FLINT WOULD LATER comment that the Tour Eiffel meetings had been started for ‘solace and amusement’ by Hulme, and the participants appear to have found them lively entertainment; even Pound would eventually admit that they had been ‘fun’.141 But they were also serious discussions about poetic form. One intriguing feature of Flint’s list of forms with which the Tour Eiffel poets experimented is the distinction he makes between ‘pure vers libre’ and Hulme’s ‘rhymeless poems’. As Flint knew well, French vers libre does not mean ‘free verse’. Un vers is a line, not a verse, and vers libre meant in the first instance getting away from fixed line length, as Storer had advocated for the English pentameter. Vers libre still had form: not a prescribed one, but the form that the poet felt best suited to the poem. Much French vers libre continued to use some rhyme, generally irregularly, with mid-line rhymes, half-rhymes, assonance, etc., and what Flint later translated as ‘rhythmic constants’, echoing or repeating cadences. (Much of T.S. Eliot’s poetry follows this form.) Of the five poems that are preserved in ‘The Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme’, only ‘Autumn’ is completely rhymeless. The other four, although they have no fixed form, use irregular rhyme and rhythmic cadences; for example, ‘The Embankment’, which Hulme subtitled: ‘The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night’:
Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.142
Lines 1 and 4 rhyme, lines 3, 6 and 7 rhyme, and ‘me’ in line 7 gives an internal rhyme back to lines 1 and 4; the poem uses plentiful alliteration (all those ‘f’s, for example). Yet for all the variable length of its lines, the poem is as close to the iambic pentameter as many passages of late Shakespeare. Incidentally, yet again, like ‘Autumn’, it is a poem that strives to domesticate and soften a cold and indifferent universe, the final couplet enwrapping the ‘I’ of the poem in the homely, star-eaten blanket. Of the eight poems published in the most recent edition of Hulme’s writing, all but one mention the sky; Hulme was still reworking the Canadian sky’s vast emptiness. Yet ‘The Embankment’ perhaps also marks the move from the nineties decadence of the flashy beginning to the plain, unadorned writing Hulme thought appropriate to modern poetry at the end.
In the rather wider selection of Hulme’s poems that Alun Jones published, the majority of those previously unpublished were rhymeless, and whilst they are less successful on the whole, clearly Hulme’s boldness in completely abandoning rhyme impressed the Tour Eiffel group. Free verse as it has developed in English has been most typically rhymeless, rather than ‘pure vers libre’. Campbell included some rhymeless poems in The Mountainy Singer. Take the following poem, for example, one of a number drawn from his ‘tramps’ in the Ulster countryside.
Night, and I travelling
An open door by the wayside,
Throwing out a shaft of warm yellow light.
A whiff of peat-smoke;
A gleam of delf on the dresser within;
A woman’s voice crooning, as if to a child.
I pass on into the darkness.143
This poem – by design or not – illustrates Hulme’s Bergsonian poetic technique of ‘piling up of distinct images in different lines’, evoking in their combination a sudden moment of light, warmth and humanity surrounded by the darkness of the first and last lines. His poem, ‘The Dark’, in the ‘sacred Hebrew form’ that Flint mentioned in his ‘History of Imagism’, is a powerful poem in its own right, and although that kind of long cumulative repetition did not feature in later imagist poetry, simpler forms of such biblical or liturgical repetition of words and cadences (such as the pattern, ‘The Lord bless you, the Lord be with you, the Lord keep you and shield you’) certainly do, particularly in H.D.’s work (‘Whirl up, sea –/whirl up your pointed pines,/splash your great pines’). But Campbell also experimented with very brief imagistic poems:
Darkness.
I stop to watch a star shine in a boghole –
A star no longer, but a silver ribbon of light.
I look at it, and pass on.144
As always, Campbell’s subject-matter was Ireland, but he presented it in both experimental and traditional forms. Although neither of these brief, rhymeless poems is a haiku as such, one could hazard the guess that their simplicity and brevity shows the Japanese influence, fused perhaps with that of Gaelic poetry. Campbell’s sense of the Irish poetic tradition had much in common with the view of the Japanese that Flint would have gained from Couchoud; both believed they had uncovered the art of an innately poetic people, immediate and direct, capturing the ever-mobile fluidity of the natural world.
