I

ON 15 APRIL 1909, the day before Personae was published, and a week before he joined the Tour Eiffel group, Pound had written home in what was clearly a fit of uncertainty and depression. He was getting nowhere, he complained. He was stagnating. He needed to go to Italy for sun, a cheaper life and better food. His irritable spirits may have been exacerbated by pre-publication nerves. Personae would, after all, be his first full collection to be brought out at the publisher’s expense; he could now claim to be a professional, not just an amateur writer; he was getting known in London literary circles. But he was still a young man, not yet twenty-four, on the edge of things; would he be acknowledged as a serious poet? would he be given the kind of praise he craved? Pound was desperate to be acclaimed. Italy would perhaps have been a bolt-hole if failure were his fate.

In the event, a bolt-hole wasn’t needed. By the end of the month Pound was back in ebullient form. Success was on its way. During that month he had effortlessly entered the Ford Madox Ford circle; he had been welcomed by the Tour Eiffel group; he had had his first poem accepted by the English Review; and, most cheering of all, he had seen the publication of Personae to remarkably kind reviews. Acceptance and acclaim appeared assured. On 30 April he was telling his father that the ‘London game seems to have too many chances in it to risk missing them by absence’.¹ No less an authority than Ford advised staying in England. Two more books, Pound reported, should be out by autumn.

Pound had yet another reason for his revived spirits. It looked as if he would finally meet Yeats, the lodestar that had originally drawn him to London. During the eight months Pound had been in London, Yeats had scarcely visited the capital, having been in Ireland or France for most of the time, but Pound had told his father in early March that, though Yeats had been delayed, ‘Mrs Shakespear has him nailed to meet me when he does come.’² In May, Yeats was finally ‘nailed’. Olivia took Pound round to Woburn Place to one of Yeats’ Monday evenings, which Pound would soon attend regularly during Yeats’ time in London. By the end of May Pound was describing his usual week as if its pattern had been established for years: ‘Victor Plarr of the old Rhymers Club … is in on Sunday supper-&-evenings, Yeats, Monday evenings, a set from the Irish Lit. Soc eats together on Wednesdays – & a sort of new Rhymers gang on Thursdays.’³ He was not to give any further details of the ‘new Rhymers gang’, as he significantly entitled his Tour Eiffel poets, until August: they had not on the whole impressive enough connections. When he eventually produced information, under questioning, it was carefully edited. Florence Farr was given star billing, as friend of Yeats and a famous actress; he had, he told his father, been working with her on psaltery settings. But he was more careful in his descriptions of the rest. He forbore to say that Flint and FitzGerald worked as office clerks, only mentioning their writing. Hulme, Pound said, ‘writes articles on Philosophy’, although Hulme had only just had his very first article on Bergson published in the New Age.⁴ Pound promised to send a copy of Storer’s poems in lieu of other credentials – incidentally an indication that Pound thought more of him then than he would later admit. That Tancred was a stockbroker he did acknowledge, the only one apart from Farr whose occupation he felt he could mention. With Yeats, however, the situation was different. Pound’s letters home from the start made the most of his eminent new connection.

Pound, indeed, succeeded in making a remarkably rapid impact on Yeats. A week after the first Monday evening he was delighted to get a note from Yeats inviting him again, along with an Italian poet, Florence Farr and her psaltery. Farr had perhaps put in a good word for Pound, but Yeats was in any case very taken with this ‘queer creature’, as he was to describe Pound to Lady Gregory.⁵ As R.F. Foster suggests, Pound arrived in Yeats’ life at a moment when the admiration of an ardent young poet was particularly welcome. The reason Yeats had not turned up in March was that his friend and fellow playwright Synge was dying at the age of only thirty-eight, and his death on 24 March was a bereavement that Yeats felt acutely on several levels. It was a bitter personal blow, but in addition, as Foster puts it, ‘since Synge had … stood for the freedom of the artistic imagination against the middle class of (largely Catholic) nationalist Ireland, his loss was enormous. It was easy, in retrospect, to see Synge as the victim of Dublin philistinism rather than of Hodgkin’s disease.’⁶ For the last few years Yeats had been pouring all his efforts into the theatre, and was beginning to feel it fruitless expense of spirit. The attacks on Synge and himself by the Irish nationalist press, especially those that followed the opening of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, disheartened and depressed him. The Theatre of Ireland, to which Padraic Colum and others had transferred their allegiance, was flourishing at the Abbey’s expense, and Yeats felt himself increasingly isolated in Dublin. London, where he could enjoy the relaxing friendship of Olivia Shakespear and Florence Farr, was more and more congenial. Other chapters of his youth appeared to be closing. He was seeing Maud Gonne again; it was she who drew him to France, where she was now living. Gonne had admitted to him the disaster that her marriage to John MacBride had been; it is likely, as Florence Farr drily put it, that Yeats’s ‘long years of fidelity ha[d] been rewarded at last’.⁷ But Gonne had also made it clear her Catholicism made a second marriage impossible, and the continuation of an illegal union unacceptable. That relationship offered no future. Arthur Symons, Yeats’ closest friend among the Rhymers, had collapsed into psychosis, and his illness brought back to Yeats the deaths of his other Rhymer friends, Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson. Though the majority of the ex-Rhymers were in fact still in robust health, to Yeats it felt as if he were the last remnant of that ‘Tragic Generation’, as he was memorably to name them. As well as these emotional blows, Yeats was growing impatient to have space to work once more on his poetry. His work in the theatre had, he complained, ‘dried the sap out of my veins, and rent/Spontaneous joy and natural content/Out of my heart … My curse on plays.’⁸ To meet with an energetic young poet, whose veins fairly pounded with sap, who thought Yeats the greatest living poet, who, moreover, neither knew nor cared about the politics of Irish nationalism, and who would have been incredulous at the steady criticism Yeats received in Dublin, a young man who had no interest in anything except poetry, nor any wish to broach any other subject – all this was balm and refreshment to the grieving, beleaguered Yeats.

