WHEN POUND HAD written home for his tennis racquet, he had also asked for his copy of Dante, because, much to his relief, the London Polytechnic had agreed to employ him again, this time for a series of twenty-one lectures, beginning in October 1909, on ‘The Development of Literature in Southern Europe’. In addition, the kindly Rhys persuaded Dent that they should publish the lectures as a book, which Pound decided to call The Spirit of Romance. He had found the phrase in a lecture by Oscar Wilde, ‘The English Renaissance of Art’, first delivered in 1882, appropriately enough on an American lecture tour funded by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. ‘The English Renaissance in Art’ was Wilde’s name for the Pre-Raphaelites and the aesthetic movement, and at the time the lecture, described as Wilde’s ‘full-length manifesto of aestheticism’, caused considerable stir; though much reported and misreported, it had its first full publication only in 1908, in a collection of Wilde’s Essays and Lectures edited by his friend Robert Ross. That Pound was quoting it in 1910 is another reminder that he was a committed aesthete still; the essay’s central message chimed with his own creed: ‘Love art for its own sake, and then all things that you need will be added to you.’30 But the distinction Pound was to seize on for the title of this book was that made by Wilde between what he calls ‘the Hellenic spirit’ and ‘the spirit of romance’, romance here referring to the cult of medievalism. These two Wilde describes as the twin sources of that English Renaissance of Art, insisting that ‘It is really from the union of Hellenism, in its breadth, its sanity of purpose, its calm possession of beauty, with the adventive, the intensified individualism, the passionate colour of the romantic spirit, that springs the art of the nineteenth century in England.’31 At this stage, Pound’s interest in Hellenism was fairly minimal, even though he thought his Provençal poets had rediscovered the pagan gods. ‘The Spirit of Romance’ had him in thrall.
When Pound came to write the book, he found it a great deal more of a trial than he had expected. For all his enthusiasm for his chosen medieval writers, his knowledge of conventional literary history was shaky. Questioned a year earlier by his father, he was extremely vague about where in western Britain Tintagel was to be found, and when asked at what period Villon wrote, replied that he was a poet of ‘the XIII century or xii or xiv. I am no good at dates’.32 Villon was in fact a fifteenth-century poet. Pound sent home for his college textbooks, and was forced to apply himself to them. His lecture course itself, he was to admit more than half a century later, had only been ‘a very raw summary of things in Rennert’s Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania’.33 He had begun hopefully enough, cribbing some of the first chapter, he acknowledged later, from J.W. Mackail’s Latin Literature, one of the textbooks his father obligingly posted across the Atlantic, and writing the next two chapters on his beloved Provençal troubadours. But boredom soon set in. Already by October, when his lectures began, he was grumbling that he was ‘sweating on this fool book for Dent – the prospect is very horrible. I think breaking stone would be preferable to compiling a literary history’. For one thing he had no typewriter, which made the physical task more onerous, but he could not afford to buy one, nor apparently could his parents, though he repeatedly begged them to send one. Thankfully Olivia Shakespear, he told his father, had ‘angelically offered to do emanuensis work’ for him, which would have the added bonus that she would ‘insist more or less on my getting it done.’34 Letters from Pound to Dorothy early the following year indicate that she had been helping too, although that had not been mentioned to Homer.