Flint too still wavered between traditional and freer forms. He wrote in spring 1909, in the preface to his book of poems, In the Net of the Stars, that ‘I have, as the mood dictated, filled a form or created one. I have used assonance for the charm of it, and not rhymed when there was no need to. In all, I have followed my ear and my heart, which may be false. I hope not.’145 Even if in practice few of his poems of this time are as innovative as Campbell’s or Hulme’s, one can see the direction in which he would develop, and indeed most of the poems in that collection must have predated the Tour Eiffel meetings. But form was not all they discussed. Hulme insisted, Flint says, on ‘accurate presentation and no verbiage’ and ‘there was also a lot of talk and practice among us … of what we called the Image’.146 Not, of course, that they called themselves imagists. Pound was not to invent the word for another three years, but it would be out of these debates that imagism would emerge. If they had felt themselves unified enough – which they did not – to give themselves a name it would be more likely at that stage to have been impressionist, since Storer, like Hulme, had insisted that was what modern poetry should be: ‘To argue for or against impressionism at this time of the day would be as foolish as to write a treatise proving the circulation of the blood,’ he had said in his essay in Mirrors of Illusion.147 In the England of 1909, the year before Roger Fry’s first Post-Impressionist Exhibition, Impressionism still represented all that was most modern in art.
Pound himself, it is generally agreed, took little part in their discussions. Humphrey Carpenter suggests the trouble was that Pound was not a good listener, which he was not, but it was also the case that he was not ready for these ideas. He had no interest as yet in vers libre. As Flint wrote, Pound ‘could not be made to believe there was any French poetry after Ronsard’; his heart was still with his troubadours.148 Pound’s only response to the modern world was still rejection. Yet even if these avant-garde poetics meant little to him at the time, Pound liked to have literary friends; in addition, the Tour Eiffel meetings gave him a captive and appreciative audience for his poems. Although Pound may not have been much concerned with their quest for modern poetry, some of the group at any rate appear to have realised that Pound’s poetry had a distinctive voice, and that he, like them, cared deeply about technical experiment, even though for different reasons. On his first visit to the Tour Eiffel, Pound read – indeed shouted – his latest Bertrans de Born poem to the assembled poets, presenting it with some confidence, for it had already been accepted by the prestigious English Review. Entitled ‘Sestina: Altaforte’, it began: ‘Damn it all! All this our South stinks peace./You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to music!/I have no life save when the swords clash.’ (‘Altaforte’ refers to Born’s castle, Altafort, nowadays Hautefort; not, as I imagined for many years, being an obscure musical term meaning ‘high-pitched and loud’.) Whatever else Hulme thought of it, he must have conceded that here was a poet who like himself wanted to forge a masculine poetry. Flint was later, with some justification, to describe this poem as a rant. The waiter at the Tour Eiffel apparently thought the same, as this was the occasion when he hastily screened them off from the other guests. Like so many of Pound’s poems, then and later, it is a curious mixture of the colloquial and the archaic, as well as a disturbing mélange of violence and glamour: ‘No cry like the battle’s rejoicing/When our elbows and swords drip the crimson … May God damn for ever all who cry “Peace!”’149 It feels unpleasantly in tune with the growing militarism of the pre-First World War political world; perhaps by 1913 Pound – though still proud of its technique – had become uneasily aware of this, as he was to comment then that a poem with such a theme could not be an important one. At the time, however, he triumphantly described it to his parents as ‘the most blood-curdling thing the good city has seen since dear Kit Marlowe’s day – unadulterated lust for battle & incidentally B de B in a peevish humour – accurate reading would require 54 inch chest.’150 The Tour Eiffel must have been thankful that Pound’s chest was luckily so inadequate, but the group could not have failed to realise that ‘Sestina Altaforte’ used a form that had very little in common with conventional English rhymed stanzas. While Pound prided himself on his antiquarian mastery of this intricate twelfth-century form, to the other members of the group he was an experimenter like themselves, using unusual models to write new poetry.