Pound’s close association with Yeats was not to develop fully until his next visit to Europe. But he was able to write proudly to Williams: ‘I have been praised by the greatest living poet. I am after eight years hammering against impenetrable adamant become suddenly somewhat of a success …’⁹ Douglas Goldring, who had recently met Pound through Ford, describes as ‘one of his greatest triumphs in London … the way in which he stormed 18 Woburn Buildings, the Celtic stronghold of W.B. Yeats, took charge of his famous Mondays … I shall never forget my surprise, when Ezra took me for the first time … at the way in which he dominated the room, distributed Yeats’s cigarettes and Chianti, and laid down the law about poetry.’ Goldring, however, may be referring to the next year; even ‘Ezra’s transatlantic brio’, as Goldring called it, may not have accomplished domination quite immediately.¹⁰

Yet Pound had indeed become, as he told Williams, ‘somewhat of a success’. It was clearly a sweet moment. Yeats was not the only one to praise him. Personae was Pound’s most well received volume, with the sole exception of Cathay, his translations from the Chinese, which he would publish in 1915. There were negative notes, but overall, as the Bookman commented in ‘New Notes’ that July, it ‘met with an unusually appreciative reception’, accompanying this note with a photograph of Pound in profile and the carefully honed information, doubtless supplied by Pound himself, that he was

a young American of English descent, his forbears having been among those early settlers who went to the New World in the seventeenth century. On his mother’s side he is distantly related to Longfellow, whose poetry he does not admire; he is a Fellow of the University of Pennsylvania; has travelled much in Spain; lived for some while in Venice; and is now making his home in England with no particular desire to depart from us, though he has a very much greater liking for the English people than for their climate.

Whether it was entirely true, as the piece also asserts, that ‘he had written and burned two novels and three hundred sonnets’ is a matter for conjecture, but it gave the right impression: Pound was an excellent spin-doctor long before the term had been invented.¹¹ He had sent home the first review that appeared – quite an important one, as it happened, by W.L. Courtney, editor of the influential Fortnightly Review, which would later print some of Pound’s most significant articles – with orders for his father to take it to the Philadelphia Inquirer and to his old support, the Book News Monthly, for re-publication.¹² His father does not appear to have had any luck with this venture, though the Book News Monthly published one of the poems from Personae, ‘Piccadilly’, and in November the American Literary Digest – the first of several American papers to boast of Pound’s success in England – ran a feature on him under the title of ‘An American Poet Discovered in London’, quoting liberally from English reviews, including a piece from Punch – real fame, Pound claimed – in which he was presented as ‘Mr Ezekiel Ton … the most remarkable thing in poetry since Robert Browning … by far the newest poet going’.¹³

