IN HIS ARTICLE ‘Prologomena’, Pound had begun by saying that he ‘would much rather lie on what is left of Catullus’ parlour floor and speculate the azure beneath it and the hills off to Salo and Riva with their forgotten gods moving unhindered beneath them, than discuss any processes and theories of art whatsoever.’98 Pound would repeatedly insist that it was better to read the poetic work itself than any critical exposition, though in practice he could rarely resist the missionary urge to explain what he was doing. Yet the reference to the ‘forgotten gods moving unhindered’ under the Italian mountains is an indication that, in spite of the new emphasis on hardness and sanity, he had not lost his sense of the mystical power of the gods. In September 1911 he had met G.R.S. Mead, a friend of Yeats who had at one time been Madame Blavatsky’s private secretary, and a leading member of the Theosophical Society until 1908, when he had resigned in protest against what he saw as charlatanism. Mead founded the Quest Society the next year, to ‘promote investigation and comparative study of religion, science and philosophy, on the basis of experience’ and ‘to encourage the expression of the ideal in beautiful forms’.99 Mead, like the theosophists, believed firmly in reincarnation, though in his wish to bring science and religion together he was perhaps closer to the Society for Psychical Research. Pound, though never attracted by the notion of reincarnation, found his ideas fascinating – he told his mother that ‘G.R.S. Mead is as interesting – along his own line – as any one I meet.’100
Mead must also have been interested by Pound, because he invited him to speak to the Society about his troubadour poets, an invitation Pound accepted with unusual apprehension; Dorothy reassuringly suggested he should claim to be a reincarnated troubadour, who knew what they thought: ‘Are you? do you?’ she asked.101 If one believed in reincarnation it would certainly have seemed a feasible idea. The lecture was given early in 1912, and published in the Quest journal in October as ‘Psychology and the Troubadours’, and in fact its fusion of mysticism and science fitted in perfectly with the other pieces in the volume. When Pound reissued The Spirit of Romance in 1932, he included it as the fifth chapter, in a slightly revised form. It’s an intriguing piece, bringing together many of the preoccupations that would last through to the end of the Cantos. The chapter has a subtitle in the 1932 edition, ‘A Divagation from Questions of Technique’, a description that could also apply to its place in his literary criticism of 1912, which otherwise is also largely preoccupied with ‘questions of technique’. Pound had called the second part of ‘Prologomena’ a ‘Credo’, but he perhaps reveals even more of his emerging creed in ‘Psychology and the Troubadours’, in which, through a discussion of the ‘inner significance’ of the ‘love code’, he explores his own fundamental beliefs: art is the true religion, and artists priests. As he says, ‘“chivalric love” was, as I understand it, an art, that is to say, a religion’.102
The troubadours, Pound argues here, were visionaries with their own ‘unofficial mysticism’, finding their visions through the religion of love rather than the ascetic privations of medieval Christianity. ‘Provençal song,’ he writes, ‘is never wholly disjunct from pagan rites of May Day.’ The cult of Amor is an evolution from the ‘Hellenistic mysteries’, with their erotic core, and connected with a tradition of ‘various cults or religions of orgy and of ecstasy, from the simpler Bacchanalia to the more complicated rites of Isis or Dionysus’. He quotes from Peire Vidal: ‘Good lady, I think I see God when I gaze on your delicate body.’103 Dante, though Pound does not mention him here, also bases his Divine Comedy on the idea that human love can lead to the divine, and sees God in Beatrice’s eyes. But in Dante’s case the love is a sublimated, transcendent and spiritual one, reconciling the cult of Amor and Christianity, while the Vidal line