’s pre-imagist verse often moves further in the direction of free verse than he was prepared to admit at the time. Henley was also to influence T.E. Hulme and Richard Aldington, though in each case they admitted it only to dismiss him. Henley has been unjustly neglected in the history of modern verse; he deserves his place in the story of the emergence of imagism.

In spite of these attacks and rejections from friends and the world at large, Pound did not lose heart. If no one would pay to publish his poems, once again he would do it himself. He arranged to pay a printer to bring out a booklet of fifteen poems, selected from his ‘San Trovaso’ manuscript. He called this selection, with his instinct for marketing, A Quinzaine for this Yule, in the expectation of catching the eye of Christmas shoppers. It was a classic Pound title – French and Ye Olde English mixed – and it worked. The 100 copies he could afford to have printed soon went, and he was able to persuade Mathews to pay for another 100 copies to appear under the Elkin Mathews imprint in late December, and at Mathews’ expense. He was launched.

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