Pound had told his father at the end of April that the New Age was ‘howling’ for a review copy of Personae, which must mean that Flint had offered to review it, Pound having no other contact with the New Age at that time, and, indeed, a review by Flint duly appeared.¹⁴ This review was one of the most perceptive, and of considerable interest as confirmation that, notwithstanding Pound’s devotion to the Middle Ages, the Tour Eiffel group had welcomed him as a fellow-revolutionary and a fellow-craftsman. ‘Mr Pound,’ Flint wrote, ‘is a poet with a distinct personality. Essentially, he is a rebel against all conventions except sanity; there is something robustly impish and elfish about him. He writes with fresh beauty and vigour … Let us once and for all acknowledge what Mr Pound owes to Browning, his mediaeval poets, mystics and thinkers, and, perhaps, a little to Mr Yeats and Thompson; and take his poems as poetry, without references to sources of raw material. I think there is sufficient craft and artistry, originality and imagination in Personae to warrant one giving them high praise … Mr Pound … is working towards a form that other English poets might study.’¹⁵

Flint was the reviewer to see most clearly that Pound was the forerunner of an innovative movement in poetry, though others agreed that, for all his medieval subject-matter, he was doing something original and new. The first of Edward Thomas’ reviews – he wrote several – was entitled ‘A New Note in Poetry’, and Rupert Brooke, in a review later that year, which acknowledged Pound’s ‘great talents’, actually criticised him for writing vers libre, scarcely Pound’s intention at this stage.¹⁶Yet, as Humphrey Carpenter perceptively comments on Pound’s opera, Le Testament de Villon, which he wrote in 1921, ‘He achieved strikingly modern effects chiefly by straining after revivalism’; something similar was happening here.¹⁷ For example, in ‘Praise of Ysolt’, one of the poems that appeared for the first time in Personae, the persona is an unnamed troubadour, worn out by ‘the wandering of many roads’, desolate because he has lost the woman he loved and for whom he composed his songs. Pound uses a refrain, an envoi and the traditional imagery of a Provençal poem, but his shifting rhythms, irregular line lengths and paucity of rhyme convinced Brooke that this was modern experimentalism:

In vain have I striven

to teach my heart to bow;

In vain have I said to him

‘There be many singers greater than thou.’

But his answer cometh, as winds and as litany,

As a vague crying upon the night

That leaveth me no rest, saying ever,

‘Song, a song.’¹⁸

Other poems used no rhyme at all, but Pound was well aware that many earlier forms of verse – Latin, Greek and Anglo-Saxon for example – had not; he would not yet accept that he was using anything so newfangled as vers libre. One of the few strongly negative reviews – and even it admitted that ‘Pound makes a lively din’ – appeared anonymously in the Nation, protesting indignantly that Pound was trying to change poetry the way such modern composers as Debussy and Strauss were changing music.¹⁹ (Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande had just had a controversial production at Covent Garden, and reports of Strauss’ latest scandalous opera, Elektra, had reached London, though it had not yet been performed there.) The reviewer spoke truer than he or the Pound of 1909 realised.

More than half of the poems in Personae had appeared in A Lume Spento; some, like ‘In Durance’ (‘I am homesick after mine own kind’), had been written in America and a few, like ‘Marvoil’, since he arrived in London. The collection contained some of the best of the poems that Pound was to produce before 1912. Many were, as the collection’s title implies, ‘persona’ poems, the form he had evolved for himself in Crawfordsville, full of life and drama, in one way or another exploring themes of loneliness, rejection, exile and defiance. The speakers in the poems are, as usual, poets and lovers, generally, of course, troubadours, outsiders, ne’er-do-wells, who have failed in worldly matters but not (with rare exceptions) in vigour, vitality or hope. Over the two years or so during which these poems had been written, Pound had known rejection, from fellow-students, from Crawfordsville, from Mary Moore, from H.D., from a series of publishers. Like the personae he created, he refused to give up; perhaps creating these personae enabled him to keep going.

Several reviewers besides Flint recognised the debt Pound owed to Browning for his dramatic monologues; as one poem directly mentioned and another quoted him, it was not a hard task. Another poet mentioned in several of the reviews was Whitman, whose ‘dangerous influence’ was, according to Rupert Brooke, apparent in Pound’s ‘many poems in unmetrical sprawling lengths’.²⁰ Brooke’s strong disapproval of Whitman was not echoed by the other reviewers: Whitman was on the whole more admired on the European side of the Atlantic than in his home country, being regarded by the bourgeoisie in the States as a vulgar, sensual poet. Pound had, he says, never really read Whitman before he came to Europe, let alone imitated him. Yet once in England, as soon as Pound introduced himself as an American poet, Whitman would be immediately evoked by his British literary contacts, and he was finally forced to pay attention to his fellow-countryman. He had written a short piece that February, in which he comments that ‘From this side of the Atlantic, I am for the first time able to read Whitman’, but his response remained deeply ambivalent. Whitman ‘is America’, he wrote. ‘His crudity is an exceeding great stench, but it is America.’ Pound, having spent his youth inventing himself as a child of Europe, had needed to come to Europe to discover he was American. He now admits that ‘Mentally I am a Walt Whitman who has learnt to wear a collar and a dress shirt (though at times inimical to both).’ Whitman’s poetry, he complained, was at times painfully bad, but Pound acknowledges that he himself sometimes – when writing of ‘certain things’ – found himself using similar rhythms. Moreover, the ‘vital part of [their] message, taken from the sap and fibre of America, is the same’, and he adds with no undue modesty, ‘I am immortal even as he is, yet with a lesser vitality as I am the more in love with beauty’.²¹ Though Pound would some four years later write a poem making a ‘pact’ with Whitman, he remains a very different poet from ‘his spiritual father’. Wyndham Lewis was to comment shrewdly much later: ‘Pound’s nearest American analogue in the past is not Whitman … or Mark Twain, but a painter, James McNeill Whistler.’²²