Flint does not mention what other poems were read on Pound’s first night at the Tour Eiffel, but one can deduce that Campbell either read from his 1907 collection, The Gilly of Christ, or lent it to Pound, because Pound was back a week later with his own version of the title poem. If he was not concerned with their theories, he took more interest in the poetry itself. Although Pound and Campbell’s subject-matter – medieval Provence and peasant Ireland – might appear very different, their poetry shared common traits. Like Pound’s, Campbell’s poems were characteristically first person, spoken through a persona, colloquial, taken from an earlier, fresher tradition, often drawing on myth or the past, and, often, as even in Campbell’s free verse poems quoted above, about a wanderer, someone on the move. Ireland, like Provence, had a tradition of the wandering minstrel, a figure centrally important to both Pound and Campbell. Both of them frequently produced poems that hover between translation and pastiche, imitation or re-creation. In addition Campbell’s approach to poetry was, like Pound’s at that stage, much more quasi-mystical than the highly theoretical Hulme. Like Yeats, Campbell was fascinated by the Irish peasants’ fusion of Christianity and pre-Christian myth, and it was, after all, less than a year since Pound had, in A Lume Spento, compared the Provençal mingling of pagan and Christian beliefs with those recorded in The Celtic Twilight. Campbell’s The Gilly of Christ is another version of this.
The Gilly of Christ poems are based on legends about Christ’s appearance in the West of Ireland that Campbell had found in Hyde’s translations of the religious songs of Connaught, and the poem after which the collection is named is spoken by one of Christ’s disciples, though called in this context, with Christ roaming round the Irish countryside, his ‘gilly’, from the Gaelic giolla, a servant. The poem has a very simple ballad form, and is possibly influenced, at any rate in conception, by Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ (‘And did those feet, in ancient time,/Walk upon England’s mountains green’) as well as by the Gaelic folk legend. It begins:
I am the gilly of Christ,
The mate of Mary’s Son;
I run the roads at seeding-time,
And when the harvest’s done …
No eye has ever seen me
But shepherds hear me pass,
Singing at fall of even
Along the shadowed grass …
All know me only the Stranger,
Who sits on the Saxons’ Height
He burnt the bacach’s little house
On last St Brigid’s night.
He sups off silver dishes,
And drinks in a golden horn,
But he will wake a wiser man
Upon the Judgment morn …151
This fusion, in a swiftly moving verse form, of folk traditions, Christian judgement and anti-British feeling (in the reference to ‘the Stranger’ who burns the peasant’s cottage) is Campbell’s reinvention of Celtic forms as a means of resistance. The next week, Pound produced his own version of disciplehood, in his case spoken by a different ‘mate of Mary’s son’ and an attack on contemporary Christianity rather than on the British in Ireland. Pound’s poem was entitled the ‘Ballad of the Goodly Fere’, with an introductory note telling the reader that ‘Simon Zealotes speaketh it somewhile after the Crucifixion’, and another note explaining that ‘Fere = Mate, Companion’. The language, as in the ‘Sestina’, is both vigorously colloquial and archaised, and if the Christ who emerges is not as bloodthirsty as Bertrans de Born, he is still a great deal more phallic than most pious versions of Christ:
Ha’ we lost the goodliest fere o’ all
For the priests and the gallows tree?
Aye lover he was of brawny men,
O’ ships and the open sea.