suggests an actual sexual encounter. Pound himself, in his earlier discussions of ecstasy, had favoured the Dantean visionary love, but later he would come to locate the heart of mystery in coitus itself. In 1912, his discussion remains very unclear; he had told Dorothy that he was going to be ‘nebulous to Nth’, and on this point he certainly is.104 Perhaps at this stage he really was not quite sure what he thought, or possibly embarrassed to say. It is likely, as Humphrey Carpenter suggests, he was still a virgin when he married: he certainly got nowhere near Dorothy’s bed, and apparently made no attempt to reach H.D.’s, so his view of the centrality of sex may have been fairly theoretical. Sex can be compared, he says, with a ‘fluid force’, by which he means energy, which can come as heat or light, just as sex can be either ‘illumination’, that is, a ‘religious experience’, or alternatively the ‘philo-progenitive instinct’, but the latter does not produce the former; they are separate and different manifestations. This distinction sounds as if he is still in Dante’s camp, for all his quotation from Vidal.105 Presumably, in Pound’s analogy here, the philo-progenitive instinct is heat, and illumination, naturally enough, light. Even Pound’s later celebrations of sexuality remain very much about what Lawrence would call ‘sex in the head’, literally so when Pound suggested in 1921 that the brain is ‘only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve’, a theory, he says, that ‘would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images’, because ‘the power of the spermatozoid is precisely the power of exteriorizing a form’.106 Yet this egregiously masculinist concept is again celebrating artistic creativity by claiming for it the vital power of sexual fecundity, but by no means saying they are the same thing, or that one produces the other. In the Cantos, the Neoplatonic illumination and vision certainly win out. Pound was very much of his generation in feeling that sexuality must be the central force in life, but he remained too much of the Philadelphian puritan to express it in any but the most gingerly terms. Yeats was to say unkindly, many years later, that Pound remained ‘the sexless American professor for all his violence’.107
By now the idea of energy or ‘fluid force’ was central to Pound’s understanding of the world. Poetry, indeed all art, visions, sexuality, what Lawrence would call the ‘circumambient universe’, Pound had come to consider as dynamic and vitalised. We all know, he says, about our kinship with the animals; what we forget is ‘our kinship to the vital universe, to the tree and the living rock … We have about us the universe of fluid force, and below us the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive … the strength of the Greek beauty rests in this, that it is ever at the interpretation of this vital universe, by its signs of gods and godly attendants and oreads.’ Since the Renaissance, however, ‘Man is concerned with man and forgets the whole and the flowing … when we do get into contemplation of the flowing we find sex.’ Pound’s vision of the vital universe is quite compatible with Bergson’s, and indeed he uses the Bergsonian term ‘life-force’ at one stage in ‘Psychology and the Troubadours’, though again it is unlikely that Pound thought of his beliefs as Bergsonian.108 What constantly fascinated him was the project of bringing together poetry, science and mysticism, or, as he would sometimes describe that last, ecstatic religion. In ‘Psychology and the Troubadours’, he talks of electrical currents and the workings of the telegraph (Ford must have told him his Marconi story), both leaping across distances to bring, in different senses, illumination. Yeats was also developing his interests in psychical research yet further at this time, speaking during January 1912 on a theory of apparitions to both the Society for Psychical Research and the Quest Society. Like Pound, his project was a synthesising one: science, poetry and the occult (in whatever form) all in one.
