III

IN THE SAME January issue of Poetry as H.D.’s poems was a report by Pound, entitled ‘Status Rerum’, dated with some precision ‘December 10’, on ‘the state of things here in London … as I see it’ (a modest qualification which Pound might not have thought of a few years later). In this he announced to the world that he found ‘Mr Yeats the only poet worthy of serious study’, though he ‘would rather talk about poetry with Ford Madox Hueffer than any man in London.’ He praised Padraic Colum at some length, and mentioned somewhat noncommittally that there are ‘a number of men whose names are too well known for it to seem necessary to tell them over’ – but then goes on to tell nearly a dozen, from Hardy to Rupert Brooke. He had kind words for some ‘little known’ others, his friends and former Rhymers Ernest Rhys and Victor Plarr, and also for Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, ‘the grandest of old men’, whom he was yet to meet. He had a small puff for Aldington: ‘Among the very young men there seems to be a gleam of hope in the work of Richard Aldington, but it is too early to make predictions.’ He does not mention H.D., but then on 10 December she had not yet been published, so could be said to be not yet part of the state of things. He sums up this list of names by saying that he could mention ‘a hundred writers who have given pleasure … But it is one thing to take pleasure in a man’s work and another to respect him as a great artist’.⁴⁴ This is a great deal less glowing than his early eulogies on the subject of the literary scene to Williams, but, although he described it to Dorothy as a ‘denunciation of everybody except Yeats & Colum’, it is a far cry from Pound’s embittered post-war diatribes against the London of this period, though it has to be said that he would comment in a letter to Alice Corbin Henderson, written on 20 January, ‘There just IS nothing alive here except W.B.Y. and Les Imagistes. God I don’t want to hide any body from deserved honours BUTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!’⁴⁵

The nub of ‘Status Rerum’ was indeed a passage on imagism. ‘The youngest school here that has the nerve to call itself a school is that of the Imagistes. To belong to a school does not in the least mean that one writes poetry to a theory. One writes poetry when, where, because, and as one feels like writing it. A school exists when two or three young men agree, more or less, to call certain things good; when they prefer such of their verses as have certain qualities to such of their verses as do not have them.’ These disclaiming prevarications can have brought little enlightenment to his readers as to the tenets of imagisme, but Pound went on to give one hint of what might be called good by these ‘young men’, H.D. being again ignored at this point. Explaining that ‘space forbids’ a proper exposition of the imagiste programme, Pound noted that ‘one of their watchwords is Precision’. They dislike ‘dull and interminable effusions’ (it is hard to imagine a poetic school in favour of them), believing that one needs to learn to write a good short poem, or even a good line, before being able to write a long poem. These preferences are in line with the reference to ‘life and intensity’ in his first letter to Harriet Monroe, but as a poetic programme they are very little changed from that of the Rhymers, who had already reacted against the long Victorian poem, as well as against didacticism, pomposity and verbiage. But in ‘Status Rerum’ Pound disguises that particular debt. His reference, however, to this still mysterious group of imagists could be relied upon to stir the curiosity of the reader of Poetry, in preparation for the next phase of the campaign to establish his new ‘school’.

