WHILE HE AWAITED the Fenollosa manuscripts, Pound continued to work on the Giles translations. By late November 1913 he had done three and a half poems, he told Dorothy, the half perhaps referring to the brief ‘Fan-Piece’, or possibly the equally fleeting ‘Ts’ai Chi’h’: ‘The petals fall in the fountain,/the orange-coloured rose-leaves,/Their ochre clings to the stone’, not a translation of a single poem, but a drawing together of images from several.78 It perhaps bears out Qian’s contention that one of the qualities of Upward’s ‘Scented Leaves’ that had struck Pound was the way in which he followed the Chinese technique of using colour to evoke a mood. All these translations, as well as ‘Scented Leaves’, would appear in his anthology of les jeunes, for which he found a publisher in early November, through the good offices of John Cournos, the Philadelphian who had interviewed him the previous December. Alfred Kreymborg, a poet and friend of Orrick Johns, whom Pound had met in New York, had just taken over the editing of a magazine called the Glebe, and had written to Cournos from New York asking for contributions. Cournos took the letter to Pound, who immediately saw this as an opening. Kreymborg agreed to print the anthology as the February 1914 issue; it was then to appear in March as a book published by Alfred and Charles Boni in Greenwich Village.
John Cournos, who would have a poem in the anthology himself, and later publish nine novels and a volume of verse, was establishing himself in London as a valued friend of the young avant-garde artists and writers. He was not only a fellow would-be writer, but, having been a professional newspaperman for eighteen years, was a highly skilled networker, and ready to use his skills to the advantage of his friends. He was working mainly at the time as a journalist, sending a stream of articles back to America, and was always willing to promote his friends in these, as he had Pound, or to gather subscriptions for their journals, or use his numerous publishing contacts to get their work in print. Flint would write to Amy Lowell in late 1915, after he had been given a contract for a book on French poetry, saying he would never have had it if Cournos had not put him in touch with Constable’s reader, and that he was doing similar good turns to half of literary London. Cournos was a remarkable man in many ways, although not everyone would think him such a spreader of good fortune. In the 1920s he had a love affair with Dorothy L. Sayers, and deserted her in a rather heartless fashion, leaving her deeply unhappy for some time, though, as P.D. James pointed out, she got her revenge by putting him into Strong Poison as the dastardly Philip Boyes, and giving herself (in the persona of Harriet Vane) ‘the satisfaction of killing him off in fiction’.79 John Cournos was himself apt in later life to wreak vengeance through his own novels on those who had displeased him, making a particular feature of reproducing their letters verbatim. Sayers and her letters appear in The Devil is an English Gentleman, and H.D. would eventually also become a victim; both her letters and Richard’s are reproduced at length in Miranda Masters (1926). But for now Cournos and the Aldingtons were the best of friends, and Flint’s warm opinion of Cournos’ generosity and geniality was widely shared.
John Cournos had been born Ivan Gregorievitch Korshoon in 1881, near Kiev, in the Ukraine, but his family, who were Hasidic Jews, had, like so many Eastern European Jews of the period, fled abroad to escape the recurrent pogroms, in their case to Philadelphia in 1891. The family lived in great poverty, but at fourteen John managed to get a job as an office boy at the Philadelphia Record; by 1912 he was a well-established journalist and the Record’s art critic. But he wanted to be a writer, and though he mixed with students from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, making sure, as Pound had done before him, that he looked the part – flowing hair, floppy tie and Augustus John black hat – he was convinced he would need to get to Europe to become one. He shared Pound’s and H.D.’s reservations about Philadelphia, perhaps with more justification: in his first novel, based on his early life, Cournos describes the way, as a Jew, he was mocked and attacked by gangs of boys in the street; the people of Philadelphia, he said, had ‘hearts of stone’.80 His stepson, Alfred Satterthwaite, says that Cournos was a small, delicate-looking man, with ‘a sensitive face dominated by deep-set melting grey eyes and a hawklike nose, hooked and Semitic’. The difficulties of his youth had marked him: ‘He always seemed to me,’ Satterthwaite writes, ‘a man who carried all the centuries of the persecution of his people on his own frail shoulders, not burdensomely, but intrepidly and sometimes almost gaily. He seemed somehow to shoulder the sky.’81 To Aldington and H.D. he was a romantic figure, full of Russian soul and profound depths. Dostoevsky and Chekhov were just making their impact at that time; the Russian Ballet had taken London by storm; being Russian was in style. Cournos was very knowledgeable about the arts, a man of great charm, widely read, and a wonderful conversationalist. Cournos says that it was Aldington who persuaded Pound to include one of his poems in the anthology, and though Aldington says neither he nor H.D. were consulted at all by Pound over its content, he undoubtedly went out of his way to be friendly to Cournos. With his resentment of British snobbery, Aldington was always anxious to befriend those, like Flint and Lawrence, who had had to struggle up from ‘the depths’, as he put it. Yet Cournos had many friends. On his arrival, he had set about interviewing everyone he could, and rapidly made the acquaintance of most of literary and artistic London. His second novel, Babel (1923), is a highly entertaining account of the London in which he arrived in 1912, and its bewildering gamut of literary and artistic movements; in it Hulme and his followers appear as the Intuitionists, and the imagists as the Primitivists, a more appropriate name than many of their later critics have realised. His popularity in these years and his willingness to help his friends is in stark contrast to his later bitterness and at times vindictiveness, but it should not, I think, lead one to think that the early kindliness was false, more that the disappointment and poverty of much of his later life sadly took their toll.