Around the time he gave this lecture to the Quest Society in early 1912, Pound was, much to his delight, introduced by Ford to Henry James, now sixty-nine. Pound had referred to his exemplary prose in ‘Prologomena’, though he had not read much of it as yet, but he knew him as the grand old man of American letters, and a fellow literary expatriate. Pound was deeply impressed, writing six years later of his ‘wonderful conversation’:
The massive head, the slow uplift of the hand, gli occhi onesti e tardi, the long sentences piling themselves up in elaborate phrase after phrase, the lightning incision, the pauses, the slightly shaking admonitory gesture with it ‘wu-a-wait a little, wait a little, something will come’; blague and benignity and the weight of so many years’ careful incessant labour of minute observation always there to enrich the talk. I had heard it but seldom, yet it is all unforgettable.109
James was to confirm him in his view that the only place for an American artist was in exile, and he would shortly be reporting that ‘the distinguished American author’ had said to him, ‘It is strange how all taint of art or letters seems to shun that continent’.110 Pound started reading James in earnest the following August, and came to admire passionately James’ depiction of America, and increasingly his analysis of Europe, later claiming that only an expatriate American could really appreciate his writing. James would influence some of his poetry, as he did T.S. Eliot’s; the most Jamesian poem Pound wrote was perhaps his 1920 farewell to London, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, which takes another of the themes that Pound found fascinating in James, his depiction of the self-deceptions and limitations of what Pound describes as the ‘literary milieux’.111 Already by 1913, when Pound decided to try his hand at satire, James was one of his models, though he also drew on the much raunchier Catullus. James surely lies behind a poem like ‘The Garden’:
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.112
From now on James joined Whistler in Pound’s pantheon as one of the few great American artists; both of them, of course, had worked in Europe.
In March, Pound wrote once more to Hope, pointing out that his annual income was now about £400: £200 from Margaret Cravens, though he was still refusing to reveal the source to Hope, £100 from his publishers, Stephen Swift & Co., guaranteed as long as he produced 60,000 words in book form per year – he claimed he could easily produce that number of words in two months – and £100 from his other writing. He admitted that this might not seem to the Shakespears a large sum for a married couple to live on in England, but Dorothy ‘seems to think she could live abroad for a year or so’ where money would go further, adding that she would ‘see a number of things & places which she probably could not see if [he] were tied to an educational position’.113 Clearly the Shakespears, like his parents, were keen for him to have the financial security of an academic appointment, and he was as reluctant as ever to take on a regular job. Nothing came of this letter, except that Olivia suggested that Pound should get the Society for the Protection of Authors to check his contract; the next year, Dorothy went for a visit to Rome with her mother and cousin and close friend Georgie Hyde-Lees, so perhaps they took the hint about more foreign travel, even if Pound was not to be allowed to go too. Dorothy told him that her mother ‘evidently thinks we are a somewhat crazy couple – which is just what we aren’t. Perhaps you wish we were.’114 That sounds rather regretful, but if Dorothy’s devotion to Pound cannot be questioned, her observation of family proprieties was steely. Pound gave no sign of desperation. Things went on as before, though he began to make plans to spend the summer in France. It is possible Olivia and Hope wanted Pound and Dorothy to separate for a while. H.D. recalled something of the sort many years later.
As Pound had mentioned in his letter to Hope, he was at the time giving some well-paid afternoon lectures on medieval poetry in the private gallery of Lord and Lady Glenconner, who lived in Queen Anne’s Gate. They probably used much the same material as his New Age ‘Troubadour Romance’, as one was on Cavalcanti, one on Daniel and one on Anglo-Saxon verse, and the advertisement for the series said that they would ‘be considered, in part, in their possible relation to the Art of to-day’.115 The second of these, on 19 March, Dorothy missed – being at the dentist at the time – but that same evening she went to hear the leader of the Italian Futurists, Filippo Marinetti, lecture in his breakneck French on the Futurists in the Bechstein (now Wigmore) Hall. Pound apparently