‘Schools’ was not the way the London literary world so far conceived of itself – clubs were another matter – but Pound saw himself as importing the language of Parisian artistic discipline into the world of London’s amateur literati. Over the next few years, as it happened, English poetry would come to be seen by many as a division into two main schools, or at least groupings: on the one hand, the imagists and those later identified as modernists, versus the Georgians, the latter being held up to ridicule or acclaim, depending on the critic’s view of modernism. It is not true, however, as has sometimes been suggested, that Pound invented imagism in opposition to the Georgians. In December 1912, neither Pound nor anyone else saw them as taking a distinctive or separate trajectory. Edward Marsh, then Winston Churchill’s secretary, a lover of poetry rather than a poet, had just edited Georgian Poetry 1911–12, which was published by Harold Monro at the end of 1912. It was not to reach the bookshops until 16 December, although Pound knew of its imminent arrival. The anthology was Rupert Brooke’s idea: a collection of modern poems by younger poets, the title merely marking them off historically from the older generations of Victorians and Edwardians. There was no suggestion that the movement would be a refuge for the conventional and staid, as these anthologies were later accused of being. Far from it: they too felt they were rejecting all that was Victorian. Like the imagists, and the Rhymers before them, these poets were opposed to rhetoric and didacticism, and on the whole preferred the brief, lyric form: like the imagists they moved away from poeticised language towards that of everyday. Rupert Brooke saw Georgian Poetry, in fact, as ‘a volume designed as the herald of a revolutionary dawn’,⁴⁶ and Monro would later say that it had been Brooke’s ‘warm contention, indeed, nearly his main principle, that the British public should be shocked’.⁴⁷ Pound himself had been asked to contribute to Georgian Poetry, and had not done so largely by chance. The two poems Marsh wanted were, firstly, as I mentioned earlier, ‘Ballad of the Goodly Fere’, which Pound, in his newly sensitive state of embarrassment over his archaisms, refused to let him have on the grounds that it was not modern, and secondly ‘Portrait d’une Femme’, which Pound wanted for his own collection Ripostes. By the time of the second anthology, Marsh had decided only to include British writers, so Pound was not asked again. It is true that he might not have been asked in any case, since his poetry was by then perhaps too modern for Marsh, who liked an element of tradition. Marsh loathed the Futurists, remembered Pound in his memoirs chiefly for his incorrect use of sapphics, and, although he published poems by D.H. Lawrence, chided him gently for his lack of attention to orthodox rhyme. Lawrence, rather less gently, childed him in return with being ‘a bit of a policeman in poetry’.⁴⁸

Marsh, public school and Cambridge, was at the heart of the Establishment, even if all his poets were not; in later life, he was a little diffident about this youthful enthusiasm for poetry and said that he felt about his work as an editor ‘very much as I should towards having been Captain of Cricket at Westminster’.⁴⁹ He remained a bachelor all his life; Brigit Patmore’s son Derek suggests he was a repressed homosexual, and says he doubts that he ever had a sexual experience, but he liked to help young literary men, and he idolised the handsome Brooke. As Alan Pryce-Jones has said, ‘His outlook … was characteristically English. Theorising about art was foreign; announcing aesthetic and critical doctrines was foreign. His approach to artistic problems was pragmatic and amateur. If his formula for an anthology worked, it was good.’⁵⁰ It certainly sold. The well-connected Marsh, aided by the also well-connected Brooke, made sure review copies were distributed to the right people on the right papers. The anthology was suitably hyped, albeit with a few caveats about Rupert Brooke’s excessive realism, but that probably helped the sales. It was a commercial success from the beginning; seven months later, it was in its sixth edition. In all, Edward Marsh reckoned, 15,000 copies were sold.