Cournos had another reason for coming to Europe. He had fallen in love in Philadelphia with an art student, Dorothy Arabella Yorke (the first Dorothy in his life, though this one was most often known in the London years as Arabella). Arabella lived with her possessive and determined mother, her father being dead or elsewhere. Mrs Yorke was deeply opposed to the idea of her daughter developing a relationship with a poor Jew like Cournos, not her idea of a good catch for Arabella, but he did not give up hope. In 1911, Arabella and her mother went to Paris, ‘where’, according to Satterthwaite, ‘her mother was seeking her own and her daughter’s greater fortune’. Arabella was ‘beautiful … tall, willowy, jet black hair and dark eyes contrasting with a very white skin, exotic, cryptic’, and her mother may have hoped that she would marry well.82 Cournos, who had sailed to Naples, went straight to visit them in Paris and tried to persuade them to come to London, but without success. Mrs Yorke was hostile; Arabella blew hot and cold. He went on to London by himself.
In his autobiography, Cournos says it was he who introduced Pound to the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska. It was, in fact, a reintroduction. According to Pound’s memoir of Gaudier, he met the sculptor first in July 1913, at the Allied Artists show in London. Pound had gone to the exhibition with Olivia Shakespear, and was engaged in trying to pronounce Brzeska’s name when ‘a young man came after us, like a well-made young wolf or some soft-moving, bright-eyed wild thing. I noted him carefully because he reminded me a little of my friend William Carlos Williams.’ He bounded up to them, explained rapidly in French that it was his name and told them how to say it, and then ‘he disappeared like a Greek god in a vision’.83 Pound is doing a certain amount of mythologising here, but his description is not irreconcilable with Epstein’s more down-to-earth comment that Gaudier was ‘a picturesque, slight figure with lively eyes, and a sprouting beard. He was very pleasant.’84 According to Cournos, Gaudier was ‘strong, lithe and lean, with a handsome energetic face, live intelligent eyes with a glint of general gayety [sic]. He was simple and lovable. If you were his kind, you were accepted as his friend without the preliminaries of a long acquaintance.’85 This may be what happened to Pound when John Cournos helped him track down Gaudier again. Pound wrote to Williams: ‘I like him very much. He is the only person with whom I can be really “Altaforte”.’86 He had in fact declaimed the belligerent and defiant ‘Sestina Altaforte’ to Gaudier at Church Walk, the poem which begins, ‘Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace’, and Gaudier had gone away deeply impressed, reporting to Cournos that he was most excited that Pound dared to include the word ‘piss’ in a poem. Pound was equally delighted by the story.87
In his account of that first meeting at the exhibition, Pound sounds as if his attention was caught more by the sculptor’s personality than his work, as perhaps it was, but he was soon to become an advocate of his sculpture as well. Gaudier was ‘the coming sculptor’, he told Williams later that year.88 Given Pound’s admiration for Epstein, it is not surprising that Gaudier’s sculpture appealed to him; Gaudier, if not exactly a disciple, had learnt from Epstein and worked in a related style. Pound claims that when Gaudier first met Epstein he assured the latter that he worked directly on to the stone as Epstein did, and rushed home to teach himself to do so before Epstein came to see the results. According to Pound, he derived great satisfaction from this method of working: ‘He liked to do the “whole thing” from start to finish; to feel as independent as the savage.’89 Earlier he had been a follower of Rodin, and an admirer of Michelangelo and the Greeks, but now he moved away from realism towards a more abstract use of form, and denounced his former masters with a passion worthy of a Poundian volte-face. Perhaps under the influence of Epstein, he became fascinated by Assyrian and Egyptian art, as well as African and Pacific carvings. Gaudier was himself French, and had come to England to avoid serving in the French Army, which he describes as the ‘slaughterers of Arabs’.90 He lived with Sophie Brzeska, a Polish woman he had met in Paris, twenty years older than himself, who passed as his sister and whose name he had added to his own. Sophie’s earlier life had been, it was generally known, full of suffering – Rebecca West described her as ‘a veteran in tragedy’ – though quite what the tragedy