When they came wi’ a host to take Our Man
His smile was good to see,
‘First let these go!’ quo’ our Goodly Fere,
‘Or I’ll see ye damned,’ said he …
Oh we drunk his ‘Hale’ in the good red wine
When we last made company,
No capon priest was the Goodly Fere
But a man o’ men was he.152
And so on for another ten verses. Pound was immensely pleased with it. He wrote to his father that it was ‘probably the strongest thing in English since “Reading Gaol” and a thing which anyone can understand’.153 This desire to be comprehensible was something new for Pound, who had written in 1907 to Viola Baxter full of scorn for Thomas Mosher’s suggestion that he should make his poetry easier for his readers to comprehend; perhaps Campbell’s simplicity had impressed him, though again it was not something he would always aim for in the future. ‘The Ballad of the Goodly Fere’ was to be accepted by the English Review, although Ford must have guessed the trouble it would cause. To Pound’s delight, 150 readers cancelled their subscriptions in outrage at the poem’s apparent blasphemy. A sexualised Christ (‘no capon priest’), and possibly (as a ‘lover o’ brawny men’) one of dubious sexual preference, was too much. For Pound, the ballad simply restored what centuries of hypocrisy had obscured. Four years later Pound was solemnly to affirm that he had written the poem because he had been shocked by listening to blasphemous talk, but this was surely a coat-trailing exercise to perplex the easily scandalised.154 When Pound was next invited to the Poets’ Club, not in fact till December, he asked Campbell – who obviously knew its origin – to read the poem for him, telling his father that ‘Campbell, “the dark man from the narth” read the “Goodly Fere” splendidly. I wish I had his voice.’155
With those not outraged, this ballad became one of Pound’s most popular poems, and perhaps not only because anyone could understand it. It caught the mood of the moment. His rejection of the image of the ‘pale Galilean’ whom Swinburne had condemned because the ‘world had turned grey with [his] breath’ appealed deeply to those impatient with the subservience, or in Nietzsche’s term, the ‘slave morality’, that they felt Christianity and a so-called Christian, in fact hierarchical and unjust, society imposed. Yeats, for example, an ardent Nietzschean, although often ambivalent about Pound’s work, greatly admired the poem. Eliot, on the other hand, having praised it in 1917 for its metrical skill, which is considerable, had come, once a Christian, to disapprove of it strongly, and excluded it from his 1928 Faber edition of Pound’s Selected Poems. Pound, who believed with increasing conviction that Christ like the pagan Greeks had celebrated sexuality rather than condemning it, would say in a poem the next year that he suspected Nietzsche of being ‘the one modern Christian’. ‘I am sick,’ he wrote there, ‘of the toothless decay/of God’s word as they usually preach it;/I am sick of bad blasphemous verse/that they sell with their carols and hymn tunes.’156 If anything that he thought ‘blasphemous’ had contributed to this poem, it would have been what was more conventionally known as pious. When Pound himself refused to let Edward Marsh have it for Georgian Poetry in 1912 on the grounds that it illustrated no ‘modern tendency’, as far as the theme went he was not entirely correct.157
When, some time later, Ford Madox Ford paid Pound £5 for the ‘Ballad’ and two other poems, Pound promptly spent the money on an outrageously dandified velvet jacket. Concern about decent clothes had been a repeated theme of his letters home. In 1909 clothes were the badge of class; one could skimp on one’s lodging or food, but social exclusion threatened those who did not pass muster with their outfits – a situation which on various occasions was to rack both Flint and Lawrence. Robert Louis Stevenson had recounted ruefully, a little earlier, how, when a row with his father left him impoverished for some months and he was forced to don working-class clothes while travelling steerage to the States, he found himself to his mortification suddenly invisible to the better-off young ladies on board. Pound, of course, was never in danger of being invisible. His flaming hair saw to that. And he had no intention of dressing simply to conform. He was bent on continuing the habits of his student days, dressing the part of the aesthetic genius. There was, perhaps, a closer link between his dress style and his choice to remain on the margins of the Tour Eiffel group than might at first appear. Pound continued to model himself partially on Yeats, but even more on Whistler, the towering individualist artist, contemptuous of the common herd, and in a year or two would actually begin to sport a version of Whistler’s grey waisted jacket, and invest in a similar ebony cane. The kind of artistic life that was soon to be imported into the English scene from the continent, the avant-garde school or movement rather than the solitary genius, was still beyond his imagination. If he had offered to be Kitty Heyman’s impresario in Venice, for now the only artist he was anxious to promote was himself. It would be some time before the potential excitement of the position of a leader of an artistic guerrilla force would tempt him into other paths, and his extraordinary skills – and blind spots – as an impresario of the literary world would change his direction for ever.