Georgian Poetry 1911–12 was the first of five anthologies. Significantly, perhaps, no woman appeared in that first anthology – indeed in the five volumes, only two women ever featured, one of whom was the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West. Marsh had somewhat guiltily tried to find a woman for the third volume; Monro suggested Charlotte Mew, but Walter de la Mare pooh-poohed her and Marsh’s courage failed. Marsh’s decision to ask British poets only – in practice they were nearly all English, unlike the mainly Celtic Rhymers – did perhaps mark a shift away from what were by then the modernising tendencies, which often came from the Americans in London, and generally from those with a more cosmopolitan outlook. The Georgians looked back to Wordsworth, not across the Channel to Paris. They did not use vers libre, nor were there, as one of their admirers put it, any ‘carnal influences due to French poetry’.⁵¹ Later Richard Aldington, explaining why he ‘thr[e]w in [his] lot with the two Americans’ rather than with the English poets, wrote that ‘The Georgians were regional in their outlook and in love with littleness. They took a little trip for a little week-end to a little cottage where they wrote a little poem on a little theme. Ezra was a citizen of the world, both mentally and in fact. He went off to Paris or Venice with vastly less fuss than a Georgian affronting the perils of the Cotswolds.’⁵² Aldington’s view of the Georgians was not entirely fair. A couple of the later volumes, for example, included some of Siegfried Sassoon’s bitter and incisive war poetry: nothing little there. T.S. Eliot was equally guilty, as Robert Ross points out, of ignoring the presence of the occasional painfully powerful poem, when he wrote that the main characteristic of the Georgians was ‘pleasantness’.⁵³ The modernist scorn for the Georgians was never shared by the public. The second anthology sold 19,000 copies, something of a record in poetry publishing at the time. But in December 1912, although he was hostile and dismissive, Pound did not realise what the Georgians would come to represent. He reported with some satisfaction to Dorothy that ‘The eagle [Yeats] groans that “no one” could read the georgian anthology with pleasure’.⁵⁴ He sent off a instant brief review to Harriet, saying ‘this collection of verse printed since 1910 will reveal to the American reader about all the younger London points of view in poetry which are likely to be unrepresented in my notes … Those who have read the Lyric Year with interest will peruse this anthology with deepest admiration.’⁵⁵ Harriet, perhaps wisely, forbore to publish it.

Georgian Poetry was printed by Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop, which officially opened in January 1913, bringing the bookshop considerable help with its funds, as well as welcome and effective publicity. The arrangement had been that Marsh would guarantee publication costs, but any profits would be divided equally between Monro and the contributors. Marsh himself took nothing, but the royalties, paid approximately every six months, were a great solace to indigent poets. The Poetry Bookshop was in Devonshire Street, off the Theobalds Road, an area just south of Bloomsbury, just west of Clerkenwell and just north of Holborn, but not really part of any of them. At the time it was a very poor neighbourhood – a ‘slum’ is how Flint described it – though paradoxically it was also an area where gold-beaters worked, and the sound of their hammering could be heard all day long. Monro had chosen the neighbourhood because of his desire to take poetry to the people, but, as Flint would later write, ‘the people cared nothing for poetry, and the acquaintances he made in Devonshire Street merely regarded him as a possible source of free drinks after the public house had closed’.⁵⁶ The littérateurs of London on the other hand poured into his bookshop, came to the readings he organised regularly, and, if without a ready bed, slept upstairs. The Poetry Bookshop became an important publishing house. As well as the phenomenally successful anthologies of Georgian Poetry Monro would publish the English edition of Des Imagistes, Aldington’s first collection, Flint’s second, and many other books of poetry.

Monro had ceased to be editor of Poetry Review at the end of 1912, though he continued the journal much as he had originally envisaged it under the title of Poetry and Drama. The problem with the original Poetry Review was that half of it had comprised the Poets’ Chronicle, the monthly publication of the very conservative Poetry Society, which met in little groups around the better areas of London and the Home Counties. Members of the Poetry Society objected strongly to Monro’s choice of contributors and subject-matter (to Rupert Brooke, one should note, as much as to Pound), and Poetry Review continued under the staid editorship of Stephen Phillips, a deeply dull poet who was thought by the Poetry Society to be a safer pair of hands. Even so, in a late 1913 issue of Phillips’ Poetry Review, there is a letter of complaint about the modern poetry that the journal published from none other than Aldington’s father. What must he have thought of his son’s work? (The letter gives evidence that Albert Aldington was not entirely grateful for his wife’s efforts to restore the family fortunes; he disguises the fact that he lives in an inn by giving his address as the more respectable-sounding ‘Mermaid Club’. Perhaps it was his father who taught Aldington to be ashamed of his mother.)