was, no one appears to have discovered. Gaudier adored her, and said she had ‘a beauty à la Baudelaire – and might have stepped out of Fleurs du Mal’.91 He was extremely poor and worked in a studio under a railway arch in Putney, on pieces of stone allegedly purloined from masonry yards and cemeteries at night. He was then twenty-two. Humphrey Carpenter suggests that Gaudier had few friends, and needed to be taken under Pound’s wing, but while that is the impression Pound gives, it is hardly true. Gaudier knew many other artists and intellectuals, Hulme, for whom he made the brass knuckle-dusters mentioned earlier, Lovat Fraser (Grace Crawford’s future husband), Nina Hamnett, who also served as a model for him, Epstein, of course, Fletcher’s former friend Horace Brodzky, Cournos, the Aldingtons and many others. Most of his friends found Sophie a difficult woman, and she was burningly jealous of them; most preferred to see him without her. Gaudier, Aldington says, had one other disadvantage as an acquaintance: ‘He was probably,’ he writes in his memoir, ‘the dirtiest human being I have ever known, and gave off horrid effluvia in hot weather.’92 In this too Gaudier may have been following Epstein’s example: Pound wrote to his mother that November: ‘Epstein is a great sculptor. I wish he would wash, but I believe Michel Angelo NEVER did, so I suppose it is part of the tradition.’93
In November 1913 Pound left London to spend three months in the country with Yeats, in a small isolated house called Stone Cottage, near Coleman’s Hatch, deep in the Ashdown Forest in Sussex. Yeats wanted to work in peace, but his eyesight was an increasing problem: Pound would write letters for him, act as amanuensis for lectures for another American tour the following January, and read aloud to him after dark. The sociable Pound did not look forward to this incarceration in the country, telling his mother he thought he would have a perfectly disagreeable time: ‘My stay in Stone Cottage will not be in the least profitable, I detest the country. Yeats will amuse me part of the time and bore me to death with psychical research the rest.’94 Although at one level he was surely delighted to be invited to stay on these intimate terms with the great poet, recreating, as James Longenbach puts it, ‘the aspect of the Rhymers’ Club that he admired most: the sense of a poetic aristocracy, meeting in private, ignoring the demands of a vastly inferior public’, in advance his trepidation appears to have been entirely real.95
Pound had originally come to England to find Yeats and to learn from him, but one reason for his doubts about the sojourn at Stone Cottage might have been that more recently other influences had held sway. Since his reconfiguration as a modern poet, Pound had been listening more to Ford. Ford and Yeats had little liking for each other as writers, and did not often mix socially. Ford apparently never went to Yeats’ Monday evenings; Yeats was rarely present at the South Lodge events. In 1914, in a review of Responsibilities, the volume of poetry that Yeats brought out that year, Ford would, as Foster puts it, ‘grudgingly admire the harshness and modernity of this new voice’ but in 1913 he was convinced (unfairly it must be said) that Yeats was lost in the Celtic past.96 He described Yeats, Pound says, as a ‘gargoyle, a great poet but a gargoyle’.97 In August Pound had said to Monroe that ‘[Ford] and Yeats are the two men in London’, but he added, in terms that echo Ford’s views, that ‘Yeats is already a sort of great dim figure with its associations set in the past’.98 When Pound sent Monroe an essay by Ford that May, which would later form the introduction to Ford’s Collected Poems, he insisted it must go in at full length, even if they had to print extra pages, ‘as it will be a considerable boost to our prose dept … it will be the best prose we’ve had or are likely to get. Clear the decks for it, s.v.p.’99 He was incandescent when she did not include it immediately. Ford’s arguments in favour of more everyday language had finally begun to make an impact on him: in March, complaining to Monroe about the latest batch of poets in Poetry, he wrote: ‘Good god! isn’t there one of them that can write natural speech without copying clichés out of every Eighteenth Century poet still in the public libraries? God knows I wallowed in archaisms in my vealish years, but these imbeciles don’t even take the trouble to get an archaism.’100 That marks a shift in the three months from the previous December when he was still telling Cournos that he believed in a ‘curial’ or priestly language for