Perhaps worst of all, however, Pound found the writing of a continuous narrative deeply uncongenial. The Spirit of Romance contains some brilliant aperçus, but the description of texts is at times plodding, and he filled the pages with translations, often his own, which he found easier than commentary. Pound was to produce many essays during his life, but the majority are a series of staccato points, aphoristic, forceful and jerky, assemblages of statements and opinions rather than reasoned arguments. Much the same could be said of his poetry; even the Cantos are a collage, an assemblage of shards and fragments. He wrote to his mother in February with striking self-awareness: ‘My mind, such as I have, works by a sort of fusion, and sudden crystallization, and the effort to tie that kind of action to the dry work of prose is very exhausting. One should have a vegetable sort of mind for prose. I mean the thought formation should go on consecutively and gradually with order rather than epigrams.’35 Consecutive thought, as opposed to the striking image or phrase, was never to be his forte. Pound, seizing on Hulme’s notion of the inferiority of prose to poetry when it suited his purposes, described his problem as that of the artist-poet condemned to the slavish labour of prose. ‘Of course your ideas on prose are quite erroneous,’ he told his mother. ‘I should never think of prose as anything but a stop-gap, a means of procuring food exactly on the same plane with market-gardening. If anything is not sufficiently interesting to be put in poetry, and sufficiently important to make the poetical worth while it is hardly worth saying at all.’36
Olivia and Dorothy both attended Pound’s lectures, which were, Dorothy confessed many years later to Noel Stock, ‘dismal’ – though she loyally explained that this was because ‘Ezra did not manage to get through to his very small audience because (she said) of his habit of over-estimating their intelligence.’37 The thin attendance was a disappointment to Pound, compounded by the lukewarm reviews of Exultations, which Mathews duly published in October, 1909. (Exultations was, incidentally, one of the few volumes of poetry published by Pound with an English – if unusual English – title.) Edward Thomas reviewed it much less enthusiastically than he had Personae, entitling his piece this time ‘The Newest Poet’, the phrase Punch had used to describe Mr Ezekiel Ton, so now Pound’s newness became something of a put-down rather than the welcome given the previous spring to ‘A New Note in Poetry’. Thomas complained about the poetry’s ‘turbulent opacity’, and was dismayed by the way that Pound’s verse was ‘dappled with French, Provençal, Spanish, Italian, Latin and Old English, with proper names that we shirk pronouncing, with crudity, violence and obscurity, with stiff rhythms and no rhythms at all’.38 Even the English Review, during that first visit to England probably Pound’s main source of income – after his father and the Polytechnic – gave him a somewhat mixed reception. ‘Richard Coeur de Lion, as we imagine him, violent and unbridled, was also the friend of the Troubadours and Mr Pound handles his verses very much as Richard I handled the events of his day.’ The anonymous reviewer (I suspect Ford himself) did, however, admire his energy: ‘he is the most alive as he is the most rugged, the most harsh and the most wrong-headed … his very thoughts … are apt to be obscured by the derivative nature of his language. But he uses his language with such force, hammering as it were word into word, that we can have no doubt as to his vitality and as to his determination to burst his way into Parnassus.’39 In the New Age, Flint, though he had reservations, was more upbeat; he was – and would continue to be – sharply critical of Pound’s use of archaisms and snatches of foreign languages, but he was emphatic that Pound was breaking new ground:
One thing is proved by these two little books of his ‘Personae’ and ‘Exultations’, and that is that the old devices of regular metrical beat and regular rhyming are worn out; the sonnet and the three-quatrain poem will probably always live; but for the larger music verse must be free from all the restraints of a regular return and a squared-up frame; the poet must forge his rhythm according to the impulse of the creative emotion working in him.40
Flint realised that modernism was on its way.
The poem in the collection that was most admired, was, perhaps predictably, the ‘Ballad of the Goodly Fere’ – both comprehensible and rhyming. Pound himself had been uneasy about Exultations, though he was not to take notice for some time of the criticisms of his fondness for the derivative, the archaic and the obscure – indeed they are qualities that at times remain defiantly and sometimes productively present in the Cantos. Noel Stock suggests that the poem which gives most clue to the way Pound would develop in the imagist years is a very simple poem entitled ‘Francesca’, an unrhymed poem free of archaisms and rhetoric, beginning ‘You came in out of the night/And there were flowers in your hands’.41 Later Eliot was to say he had read Personae and Exultations shortly after they came out but hadn’t thought much of them, but one wonders if these lines or this image had lingered in his mind, to re-emerge in The Waste Land as the hyacinth girl returning from the garden, also with her arms full. Pound’s poem is very much the evocation of an epiphanic moment, and in that way too looks forward to imagism: ‘I who have seen you amid the primal things/Was angry when they spoke your name/In ordinary places.’ But it would be some time before he would attempt such poetic minimalism again.