did not go, though he could not have missed the impact that Marinetti was making, attracting horrified and excited coverage in the press. Marinetti was a master of publicity, with his dramatic speeches, noisy accompaniments, and extremist views. Harold Monro admired him for his success in taking poetry to the people, though he did not agree with his worship of speed and machinery. The Times reported that ‘Signor Marinetti, founder of the Futurist movement, gave a lecture in French on Futurism in literature and art. He read his lecture in French with such an impassioned torrent of words that some of his audience begged for mercy, and of his sincerity there can be no question, but his doctrines are a morbid form of destructive revolution. There is no beauty, according to the Futurists, except in violence and strife: every museum and all the great works of the past should be utterly swept away.’116 These sentiments are not ones that Pound would ever share, but Lawrence Rainey has suggested Pound must have been struck by the contrast between his own old-fashioned reliance on patronage and Marinetti’s astute playing to the marketplace, between his passéiste concern with literary relics, and Marinetti’s denunciation of the past and zeal for the new and machine-like, between his limited audience and Marinetti’s celebrity. It was this, Rainey suggests, that drove Pound to invent imagism at that moment, by analogy with Futurism.117 There is, however, no evidence that Pound had any such thoughts, or that he was yet planning what Aldington would call his ‘mouvemong’.118 In his ‘Prologomena’, he had denied that he was part of any movement, unless one started by Swinburne in the return to poetry as ‘pure art’, and argues that ‘only after a long struggle will poetry attain such a degree of development, or if you will, modernity, that it will vitally concern people who are accustomed, in prose, to Henry James and Anatole France, in music to De Bussy. I am constantly contending that it took two centuries of Provence and one of Tuscany to develop the media of Dante’s masterwork, that it took the latinists of the Renaissance, and the Pleiade, and his own age of painted speech to prepare Shakespeare his tools.’119 It is true that by the following August Pound would have changed, but in the meantime he was wary of modernity. Rainey’s justification for suggesting this moment for the birth of imagism is that the first mention of ‘les imagistes’ appeared in Ripostes, in a note appended to ‘The Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme’, and Pound sent Ripostes off to the publishers shortly after Marinetti’s lecture. Pound, however, did not deal with the final set of proofs for the volume until August. By that time things had changed, and, as will appear, the evidence shows he invented imagism then.
The first Futurist exhibition in London had opened on 1 March 1912, at the Sackville Gallery, and although Pound does not appear to have gone, his interest in modern art was belatedly arising. He had been introduced to the work of Jacob Epstein, almost certainly by Hulme, and was deeply impressed.120 He wrote home to his parents, ‘I’m not sure the little Jew hasn’t more real strength than Rodin’. He was struck by a ‘very fine sun-god’ that Epstein had carved, which he reported might have been ‘exkavated from Babylon & not questioned as to authenticity’.121 (Richard Cork, probably correctly, identifies the model as Egyptian, but Epstein was also influenced by ancient Assyrian art.) Epstein, unlike Marinetti, was Pound’s kind of modern artist: rather than embracing all that Pound found objectionable in the modern world, he returned to earlier forms, the seed-time of cultures as Pound later put it, in order to capture something that gives life again to art. Pound was also making his first discoveries in modern French poetry, telling his parents that Flint had put him on to ‘some very good contemporary French stuff’ and mentioning the names of Henri de Régnier and Rémy de Gourmont.122 It was skilfully planned by Flint, because they were both poets who drew on the past, so likely to appeal to Pound in a way other modern poets would not. Rémy de Gourmont was deeply interested in the Latin Middle Ages, and one of the collections Pound and his fellow-imagists came to admire particularly was Le Livre des litanies, in which, Pound would say in 1913, de Gourmont made the ‘most valuable contribution to the development of the strophe’ since Arnaut Daniel.123 De Gourmont here uses the rhythmic form of a Christian litany for his own secular poetry; Pound quotes from ‘La Litanie de la rose’:
Rose couleur de cuivre, plus frauduleuse que nos joies, rose couleur de cuivre embaume-nous dans tes mensonges, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.