poetry. Pound had also come to agree with Ford that the artist needed to absorb the modern urban experience, with its disparate traditions, of which Ford had written so eloquently in The Soul of London, and he had told Monroe shortly before he left for Stone Cottage that ‘all great art is born of the metropolis (or in the metropolis). The metropolis is that which accepts all gifts and all heights of excellence, usually the excellence which is tabu in its own village. The metropolis is always being accused by the peasant of “being mad after foreign notions”.’101 When he speaks of ‘all gifts and all heights of excellence’, he may have been thinking particularly of his recent meetings with Indian and Chinese culture through Tagore, Ghose, Upward and Mary Fenollosa, but whatever he had in mind, for someone with such a vivid sense of the cultural excitement of the capital, disappearing into the wastes for three months must have appeared a dispiriting prospect. When he later reported that he was having a good time, he sounded genuinely surprised.
Whatever his misgivings, in addition to the compliment of the invitation, there was the added advantage that it would be much cheaper than living in London. Dorothy knew the house, as she had stayed nearby several times, possibly including the occasion when Yeats found Stone Cottage with Olivia Shakepear. She warned him it could be fearfully wet, and advised thick boots, but also reported that the area was a ‘weird place – and possibly faerie’, perhaps what had appealed to Yeats.102 In the event Pound really enjoyed his visit: he wrote to Williams to say ‘Yeats is much finer intime than seen spasmodically in the midst of the whirl. We are both, I think, very contented in Sussex’.103 It was a very different story from his time spent with Ford, with whom intime visits were never a success. In spite of Pound’s growing conviction of Ford’s critical acumen, he and Yeats in many ways had much more in common and the time he spent at Stone Cottage with Yeats shaped his future attitudes profoundly. Pound was right about Yeats’ contentment: he would write to a friend in January that it had been ‘the best winter I have had in years – the only winter in which my evenings have not been a problem & the only winter in which my creative power has been a conscious pleasure’.104 The house was owned by two sisters, Ellen and Alice Welfare, and Alice looked after them and provided their meals. Yeats went up to London once a week for his Monday evenings and to see his medium, Elizabeth Ratcliffe; Pound went approximately as often to see Dorothy and his friends.
There was of course the matter of his work for Poetry and the New Freewoman, less easily dealt with in the middle of nowhere, but Pound’s zeal for controlling magazines was temporarily slacking. In November he had had one of his periodic outbursts over the quality of work Monroe was publishing, and resigned in dudgeon as foreign correspondent of Poetry in favour of Ford; Ford, quick as a flash, resigned immediately in favour of Pound, and Pound grudgingly agreed to go on, ‘pending a general improvement of the magazine’.105 He had just received an unexpected windfall from Poetry, which made it hard to refuse. Monroe, on Pound’s advice, had given Poetry’s annual Guarantors’ prize of £50 for the best poem published in the magazine that year to Yeats for ‘The Grey Rock’, which had appeared in Poetry the previous April. Yeats was embarrassed, feeling many of the impecunious poets published in the magazine needed it more than he did; he accepted £10, which he would spend on getting Sturge Moore to design a bookplate for him (Lady Gregory had a very fine one, which may have given him the idea), but asked Monroe to give Pound the other £40. Pound, when he heard that Yeats was returning the money, had first suggested it should be shared between Aldington and Vachel Lindsay, but gave in gracefully. Pound – much, I am sure, to the relief of his correspondents, including Monroe – spent some of the money on a typewriter. He also spent £15 on two statues from Gaudier, very cheap, but, as he said, ‘he had next to no market and … I … next to no income’.106 Sophie Brzeska thought the amount far too little; it was the first of many grievances she had against Pound, but Pound was, in addition, doing his best to rectify his latest protégé’s lack of a market, writing to Dorothy with instructions to put possible purchasers in touch and persuading Olivia Shakespear to buy a very beautiful nude torso that Gaudier had carved, for which Nina Hamnett had been the model. Pound was delighted with his own purchases, and possibly felt more kindly towards the unfortunate editor. Monroe seized the opportunity to soothe his ruffled feathers, announcing in the January Poetry that she was delighted to be able to give him the money, ‘as it enables her to acknowledge her high appreciation not only of Mr Pound’s poetry, but also of his disinterested and valuable service as foreign correspondent of the magazine’.107
