AS POUND HAD mentioned in that first letter to Monroe in mid-August, he was still working on the proofs of Ripostes. The story of these proofs is not entirely clear; the previous June he had written to his mother from Paris, telling her that he had sent off the Ripostes proofs, and that the book would be with her in a month or so. Dorothy had with enormous care sent him two sets of proofs to Paris, plus his original manuscript, all duly registered, and Pound had poured scorn on her for such precautions. Possibly his returned proofs, presumably unregistered, had gone astray; it may be that Swift & Co., which would not last much longer, was a rather ramshackle organisation, and simply mislaid them. Whatever the explanation, he was now checking them for the second time. Presumably he had already decided in March to append ‘The Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme’, the five poems by Hulme which had appeared in the New Age in January, as one would imagine that Swift & Co. would have taken it ill if Pound had added them at final proof stage, but the preface that he included, which had not appeared in the New Age, and which contained the first reference to the imagistes in print, can only have been written in August. For one thing, if Pound had invented the term imagiste in March, before he sent in the manuscript, or even in June, at the first proof stage, it is inconceivable that he would not have used the term again in one of the numerous extant letters and pieces of writing he had produced since. In addition, the preface bears the signs of the new knowledge he had gleaned from Flint’s article. In his newly conceived role as leader of the imagistes, Pound could not pass up the opportunity for a manifesto, though in this first imagiste pronouncement there is no definite indication that Pound was yet taking avant-gardism entirely seriously. Pound referred obliquely to the Tour Eiffel meetings, saying the poems ‘recall certain evenings and meetings of two years gone, dull enough at the time, though pleasant enough to look back on’. He went on:
As for the ‘School of Images’, which may or may not have existed, its principles were not so interesting as those of the ‘inherent dynamists’ [one guesses he means the Futurists] or of Les Unanimistes [whom Flint had discussed at length in his article], yet they were probably sounder than those of a certain French school which attempted to dispense with verbs altogether; or of the Impressionists who brought forth
‘Pink pigs blossoming upon the hillside’
or of the Post-Impressionists who beseech their ladies to let down slate-blue hair over their raspberry-coloured flanks …
As for the future, Les Imagistes, the descendants of the forgotten school of 1909, have that in their keeping.94
Given the mocking tone, it is not surprising that Flint was to claim later that ‘the name [imagiste] … was adopted as a joke rather than the challenge it finally became’.95 There would be at least one volume of ‘post-impressionist poetry’ published in 1914, though it wasn’t a word much applied to poetry, but Pound was perhaps anticipating the advent of the much-discussed Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, which was to open in October, the month when Ripostes eventually appeared; critics were to lose no time in discovering disagreeable similarities between them. Yet it is worth noting, in the face of Pound’s later prevarications, that here he explicitly and publicly acknowledges his debt to Hulme’s ideas.
Pound’s next step in fashioning himself into the leader of a poetic movement was to begin to host a regular literary gathering on Tuesdays; the same day that he had held his weekly gathering back at Hamilton, though by now the choice of day was probably directly in homage to Mallarmé’s famous mardis, described so evocatively in Arthur Symons’ The Symbolist Movement in Literature, for Mallarmé’s overarching importance as the father of the symbolistes had been made much of in Flint’s article. These Tuesdays do not appear to have been large events – the size of Pound’s room would have precluded that – and from accounts in Brigit Patmore’s memoirs, it appears that she, Aldington and H.D., with whom Pound was now in almost daily contact, were the regulars. Flint also came along sometimes, and there were occasional others. Frances and Louis had returned to England, and during the later summer and autumn may have occasionally come, gathering material for their satire, The Buffoon. They certainly met up several times with H.D., Aldington and Pound, and might well have been asked along. Pound was now exploring new areas; on one of the first Tuesdays he invited Marjorie Kennedy Fraser to sing them Hebridean folk songs, which appear to have impressed him deeply, for the next spring he advised a would-be poet to ‘fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language … e.g. Saxon charms, Hebridean Folk Songs, the verse of Dante, and the lyrics of Shakespeare’.96 Even before that – not much more than a week before her departure – Florence Farr chanted some of Tagore’s poetry, reading ‘from an unpublished english mss translated from the Bengali’. Tagore ‘was a very great person indeed’, Pound explained to his father, reporting on this event.97 Even though he had not yet met Tagore, Pound was already on message. He told his father that Yeats was doing an introduction, and he would let him know when the book was out.