Rose au visage peint comme une fille d’amour, rose au coeur prostitué, rose au visage peint, fais sembleant [sic] d’être pitoyable, fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence.124
This technique of the repetition of words and of what the French vers libre poets called rhythmic constants was a feature of much of their writing, and this litany-like repetition appears in much imagist verse, especially perhaps that of H.D. Her flower poems with their subversion of traditional ‘flowery’, feminised associations may owe something to de Gourmont’s poetry in subject-matter as well as form, as in her poem ‘Garden’, when she writes of a ‘rose, cut in rock,/hard as the descent of hail,/ If I could break you/I could break a tree.’125 But the book by de Gourmont that first seized Pound’s imagination was his anthology of medieval Latin poetry, Le Latin mystique, which to his delight bore out his arguments about the fusion of religious and sexual passion in ‘Psychology and the Troubadours’. Whether or not he discovered this in time to mention it in his lecture to the Quest Society that spring, he certainly quoted from it in the written-up version that appeared in their journal that October.126
Equally influential would be the other poet recommended by Flint, Henri de Régnier. René Taupin points out that the poem Pound wrote later that month, ‘The Return’, is based on his ‘Médailles d’argile’, one of his poems known as the ‘Odelettes’, which Flint particularly admired. Taupin goes so far as to describe Pound’s poem as a conscious imitation, though it is scarcely close enough to assert that, but the movement of the verse is strikingly similar, and the content related.127 In ‘Médailles d’argile’, de Régnier suggests his poems are, as it were, spoken to him by the gods, the forces behind the vital universe, intuited by the poet. In ‘The Return’, Pound’s gods are also the vital forces that make poetry possible, though in his case they are re-emerging after a long period of defeat. He is going back to Pater’s assertion that Provençal poetry arose at the moment which saw ‘the return of that ancient Venus, not dead, but only hidden for a time in the caves of the Venusberg, of those old pagan gods still going to and fro on the earth, under all sorts of disguises’, an idea which had also been lurking behind his ‘Psychology and the Troubadours’ lecture, and his claim there that ‘Provençal song is never wholly disjunct from pagan rites’.128 Once more, Pound suggests, the gods are returning to make poetry possible. ‘The Return’ is a poem that has been seen as Pound’s first hesitant claim to be on the brink of discovering a new and powerful way to write poetry:
See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!
Pound’s poem uses de Régnier’s short, broken, slow moving lines and his habit of direct address. ‘Alors j’ai dit: Voici des flûtes et des corbeilles,/Mordez aux fruits … J’ai dit encor: Écoute.’129 Where de Régnier tells his readers to listen (‘Écoute/Écoute’) Pound instructs his to ‘See’. The imagery of movement, feet and pace can, it has been pointed out, refer either to the returning gods or to poetry. The uncertain, slow movements of the returning gods are embodied in the breaks and hesitancies of the form:
See, they return, one, and by one,
With fear, as half-awakened;
As if the snow should hesitate
And murmur in the wind,
and half turn back;
These were the ‘Wing’d-with-Awe,’
Inviolable.
Gods of the wingèd shoe!130
De Régnier’s gods too were counted ‘une à une’. The god with wingèd shoes was of course Hermes, who, as well as being the messenger of the gods, was, in his Egyptian form, Thoth, the scribe of the gods and the inventor of writing, perhaps why Pound invokes him here. Nowadays this poem is seen as a brilliant example of cadenced free verse, and Pound himself two years later would republish it in the anthology Des Imagistes, but at the time he described it to Dorothy as another experiment in ‘sapphics’. He would later compare this poem with Epstein’s Sun-God, and it is possible that Epstein’s Sun-God, with its return to the simplicity and power of ancient forms, had a direct influence on the poem, which too is re-invoking ancient forms and beliefs.131 Pound must have been delighted when Yeats, who admired ‘The Return’ greatly, said that it read as if Pound ‘were translating at sight from an unknown Greek masterpiece’.132 That was undoubtedly the effect for which Pound was trying, and that he had admired so much in Epstein’s carving, which could have been ‘exkavated from Babylon & not questioned as to authenticity’, a creation of something powerful, simplified, harking back to elemental forces that felt more vital and intense than the febrile modern age. ‘The Return’ is a move away from his persona poems, but it keeps their direct voice. Pound described it as a poem about ‘objective reality’, by which he means it is a poem that centres on the description of a scene, rather than on the psychological state or consciousness of the speaker. ‘Objective reality’ is in some ways an odd expression for this mythic scene, but Pound would have agreed with H.D. when she later wrote, ‘Mythology is actuality, as we now know.’133