During January, Pound gave three lectures in the Mayfair drawing-room of the well-to-do society hostess and friend of Olivia Shakespear, Eva Fowler. The lectures covered his various interests in sequence, the first being on the Provençal troubadours, the second on Tagore, and the third on vers libre and metrics. It was probably in order to give the last lecture that he read one of the critical books recommended by Flint in his August article, and already well known to Hulme in 1908, Vildrac and Duhamel’s Notes sur la technique poètique, a book which he was soon to be quoting in discussions of imagism, but, for all his new concern with the modern, that inclusive lecture sequence perhaps confirmed that he would never be prepared to proclaim the total superiority of the present over the past, nor, indeed, that of the West over the East. He was appalled when Edmund Gosse rebuffed Yeats’ efforts to have Tagore elected to the prestigious Academic Committee of English Letters, and was still seeing a good deal of the delightful Ghose, but his interest in the Far East, first aroused by Binyon in 1909, also appeared to be growing, belatedly following Dorothy’s own. Dorothy had recently produced one of her very few oil paintings, entitled Landscape: Devil’s Cheese Ring, which Richard Cork exhibited in his 1974 exhibition, Vorticism and its Allies, describing it as ‘her first attempt to break away from the Victorian water colour tradition and combine an interest in early Cubism (the boldly simplified foreground trees) with her admiration for Japanese prints (the mountainous horizon)’.⁵⁷ On 4 January 1913, Pound wrote to tell her that he had ‘contemplated mediaeval japanese prints at the [British Museum] & feel ages older & wiser’.⁵⁸ He also reported to both Dorothy and his father that Binyon had been to the States to see the Freer collection of Oriental art, and lamented that there was nothing comparable in Britain. The Far East was, as it happens, in vogue: Pound had told his father that his lectures would take place in Mrs Fowler’s ‘new chinese drawing-room’; Dorothy had a new Chinese skirt and Pound was searching, in Liberty’s and elsewhere, to find some matching jade jewellery.⁵⁹ But he had also bought a history of ‘Hindoostan’ for fourpence; India continued to be his main Eastern interest, but only for a few months longer.⁶⁰

Such lectures helped his finances, but Pound was still looking for more ways of promoting imagism. In early January, before the lectures began, he had told Dorothy that Flint was writing ‘an intelligent article on me chiefly at my own dictation’.⁶¹ To Alice Corbin Henderson he forbore to mention the dictation, merely saying he was asking Flint to write a note on ‘Imagisme’: ‘I can’t very well do it myself,’ he explained, ‘and he is getting known for his knowledge of contemporary work in France so I thought him the best person to describe the school.’⁶² The article would appear in the March Poetry, followed by a much longer piece entitled ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, signed by Pound himself and described by him to Dorothy as ‘a little kindergarten course in Ars Poetica’.⁶³ It became one of the most famous imagist documents, and is still required reading on some creative writing courses today. Pound felt the time had come for a manifesto – though it was a manifesto that explicitly denied that imagists had produced a manifesto – and to enlighten, to some extent at least, the readers of Poetry as to the nature of this school, following the elusive hints that had been dropped up to then.

According to Patricia Hutchins, who interviewed Flint in the 1950s, the first Flint heard of this article was when Pound arrived at his house with the text of an interview with himself supposedly conducted by Flint. Pound wanted him simply to sign the manuscript. Flint, who was no pliant disciple, something Pound was slow to learn, refused, and reworked it in his own words. Pound insisted on making revisions, slashing away at Flint’s text much as he did at his friends’ poetry. References to ‘Mr Pound’ were changed to ‘an imagiste’, conversation turned into more austere indirect speech, and whole paragraphs removed. Flint’s original version was clearer (and funnier) than the final text, but Pound preferred to remain enigmatic yet authoritative. By a neat sleight of hand the article simultaneously claimed and disclaimed avant-garde status. ‘The imagistes admitted that they were contemporaries of the Post Impressionists and the Futurists; but they had nothing in common with these groups. They had not published a manifesto. They were not a revolutionary school; their only endeavour was to write in accordance with the best tradition, as they found it in the best writers of all time, – in Sappho, Catullus, Villon.’⁶⁴ Neither Pound nor the other imagists were in sympathy with the Futurists’ uncritical worship of the modern, it is true, though ironically they were to gain some fame in Russian literary circles a couple of years later as the ‘English Futurists’. That they simply wrote in ‘the best tradition’, however, was the position that all four of the present imagists would maintain. Lawrence Rainey interprets this as being straightforwardly anti-avant-garde, but it is surely more complex than that, though it was perhaps a perverse, even a fauxnaïf line, as they knew perfectly well they appeared ‘a revolutionary school’, and, in the case at least of Pound and Aldington, very much enjoyed scandalising their readers. Yet Pound, as Eliot was to do later, was always to align himself with his own chosen tradition of the best, and would claim an austere classicism while most rudely upsetting the accepted norms; the article also tells its readers that ‘the school musters altogether a most formidable erudition’, and that the imagists display ‘an earnestness that is amazing to one accustomed to the usual London air of poetic dilettantism’.⁶⁵