Flint’s first book of poetry, In the Net of the Stars, and Campbell’s fifth, The Mountainy Singer, appeared at much the same time as Exultations – the Tour Eiffel group was making its mark – and some reviews linked Pound with one or the other. The Nation, which, exceptionally, thought Exultations a slight improvement on Personae, welcomed Campbell’s book with relief as an alternative to Pound’s ‘somewhat feverish eccentricities’.42 Pound and Flint, on the other hand, were largely condemned for the same faults. The Birmingham Daily Post lamented: ‘Mr Ezra Pound is a poet, we fear, in danger of being misled by the unwise. His technique in Exultations finds a parallel in the work of Mr Flint recently reviewed in these columns. Again we have the spectacle of a really sincere and vigorous artist driven by his revolt against the abuse of law and convention into mere chaos.’43 One wonders if Pound were thinking of reviews like that when he later added a footnote to the chapter in The Spirit of Romance that discusses the Poema del Cid:
As to its ‘irregular’ metre, I can still see Dr Rennert [his supervisor at Penn] manicuring his finger nails in seminar, pausing in that operation, looking over his spectacles and in his plaintive falsetto, apropos someone who had attempted to reprint the Cid with ten syllables in every line: ‘Naow effa man had sense enough to write a beautiful poem like this, wudn’t yeow think he wudda had sense enough to be able to keount ep to ten on his fingers ef he’da wanted tew?44
The Net of the Stars, like Exultations, was reviewed in the English Review, but the only comparison made between them was to note they had both had poems published in the journal. Three of Flint’s poems had appeared there that July; Pound may have sent them in for him – he was to do so for others – or made the suggestion that Flint should approach Ford. Flint like himself became a regular visitor at South Lodge – another example of the class fluidity of that circle – and was to remain a good friend of Ford’s for many years. Ford and Douglas Goldring both admired Flint’s poetry, rather more than Pound came to feel they should. The poems that had been published in July had moved further away from regular stanzas than those he had published in the New Age. They were clearly very much the product of the discussions in the Tour Eiffel, strongly influenced by French vers libre, with irregular rhyme schemes, alliteration and assonance, and what Flint called the ‘Hebrew’ form of anaphora, also cultivated by the French vers libristes: the Birmingham Daily Post would undoubtedly have found them alarmingly chaotic. They were love poems, the titles and imagery reminiscent of Yeats, but they are less successful and individual than his poems that rail against urban drabness, and the anonymous reviewer (again probably Ford) in the English Review agreed, commenting that ‘Mr Flint occasionally attempts to render some aspect of modern life. And it is from such rendering that – if ever it will – poetry will once more regain its hold on the attentions of the English-speaking world.’45
That poetry should be concerned with the modern world was the message Ford would hammer home to contemporary poets in general, and later the imagist poets in particular. The poem that the reviewer picked out to quote begins, at any rate, in the urban present:
As I paced the streets, there came to me,
Although the air with smoke was dim,
And bleak, black walls were frowning grim,
The vision of a sunlit sea,
A crumbling cliff all hacked and torn,
A waste of sand dunes, grey and wide,
And wheeling gulls that dipped and cried,
And scarlet poppies in the corn.