Shortly after Personae appeared, Pound briefly moved to Hammersmith, in the hope of finding cheaper accommodation. To his dismay the bus fares, as he told Patricia Hutchins many years later, cancelled out the saving in rent. With his increasingly frequent visits to the Shakespears and the Ford/Hunt circle – shortly to become a ménage when Ford moved as a ‘paying guest’ into South Lodge, with Violet’s near-senile mother as supposed chaperone – Pound decided Kensington was the place to be. It was full of associations with the Pre-Raphaelites, but luckily not anything like as affluent as today. He moved in August, having found a room in a working-class street, 10 Church Walk, by the graveyard behind St Mary Abbots. Pound had no objection to graves, but he found the constant ringing of St Mary’s bells deeply irritating, and complained about them well into his old age. It was another wedge between himself and organised religion. The house was owned by a grocer, Sam Langley, whose wife let out the rooms, and who would cook for Ezra if he were in. The Langleys, Pound said, were ‘positively the best that England can produce at ANY level’.²³ Pound was still there in 1914, when he married and moved to a flat. But the flat was only just round the corner, and Mrs Langley would still sometimes come and cook.

Praise continued to come (‘even from Paris I am felicitated,’ he reported home) but by the autumn he was forced to face the fact that praise had failed to turn into adequate funds.²⁴ Mathews had not recovered his money on Personae, although he was not reneging on his promise to bring out a fourth collection for Pound, Exultations, whose organisation was causing Pound headaches. But if Pound was not earning much, he was not spending much either. He walked to the British Museum or the Tour Eiffel, and could rely on the hospitality of literary London for much of his diet. Kathleen Cannell, the wife of the poet Skipwell Cannell, who would later contribute to the first imagist anthology, remarked in her memoirs on the penniless writers at Ford’s teas devouring food as if it was their only meal of the day; Pound was one of those. He was becoming a regular at South Lodge parties, and even introduced a new form of entertainment to the Ford/Hunt circle. Opposite South Lodge was a communal garden with tennis courts, and Pound decided they should be used by Ford and his friends. He sent home for his tennis racquet, and, as Douglas Goldring put it, ‘The garden was taken over and every afternoon a motley collection of people, in the oddest costumes, invaded it at Ezra’s instigation, and afterwards repaired to South Lodge – or to 84 Holland Park Avenue, – to discuss vers libre, the prosody of Arnaut Daniel, and, as Ford records, “the villainy of contributors to the front page of The Times Literary Supplement”’.²⁵

Violet Hunt recalled Pound’s ‘demon’ play, as he sprang round the court, ‘the flaps of his polychrome shirt flying out like the petals of some flower and his red hair like a flaming pistil in the middle of it’.²⁶ Ford was unfailingly mocking of Pound’s tennis, describing him as playing like ‘an inebriated kangaroo’, but the games gave Ford a welcome and amusing diversion from the mounting debts at the English Review and from the conflicts of his emotional life.²⁷ In 1909 he and Pound had not yet developed their later ‘intimate friendship’, as Goldring put it, though that was never to be intimate in the sense that they would share personal troubles, but then, as later, Pound’s ‘transatlantic brio’ could certainly cheer Ford up.²⁸ In addition, Hunt said, ‘Ezra, a dear … was very kind to the editor, and would do any sort of job for him or me’.²⁹ Pound, in fact, in spite of his eccentricities and lack of polished manners, was becoming something of a social as well as a poetic success in London literary circles. It was a far cry from the disapproval and loneliness he had experienced in his university days in the States. No wonder he was reluctant to return home.