The part of Flint’s account which would arouse most interest were the three rules that he says the imagists followed. These had been put together by Pound, with his passion for lists:

1 Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective.

2 To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.

3 As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.⁶⁶

In those last two rules, Pound had captured two of the most important qualities of the new poetry – its pared-down, elliptical quality, and its shedding of traditional metric forms in favour of more flexible cadences. Pound was later to say that the second was the most important of the three. His phrase ‘direct treatment of “the thing”’ refers to these poems’ freedom from moral comment, explanatory context or narrative elaboration, and has nothing necessarily to do with an attempt at visual exactitude or pictorial clarity, which the name ‘imagism’ could suggest. Pound, in fact, in ‘A Few Don’ts’ made it clear that was not his intention: ‘Don’t be descriptive; remember the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can … When Shakespeare talks of the “Dawn in russet mantle clad” he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing one can call description; he presents.’⁶⁷

In Flint’s original version the interview continued:

‘Surely’, I urged, ‘these are the rules which every poet worthy of the name has engraved on his heart?’ … Mr Pound became unprintably voluble for a few minutes. I gathered that in his opinion, there were few poets worthy of the name, and that having judged most contemporary poetry according to his standards, he found it wanting. With this judgment I was inclined to agree; and I thought of the two hundred odd volumes of verse that had passed through my hands during the last few years … ‘But why Imagistes?’ I asked when Mr Pound has [sic] recovered his calm.⁶⁸

Pound crossed all this colourful and chatty account out, putting in its place simply ‘By these standards they judged all poetry, and found most of it wanting.’ He left the next two sentences, the answer to ‘why Imagistes?’, almost intact: ‘They hold a certain “Doctrine of the Image,” which they had not committed to writing; they said it did not concern the public, and would provoke useless discussion.’⁶⁹ Needless to say this hidden doctrine, even without being committed to writing, has provoked much critical discussion, not all of it useful, it must be granted. The phrase must have been Pound’s own, for Flint later suggested it was Pound indulging in mystification, as some later critics have also thought. Pound never offered an actual explanation, but twenty years later he made the suggestive comment that the term ‘imagism was formulated almost in order to give emphasis to certain qualities that [H.D.] possessed to the maximum degree: a mytho-poetic sense that was deep, true and of Nature’.⁷⁰ The ‘Doctrine of the image’, one can surmise, referred to this mythopoetic sense, the visionary quality that Pound believed great art should have, the theological term emphasising his belief that art was true religion, and that it connected one with the flows and energies of the universe. As the piece went on to say, the imagists considered that ‘Art is all science, all religion, philosophy and metaphysic’.⁷¹

Pound’s set of admonitions, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, which followed Flint’s ‘interview’ were not all, as he put it, in the ‘Mosaic negative’. Much of it, it has to be said, remains very practical advice: ‘Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something’; ‘Use either no ornament or good ornament’; ‘Don’t allow “influence” to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire’; ‘Don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs. Don’t make each line stop dead at the end, and then begin every next line with a heave.’ As well as providing a reading list of exemplary poets, ‘Sappho, Catullus, Villon, Heine when he is in the vein, Gautier when he is not too frigid; or … seek out the leisurely Chaucer’, Pound recommends the practice of translation, the way he had trained himself, and would continue to do. He ends by saying, somewhat sardonically, ‘“… Mais d’abord il faut être un poète,” as MM. Duhamel and Vildrac have said at the end of their little book, “Notes sur la Technique Poétique”; but in an American one takes that at least for granted, otherwise why does one get born upon that august continent?’