That spring, H.D and Aldington both moved into Church Walk, having separate rooms in number 6. Pound appeared delighted by this – doubtless he had engineered it, and he would soon begin to treat them as his poetic children. Richard and H.D. were seeing each other a good deal. Aldington, as Brigit correctly surmised, had been attracted to H.D. from the start; in a letter written from the front in 1918 he recalls the first time he surreptitiously touched her little finger at one of Brigit’s parties. His open admiration of not only herself but also her poetry touched H.D., whose poetic efforts were still being ignored by Pound, though by now he appears to have been discussing poetry with the two of them. Aldington loved her passion for beautiful things; they both spent a good deal of time sketching in the South Kensington Museum, as the Victoria & Albert continued to be known. They were true heirs of the Pre-Raphaelites and the aesthetes, passionate about beauty and the power of art, dismayed at the ugliness of modern industrial society. Aldington shared H.D.’s love of the natural world and flowers, and they visited the Kent countryside together with Brigit. Perhaps because Aldington was so much younger, H.D. was, at any rate to start with, less aware of any tendency towards the kind of masculinist domination that Pound took for granted as his right. Aldington neither patronised her nor put on airs. He knew that she was, as Brigit put it, the ‘chosen friend’ of Pound, from which she may have acquired a certain glamour in his eyes, but he does not appear to have worried about him as a rival.134 Richard always had enormous sexual self-confidence. In Death of a Hero, Pound appears as Mr Upjohn, of whom the narrator says, ‘While gallantly and probably necessarily discreet as to his conquests, he was always prepared to talk about love and give subtle erotic advice, which led any man who had actually lain with a woman to suspect that Mr Upjohn was at best a fumbler and probably still a virgin.’135 While it’s unlikely that Aldington was quite so dismissive of Pound in the early days of his discipleship, he appears to have been in no way inhibited by the possibility that Pound wanted a relationship with H.D. Pound, indeed, from the beginning was keen to bring Aldington and H.D. together; a neat solution from his point of view, though he appears to have expected to retain the proprietary right to demand kisses from H.D. when he felt like it. H.D., for her part, in her strange limbo of uncertainty about what she felt about Pound, or he about her, was charmed by Aldington’s warm, exuberant admiration. All the same, when Rummel broke the news that spring of Pound’s engagement, she was devastated.
It is highly unlikely Pound had mentioned the engagement to Walter himself; Pound rarely spoke of his personal affairs to his male friends, certainly not if he could avoid it. Walter had been told by Olivia Shakespear, with whom, according to H.D., he had become a great favourite. As H.D. writes in End to Torment, ‘Walter said, “I think I ought to tell you, though I promised Mrs Shakespear not to, – don’t let her know or anyone. But there is an understanding. Ezra is to marry Dorothy Shakespear. He shouldn’t tell other people or imply to other people that he – that you –”.’136 When in the 1950s Erich Heydt asked her how she had felt on hearing that, she replied, ‘Look – it’s impossible to say. I felt bleak, a chasm opened … I don’t know what I felt.’137 In the fictional account in Asphodel, she does tentatively rebuke him: ‘don’t you think, George, it was just a little, just a little – odd … I mean if you were engaged all that time – to – kiss me … you might have told me.’ George is unrepentant: ‘Well, Dryad as I never see my – ah – fiancée save when surrounded by layers of its mother, by its family portraits, by its own inhibitions, by the especial curve of the spiral of the social scale it belongs to, I think you might be – affable.’138 The phraseology is certainly pure Pound. Yet in the fictional version, as in End to Torment, the rupture sets her free to be a writer. George had continued to disparage Hermione’s poetry: ‘You are a poem though your poem’s naught. Why should she have questioned. Striven. George would write for them both.’139 It is Darrington, the Aldington figure, who praises and encourages her poetry, and who is the person to whom she turns.