The traffic’s jangle and its roar
And human clamour could not quell
The low murmur and the spell
Of languid waves that laced the shore.46
In the Net of the Stars was dedicated to ‘Violet’. Flint had married during the course of the year, his new wife being the daughter of his landlady. He was devoted to her, though on his meagre salary it was scarcely objectively a sensible act, and over the next few years he was to feel increasingly ground down by what Maupassant had called, as Flint would know, the ‘petites misères’ of life. They both came from large families – Flint had ten younger brothers and sisters by then, Violet’s family was the same size – and there was no family assistance with finance. It was not at this stage to stop him writing poetry, but it would heighten his sense of social injustice. His better-off acquaintances were apt to regard the marriage as a grave mistake, and at times Flint was in despair under the pressures of penury and family obligations. Their first child, Ianthe, who would become a great favourite with H.D., was born the next year. Flint’s new domestic commitments may be one reason why the Tour Eiffel group appears to have disintegrated by early 1910. In addition, Hulme was beginning to lose interest in poetry. Storer, whose next book, Ballad of the Mad Bird, was also reviewed, somewhat harshly, in the English Review, had lost his enthusiasm for vers libre. Campbell and FitzGerald were both embarking on relationships that would end in marriage and take them away from England. One phase in the development of imagism would soon be over.
Pound did not mention Flint’s marriage in any of his extant letters during this London visit, though his mother in September began to raise the issue of marriage with Pound himself. Perhaps she was afraid his reluctance to return home was due to an affair of the heart – which in a sense it was, but the affair, it seems, was more with literary London rather than with a woman. Pound had dedicated Personae to ‘Mary Moore of Trenton – if she wants it’. He had dedicated Exultations to his former minister and co-editor of the Philadelphian Book News Monthly, Carlos Tracey Chester. No suggestion of a London attachment in either. Yet given Pound’s dependence on female attention in the States, it might seem rather surprising if, in that first year and a half in England, Pound had not found any substitute or substitutes for his H.D.s and Mary Moores and Louise Skidmores. Pound of course would not mention any such relationship in his letters home, merely telling his mother that it should be illegal for artists to marry, but in any case the evidence suggests that on this visit Pound’s desires were overwhelmingly directed towards poetic success. In London he could attract the admiring gaze of whole drawing-rooms; he did not have to be content with one young woman at a time. Dorothy Shakespear was certainly in love with him, but his attitude to her is harder to gauge. Their relationship would blossom in Italy the following spring, but in 1909 it seems unlikely that there was more on his side than a little gallantry, which he appeared to show to Olivia and Dorothy equally. In July Dorothy had copied a poem by Pound into her journal with a note that it was written for her that month.47 This poem, ‘Planh’, whose title meant, he explained to his father, a lament, and which appeared in Exultations, gives an uncertain message. It is in no way a straightforward love poem, but addresses a ‘White Poppy, who art wiser than love’:
White Poppy, heavy with dreams,
Though I am hungry for their lips
When I see them a-hiding …
But if one should look at me with the old hunger in her eyes,
How will I be answering her eyes?48
It reads like a moment of insight into his ambivalent attitude to women, on the one hand the ‘fiery’ kisses that H.D. records, on the other the refusal to commit himself.49 ‘Planh’ contains the lines: ‘O White Poppy, I come for peace, yea from the hunting’, which suggests that for now he is coming to Dorothy for companionship rather than love. Dorothy feared just that: she confessed to Pound two years later that she had been afraid that the poem meant only a ‘friendship – rather cold & blue’. The hunting with which Pound was concerned in 1909 he summed up in a short poem in Personae, ‘The White Stag’, which describes the chase: ‘Lo! they pause not for love nor for sorrow … ’Tis the white stag, Fame, we’re a-hunting,/Bid the world’s hounds come to horn!’50