The most important part of Pound’s ‘Don’ts’, however, was the beginning, not a ‘don’t’ at all, but his definition of an ‘image’, which, he says, ‘is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’. He goes on to explain that he is using “complex” … in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart, though we might not agree absolutely in our application’. Bernard Hart, the ‘newer’ psychologist referred to here, had described Freud’s idea of a complex first in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1907, in an issue dedicated to the idea of the subconscious. The issue must have stirred considerable interest, because it was reprinted as a book in 1910. Quite how Pound came across Hart’s work he doesn’t say, but this was an area in which G.S. Mead and the Quest Society were interested, and Pound was still closely in touch with Mead; his own interest in psychoanalysis at this period, was, as it was for the Quest Society and the Society for Psychical Research, an extension of that mixture of scientific and occult explorations of the nature of the mind that Pound had been led to by Yeats. As I mentioned earlier, H.D. recalled many years later that in 1912 Pound had been very intrigued by psychoanalysis: he knew some American psychoanalysts in Paris, perhaps through Margaret Cravens, whose occult interests, as well as her distressed state of mind, could well have led her in that direction. At the time, H.D. resisted Pound’s attempts to persuade her to engage with it, but her own later deep if unorthodox interest in psychoanalysis would blend it, as those pre-First World War psychic investigators did, with her own mystical and esoteric beliefs.

In his article Hart had described the subconscious as ‘a sea of unconscious ideas and emotions’ on whose ‘surface plays the phenomenal consciousness of which we are personally aware’. These unconscious ideas and emotions form ‘complexes’, fusions which impact on the individual’s psyche. They possess, he says, ‘both potential and kinetic energy’, and can affect consciousness either directly or indirectly, in the latter case through ‘symbolisms, word forgetting, disturbance of the association processes, etc.’ As he stresses, a ‘single idea or image in consciousness’ may be the product of a ‘multiplicity of unconscious complexes’.⁷² In Pound’s version of this, the image, for Hart the fusion of the pulsating kinetic energy of these various unconscious complexes, becomes for Pound a complex itself. Hart’s unconscious complex has both ‘constituent ideas and affect’, in other words, both intellectual and emotional elements, as Pound’s image has. These two elements, concentration and energy, would be central to Pound’s theory of poetry.

Later in the article Hart says that ‘the complex may be said to be the psychological analogue of the conception of force in physics’, a comparison that surely must have attracted Pound, chiming as it did with his own identification of art with energy by analogy with one form of force or another, electricity or magnetism, or, more broadly, with the physical ‘fluid force’ of the universe.⁷³ The ‘image’ perhaps is connected with the force, not just of the psyche, but for Pound more comprehensively and mystically with the life-force, hence its power. Pound goes on to insist on the visionary impact of ‘the image’: ‘it is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits – that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art’. Yet if, for Pound, this power is a quality of all great art, the terms in which he expresses it are very much of his moment. It is intriguing that ‘sudden liberation’ was the exact phrase Vanessa Bell used to describe the impact on her of the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition.⁷⁴ David Kadlec has pointed out the similarity between the modernist ideas emerging in Pound’s thought and those of contemporary anarchists; he links their ‘direct action’ to the ‘direct treatment’ of the object, and one could see something similar here in the instanteous liberation given by the impact of the image.⁷⁵ Pound shares their urgency and utopianism, even if his aims are very different.

Pound went on to say ‘It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.’ For the next few years, he would warn against the dangers of over-production, but in producing the 117-odd cantos perhaps he forgot his own advice. There’s no doubt he wanted them to fuse as one supremely potent image, but possibly someone should have been brave enough to suggest he revisited them with his ‘creative pencil’; if he had ever finished them, he might have done so.