Dorothy had returned to London for the second half of August, but then left again for Devon. Pound had a busy social life in her absence: he was, he told her, playing tennis with Ford in the afternoons, and dining with Aldington and H.D. in the evenings. Given his late rising, one wonders how he fitted in his writing, but he clearly did so. He was beginning to experiment with what he now acknowledged was vers libre, and with satirical poems, telling Dorothy, ‘I have … writ a few modern epigrams to keep Richard from the blues.’98 One of them was on a tea-shop, describing the way ‘the glow of youth’ is fading from the girl who brings them their muffins: ‘The August has worn against her’.99 It is surely a sign of his self-reinvention that he has swapped courtly love for talk of muffins: he would later, it might be noted, dismiss his earlier poetry as ‘stale cream puffs’.100 According to Aldington, tea-shops were where Pound, H.D. and he spent much of their time, presumably after Pound’s tennis matches. ‘Like other American expatriates,’ Aldington says, H.D. and Pound had ‘an almost insane relish for afternoon tea’. He, as ‘an oppressed minority’, had to go along. So their poetic discussions largely took place ‘in the rather prissy milieu of some infernal bun-shop full of English spinsters’. In spite of these surroundings, ‘an extremely good time was had by all, and we laughed until we ached’. He couldn’t, he admitted, remember what they had found so entertaining: ‘I suspect that the cream of the wit lay in the fact that we were young, entirely carefree, and having a glorious time just being alive’.101 Aldington’s memories of the gaiety of the years 1912–14 may be heightened by the contrast with the sombre war years that followed, but there is no doubt they had a good deal of fun together, even if they all had their darker moments, and they all – even Aldington, in spite of the flippancy of his later comments – at heart took writing poetry deeply seriously.
Pound was making other moves to further his new persona of the leader of a cénacle. Aldington and H.D. were no longer just his friends. They were, he told them, somewhat to their surprise, if not bewilderment, members of the imagist movement. ‘Whenever Ezra has launched a new movement,’ Aldington wrote, ‘he has never had any difficulty about finding members. He just called on his friends.’ Pound would, he relates, often ‘obliterate a literary figure by the simple assertion: “Il n’est pas dong le mouvemong”’. (It recalls Mrs Thatcher’s insistence that her satellites must be ‘one of us’.) In Aldington’s account of the birth of imagism, he says that
Naturally … the Imagist mouvemong was born in a tea-shop – in the Royal Borough of Kensington. For some time Ezra had been butting in on our studies and poetic productions, with alternate encouragements and the reverse, according to his mood. H.D. produced some poems which I thought were excellent, and she either handed or mailed them to Ezra. Presently each of us received a ukase to attend the Kensington bun-shop. Ezra was so much worked up by these poems of H.D.’s that he removed his pince-nez and informed us that we were Imagists.102
H.D. tells the story of Pound reading these poems of hers more than once. She hadn’t posted them – as they were all living in Church Walk, it is surprising that Aldington suggests she might have done. She was, she says, with Pound in the British Museum tea-room when she showed him one of her poems, rather bravely one might think, considering how often he appears earlier to have dismissed them, and indeed, Pound told Harriet Monroe, he had great difficulty in persuading her to let him see any. But if Aldington had praised them first that might have given her courage. This time Pound’s reaction was quite different from his former scorn. As she recalls in End to Torment, he said: ‘“But Dryad … this is poetry.” He slashed with a pencil. “Cut this out, shorten this line. ‘Hermes of the Ways’ is a good title. I’ll send this to Harriet Monroe of Poetry” … And he scrawled “H.D. Imagiste” at the bottom of the page.’103 This was perhaps a collaborative act not unlike the more famous partnership when Pound ‘slashed’ T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land; but H.D.’s story conveys all her ambivalence about Pound. She emphasises the violence of the slashing, just as elsewhere in that memoir she makes clear Pound’s aggressive bullying when he ‘pounds’ the taxi with his stick as he insists she is not to go with Frances on her honeymoon. Yet that slashing with Pound’s ‘creative pencil’, as she describes it, is also productive, setting her on her course as a poet.104 Perhaps she wants to make it analogous to what she said about Pound’s earlier betrayal of their engagement, which seared her, but put her on her path away from home and towards London and poetry; Pound, she would say, ‘was