Yet there are some less indecisive love poems than ‘Planh’ in Exultations, notably the poem ‘Francesca’, and since Pound’s other love poems were at any rate loosely associated with a real woman – H.D. or Kitty Heyman, for example, however reworked into a literary device – it may be there was someone for whom they were specifically written, though Pound, according to H.D., was apt to make any love poem serve a variety of recipients: a sequence in Asphodel goes: ‘“O George I thought you’d written them to me.” “What made you think that Lointaine?” “I thought you’d told me you had.” “O but I tell that to everyone.”’51 When William Carlos Williams came to see Pound in February 1910, he discovered that Pound had, in a typically theatrical gesture, constructed a little shrine in his room with a woman’s photograph before which a candle always burnt. Williams never discovered who she was, so it cannot have been Dorothy, whom he met on that visit, and would surely have recognised. Noel Stock suggests the photograph was that of Bride Scratton, a strikingly beautiful married woman, for whom he thinks Pound developed a romantic admiration during that first year in London. If that is so, it is possible that the poem ‘Francesca’ was also written to her. Pound knew no Frances or Francesca in London, as far as is known, but, given his devotion to the Paolo and Francesca story, ‘Francesca’ could well signify a lover’s name for a married woman. Pound had met Bride Scratton at one of Yeats’ Mondays; according to Stock she was unhappily married, dissatisfied with upper middle-class drawing-room life, and anxious to meet poets and artists. Yet there is no evidence that there was much more at that time than courtly worship of her beauty and charm in Pound’s attitude to her, conducive to the writing of poetry. Later, in the early 1920s, when Pound was living in Paris, he became closer to her, helped her to publish some prose, and was cited as co-respondent when she eventually divorced her husband – but even that, Stock loyally maintains, was only Ezra ‘being gallant and getting Bride out of a ghastly marriage’.52 Possibly there was more to it; Bride is remembered in the Cantos under the name ‘Thiy’, after an early Egyptian queen, so she was not unimportant to Pound. All the same, in 1909–10 she was probably no more than a muse.
One young woman with whom Pound may have had some kind of Philadelphian flirtation was the twenty-year-old Grace Crawford, whom he met at the end of July 1909. Grace was attractive, cultured and cosmopolitan. She had American nationality and parents, but had been born in Paris, growing up for the most part in London. Grace’s father, then a political journalist, had been posted to London some years before Grace was born, to supply news on English affairs. When he went to report on the London visit of Buffalo Bill’s highly successful travelling Wild West Show, he was so taken with it that he set up a syndicate to fund a continental tour, and, dispatching his notice to the States, installed himself as Buffalo Bill’s (alias William Cody’s) financial manager. Grace was born while the show was in Paris. After the tour was over – it lasted a couple of years, one of the highlights being a performance in the spectacular Roman Arena in Verona – her father supported them in remarkably fine style through a series of risky but largely rewarding business speculations. Although Grace later wrote that ‘like all gamblers he had his ups and downs’, the family, she notes, never had to reduce its expensive way of life; successful ventures quickly made up for any disasters.53
Grace’s mother came from a respectable New England family, her own father being in the House of Representatives. Her passion was music, and she had longed to become a professional pianist, but her father had refused to countenance this. Grace had inherited her mother’s gift for music, and her mother hoped that Grace would become the professional musician she had never been allowed to be. Grace was taught the piano by none other than Pound’s friend Kitty Heyman, but although she, like her mother, loved music, and practised the piano two hours a day, her real wish was to go on the stage, a profession which was in turn too shocking for her mother to contemplate. Training as a singer was the compromise they agreed on. Grace had never been sent to school, and was taught by governesses and tutors, being brought up to speak French and Italian as well as she did English. She also knew German, and was well read and knowledgeable about the arts. Although she lived at home, and both her parents doted on her, she had established a degree of independence unthinkable for most respectable English daughters of the time, having her own sitting-room to which she could invite her friends, and going out unchaperoned to theatres and concerts.
Pound was brought to tea by Kitty Heyman, who had told the Crawfords (mother and daughter that is, Grace’s father being away on business) that he was a lonely young American poet who would love to meet an American family. As this was in late July 1909 Pound was already a good deal less lonely than he had been.54 Kitty was clearly very fond of Grace, and it is possible that she was attempting a little matchmaking. Grace was by no means as struck by Pound’s beauty as Dorothy had been, describing him as ‘thin, loose-limbed and gawky, pallid and with a mop of long, tangled pale gold hair’. She was, however, intrigued by his outfit. Pound arrived, Grace wrote,
dressed in a loose fitting grey suit – without a waistcoat – a sky-blue shirt and an apricot-coloured tie held in place by a gold finger ring. All of this was most negligently worn but obviously far from negligently chosen. Around his neck was a narrow black riband to which was attached a pair of rimless pince-nez. The position of these was constantly varied as he talked, sometimes worn normally, sometimes far down his nose to be frowningly peered over, sometimes wildly waved in the air to emphasize a point or dropped and completely forgotten.55
Yet even if, as this suggests, she was amused by his posturing, they rapidly became friends. After tea, they spent a couple of hours alone in her sitting-room, Pound being delighted to discover copies of Villon and the early Italian poets on her shelves and Grace to find that ‘he really liked and understood music’. He stayed for dinner and lingered on talking until ‘Mama proclaimed a curfew’.
After that he would frequently spend the afternoon with Grace in her sitting-room, arriving unannounced and often staying to dinner afterwards, for Mrs Crawford liked him and encouraged his visits. Grace had her own piano, and Pound persuaded her to collaborate on a project on which he was working, trying to bring spoken poetry and music closer together by finding a ‘vocal line, neither quite speech nor quite song, but a fusion of both which would completely fit the rhythm of the verse’. Grace was ‘to pick up on the piano the rhythms and musical intervals as he chanted the words and transfer these to music paper so that they could be repeated for him to polish and amend’.56 Since meeting Farr Pound had become very attentive to the links between music and poetry, and she may well have told him, if Yeats himself had not, of Yeats’ own collaboration with Arnold Dolmetsch, who, Ronald Schuchard tells us, ‘sat up many hours writing the musical notation of Yeats chanting his poems in trancelike states’.57 Pound and Grace started work with Provençal and the early Italian dolce stil nuovo poems, and then tried some of Pound’s own. ‘Our work sessions were never plain sailing,’ Grace wrote, ‘and we occasionally fought over some disputed point, but these hours of a close working association were among some of the most stimulating which I have ever spent.’58 They didn’t only work; they talked, read books to each other, went for walks around London together and went to see plays. Pound introduced her to Ford and Violet Hunt, with whom she became good friends, and he took her once to a Yeats Monday, which she found quite terrifying. She played tennis in a foursome with Pound, Ford and Mary Martindale, Ford’s sister-in-law with whom he had earlier had an affair and who had for no very clear reason also moved into South Lodge. All the tennis equipment was kept at South Lodge, not an entirely satisfactory arrangement, as, Grace reported, old Mrs Hunt loathed both Ford and Pound and would hide away their tennis racquets every week, always in a different place, so the game had regularly to be preceded by a house search.
Grace only goes so far as to assert friendship with Pound, but since for a while she was seeing him almost daily, often unchaperoned, that could perhaps be taken for code that their intimacy included at least the unconsummated embraces that were acceptable between the American middle-class young, though not yet the English. Yet there is certainly no hint of romantic intensity in her account; more good-natured companionability. Their relationship appears to have more in common with Pound’s warm, friendly relationship with Mary Moore than his intense love affair with H.D. Grace said that Pound never wrote to her, perhaps understandably while they were both in London, but that he did not continue to correspond with her, as he did with H.D., Mary Moore and his early lust, Viola Baxter, is quite surprising. Their friendship had already faltered before Pound left England in March, for reasons that will emerge. It is not impossible, though it is unlikely, that it was her picture that Williams saw. It may be significant that Pound never took her to the Shakespears’, though they once bumped into Olivia at the theatre. He certainly never introduced Grace to Dorothy; his old habit of compartmentalising again, perhaps. He may not have been ready to develop a relationship with Dorothy, but he must have been aware that she would not like to feel she had a rival. Perhaps he did not want to spoil his chances there. Yet for his 1908–10 visit, his principal object of desire remained ‘the white stag, Fame’.