the scorpionic sting … that got me away’.105 In her unpublished memoir, ‘Compassionate Friendship’, she repeats the story, explaining that ‘Hermes of the Ways’ was ‘a rough transcription of a short poem from the Greek Anthology’, which Pound ‘pruned … into vers libre’. ‘It was one of those early poems that Ezra scrutinized and with a flourish of a large lead pencil, in the British Museum tea-room, deleted and trimmed or pruned or chiselled into the then unfamiliar free-verse’.106 Whether the original ‘rough transcription’ was the kind of poetic prose or prose poetry that she had written in her diary in Paris that spring, or the kind of hesitant formal metrics she also included, one can’t tell. If she had been reading Henri de Régnier in Paris, it seems surprising that she found free verse still unfamiliar, but perhaps to transpose it into English had been too sudden a move. Even Flint, who after all had been studying and advocating vers libre for some years, had only the previous year begun to shed formal metric and rhyme. But her diary for that summer shows that H.D. was already writing with the immediacy and intensity that characterised her poetry, though without yet being able to find a form. Pound’s ‘Cut this out, shorten this line’ showed her what she needed. Her prose in that diary had been more intense and poetic than the formal poetry she attempted; something very close to vers libre was in fact what she was instinctively writing. It was the perfect form for her ‘tense, terse music’.
What emerged from this chiselling and pruning was perhaps, as Cyrena Pondrom has argued, the kind of poetry from which Pound would finally develop his definition of imagism.107 In 1915 Pound was to write to Flint saying that he had invented the name ‘Imagisme’ to describe the work of H.D., which cannot be entirely true, for when Pound coined the word he had not yet seen the poems to which he appended the signature, ‘H.D. Imagiste’. The more likely scenario is the one he described to Harriet Monroe: ‘The name appears in my introduction to T.E. Hulme at the end of Ripostes, and the whole affair started … chiefly to get H.D.’s five poems a hearing. It certainly began in Church Walk with HD, Richard and myself.’108 If that’s true it would confirm, as I’ve suggested, that Pound invented the name of the movement first, and only began to reach a programme when he saw H.D.’s spare yet freighted poems, so imagism came to be defined by the sort of poetry that she and – to some extent – he and Aldington were writing; it was not a set of principles they had followed to produce it, hence Pound’s continual redefinition of the term as he strove to analyse more exactly how he thought their verse worked. But for now he wrote to Harriet Monroe with great excitement: ‘I’ve had luck again, and am sending you some modern stuff by an American, I say modern, for it is in the laconic speech of the Imagistes, even if the subject is classic … This is the sort of American stuff that I can show here and in Paris without its being ridiculed. Objective – no slither; direct – no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won’t permit examination. It’s straight talk, straight as the Greek!’109 ‘Direct’ was one of Hulme’s watchwords, but ‘objective’ was Ford’s, derived from the Flaubertian principle of the presentation of a story without authorial comment. It doesn’t imply that there is no psychological intensity, or that it is unrelated to subjective experience. In his ‘Prologomena’ Pound had said he wanted poetry ‘free from emotional slither’, in other words, not without emotion, but the emotion, as he says in his introduction to Cavalcanti, must be ‘exact’. Some critics have persuasively suggested that imagist poetry is analogous to what Eliot would later call the ‘objective correlative’, which for him is ‘the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art’, that is, by finding something external, ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events’, that will by ‘the skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions’ give the ‘exact equivalence’ of the emotion.110
Pound’s reading of H.D.’s poems must have happened very shortly before his excited letter about them to Monroe in October.111 He had already sent some of Aldington’s poems to Harriet before those by H.D., ‘Choricos’ (spelt in Greek letters), ‘To a Greek Marble’ and ‘Au Vieux Jardin’. Aldington would later mock Pound’s weakness for foreign titles, which he described as ‘a rather childish form of high-hatting’; but in 1912 he was high-hatting with the best.112 Harriet Monroe much admired ‘Choricos’, and it would remain her favourite of Aldington’s poems, and be one of his most popular with many others as well. Its preoccupation with death, and a strangely eroticised death at that, is recognisably in the decadent tradition, and has shades of Poe or Swinburne. Its tone and imagery must have been familiar, its diction reassuringly poetic, even if its form were new:
O death …
Thou art the dusk and the fragrance;
Thou art the lips of love mournfully smiling;
Thou art the sad peace of one
Satiate with old desires;
Thou art the silence of beauty
And we look no more for the morning;
We yearn no more for the sun …113
Pound was pleased to have his protégé in print. His relationship with Poetry had started well. He was delighted to have access to a magazine adequately funded by others; the possibility that his advice would not always be taken does not appear to have occurred to him at this stage, though he would soon learn. Although it would not be a paid position, Pound would be a regular paid contributor, and Harriet Monroe had also promised to send him some extra payment for his efforts if she could. She described him in the first issue in glowing terms, as ‘Mr Ezra Pound, the young Philadelphia poet whose recent distinguished success in London led to wide recognition in his own country … That discriminating London publisher, Mr Elkin Mathews, “discovered” this young poet from over seas.’114 She goes on to list Pound’s books. Pound must have enjoyed the praise even if he was irritated that she managed to get the title of Canzoni wrong, and give an erroneous publisher for Provença: a correction duly appeared next time. Harriet Monroe was a curious mixture as an editor; she had an eagle eye for what she thought blasphemous or indecent nuances, but in ordinary copy-editing she was very careless. Titles of books, for example, mentioned in the prose pieces of the magazine, are randomly capitalised, italicised or in inverted commas; details about her contributors are regularly slightly inaccurate. Pound would frequently write to her or Alice Corbin Henderson to correct her statements; he does not seem to have much minded her carelessness, unless it affected his projects, but he could find her respectability very irksome.
H.D. was the only one of the imagists never to publish a pre-imagist poem, unless one counts the Heine translation in Paint it Today.115 Pound’s ‘creative pencil’ might have chiselled that first poem, but it led her instantly to her own very characteristic mode. ‘Hermes of the Ways’ is based on a brief epigram by a Greek woman poet, Anyte of Tegea – the choice of a woman poet is surely no coincidence – which, as H.D. says, she had come across in the Greek Anthology.116 H.D.’s poem is longer, more developed than the original, as is often the case in her translations, yet the effect sounds as spare as a faithful translation from the Greek (though since H.D. created so powerfully our present sense of what a Greek poem should be, perhaps it sounds that way because she invented Greek poetry for the modern English reader in much the same way as Eliot would later credit Pound with inventing Chinese). The original poem, consisting of two elegiac couplets, in which Hermes welcomes weary travellers home, would have been written in the form of an inscription (which is what ‘epigram’ originally meant) for a herm, or boundary stone, very much an ur-Hermes, associated with the early, chthonic stages of Greek religion.117 The speaker in H.D.’s poem, however, is not Hermes but the traveller returning after a tempestuous, battering journey: it is a persona poem, like Pound’s, as many of her poems would be, growing out of a similar need to find a shape for what she would describe as the ‘inchoate’ self. Norman Holmes Pearson, the close friend and supporter of H.D.’s later years, was to say of her:
She used art in order to find herself. That constant search for identity marks twentieth-century American literature. You remember Cummings: ‘Why do you write?’. ‘I write, I dare say, to become myself’ … Or what does Pound call the hero, the protagonist of the Cantos? ‘A man of no fortune, and with a name to come.’ You could say that H.D. devoted her life to this kind of search … yet again, paradoxically, one is swept up into a knowledge of one’s identity by the similarities in the patterns of other lives and other races … she used Greek myth to find her own identity … she writes the most intensely personal poetry using Greek myth as a metaphor. That is, she can say these things better and more frankly about herself using these other devices than she could if she simply said, ‘I, I, I.’ To say ‘Helen’ is really to free oneself.118
Pearson’s formulation was one that many poets of the period would have understood; the ‘bundle of accidents and incoherence that sits down to breakfast’, as Yeats described the poet as individual person, was bound by the distorting conventional thought of the day; to get to a truer understanding of themselves and the world they had to work obliquely through another.119 This speaking through others, often by translating others, would be central to the imagist movement.
Whilst in her later poetry H.D.’s personae would be complex and subtle reworkings of the female mythic figures of the Homeric traditions, in her early imagist period, up to the publication of Sea Garden in 1916, she writes mostly about the pre-Olympian nymphs, dryads, oreads, herms and so on, the often unnamed and undifferentiated gods of archaic Greek religion, a world that embodied the radical, elemental simplicity that she wanted in her verse. She may have discovered this version of the early Greeks in the work of Farr’s friend, the anthropologist Jane Harrison, whose 1905 book, The Religion of the Ancient Greeks, might well have attracted her in the British Museum Reading Room. Harrison says there that Hermes in his original form as an unwrought herm or boundary stone that marked the ‘sanctity of a spot’ was the earliest of the Greek theoi or chthonic gods; the next step was ‘a square limbless “Hermes”’ to which the Arcadians (Tegea is part of Arcadia) were ‘specially partial’.120 There is no definite proof that H.D. read Harrison’s work, but so many of her ideas appear in her work that it would be surprising if she had not, though she may have come across them at second hand. Harrison, like Martin Bernal more recently in Black Athena, believed that early Greek pre-Homeric culture came from Africa and Asia, something H.D. also stresses, whilst the later Hellenic culture and the Olympian gods came from the north. The archaic pre-Homeric religion gave prominence to the female deities, in particular early versions of Demeter and Kore, though Dionysus is also associated with it; the later Olympians are much more patriarchal.121 Like Jane Harrison, H.D. recreates the Greek world; it is no longer the Victorians’ masculine citadel of Homeric heroes or Athenian repose but an earlier, more elemental place where the struggles of the female psyche can be played out. H.D.’s Greeks belong to the archaic world that was also being evoked by Epstein in his statues. They are no longer the originators of Western rationalism, but represent what she sees as a non-Western intensity and passion through which she can present her own psychic turmoil.
‘Hermes of the Ways’ was a fitting opening poem to H.D.’s oeuvre. It is a poem about the shoreline, that liminal space between land and sea that would appear so often in her poetry. As an expatriate American, on the edge of British life; as a bisexual, between sexualities; as an experimental poet, at the cultural margins, she was always at a ‘borderline’, as the film in which she later appeared with Paul Robeson would be called. In 1921, she would say in a letter to Marianne Moore, ‘I can’t write unless I’m an outcast’.122 Louis Martz suggests that ‘her poetry and prose, like her own psyche, live at the seething junction of opposite forces’ – the reason why ‘the active, shifting scene where land and ocean meet’ is central to her early poetry.123 The traveller in this poem has finally reached the safety of the sea-shore (‘The hard sand breaks,/and the grains of it/are clear as wine’), yet the sea-shore is, as H.D.’s are so often, a harsh and stormy place:
Wind rushes
over the dunes,
and the coarse, salt-crusted grass
answers.
Heu,
it whips round my ankles!
At the beginning of the second part there is a brief moment of respite, associated, as in the original, with a stream:
Small is
this white stream,
flowing below ground
from the poplar-shaded hill,
but the water is sweet.
After that, however, the harshness returns. The orchard’s apples are ‘hard/too small,/too late ripened/by a desperate sun … The boughs of the trees/are twisted/by many bafflings’. And yet, all the same, the ending suggests something of a home-coming:
Hermes, Hermes,
the great sea foamed,
gnashed its teeth about me;
but you have waited,
where sea-grass tangles with
shore-grass.124
What was this home-coming, buffeted and baffled though it is? I would suggest, as in Pound’s ‘The Return’, Hermes is associated with writing; as Timothy Materer says, Hermes ‘symbolizes poetic vision throughout [H.D.’s] poetry’.125 H.D. had found what Pound would call her ‘métier’; she knew now she would be a poet. It would be a struggle, on the margins, but it was her calling. Yet what her next step would be, she did not know. In the poem, Hermes ‘of the triple pathways’ stands ‘Dubious/facing three ways’. In a few weeks, she would leave London to meet up with her parents. Would she ever be back? Even if she had come to a new sense of her aim, she was still doubtful about which path she would be following to achieve it.