The New Freewoman was a rather different case. Now that Fletcher was no longer providing money to pay contributors, Pound may have found his position there less attractive; cajoling writers to produce work for free was not something he enjoyed. On the other hand, he did not want to lose his influence on the magazine, especially as by now the literary concerns had taken over a good half of its pages. He needed a disciple in place. As it happened, Rebecca West had resigned her position as assistant editor at the New Freewoman, and Dora Marsden, presumably on Pound’s recommendation, decided that Aldington should be her replacement. He was appointed, at the princely salary of a guinea a week, a position he would keep for almost four years. For a magazine with the name of the New Freewoman to have a male assistant editor might seem anomalous, but by the beginning of 1914 Dora’s magazine would have changed its name again. For many years the story of the transformation of the New Freewoman into the Egoist was that the ruthless piratical Pound leapt aboard this barque of feminist sweetness and light and commandeered it for his own ends. Events were not that simple: Pound simply for once had excellent luck, and seized his chance. Rebecca West had suspected that Pound would like to have Richard Aldington in her place, but she herself had made the decision to resign in October. Her resignation was prompted in part, it must be admitted, by her growing irritation at Pound’s high-handedness – she was not happy for him to make his own decisions even if Dora was – but Pound (whom she described in retrospect as an arriviste poet) was by no means the only or even chief reason. Dora Marsden’s new direction was much more the issue. West, like Marsden, had worked for the WSPU (the Women’s Social and Political Union), and like her had become critical of the organisation. She too was suspicious of assumptions about women’s nature. (She told the story of selling Votes for Women as an adolescent along with her sister in Harrogate: ‘We offered one to a dear old lady in rustling black silk and widow’s bonnet. With superb vigour she raised her umbrella and brought it down on my sister’s head, remarking: “Thank God I am a womanly woman!”’)108 West supported the magazine’s liberal and free-thinking attitude towards sexuality, very different from that of the WSPU. Christabel Pankhurst had brought out her book on the ravages of syphilis earlier that year; entitled The Great Scourge and How to End It, it argued strongly for faithful marriages, urging men to follow the example of women’s natural purity, and advocating ‘chastity for men and Votes for Women’.109 Yet in spite of their shared opposition to the WSPU, by now West felt Dora had ceased to face the issues of the practical world in which they lived; some kind of collectivity, she believed, was needed if gender and class oppression were to be overcome. West was a socialist, and even Dora’s anarchist supporters were beginning to feel she had gone too far. Her individualistic anarchism was expressed in increasingly philosophical and, West thought, unclear terms: she had behaved much more anarchically as a suffragette. West was, in fact, writing regularly for the much more successful socialist journal, the Clarion, and, though she had worked hard to re-establish the New Freewoman, she found the Clarion a more congenial home. Pound’s only comment on her departure, that she ‘saw that Egoist [sic] was NOT her path to practical success in PAID journalism’, may have had some partial truth.110 And there was also perhaps the fact that her tempestuous affair with H.G. Wells was taking its toll; she was to give up work for the Clarion by the end of the year. The following August, she gave birth to Wells’ son.
Marsden’s appointment of Richard Aldington as West’s replacement meant that the imagists’ English outlet was secure, or at any rate as secure as the magazine’s finances permitted. Pound remained involved as and when it suited him for now, though Dora noted that ‘“E.P.” and the new “sub” spit and scratch at each other’, the first hint perhaps of disagreements to come.111 In November at a directors’ meeting it was proposed that the name should be changed to something that did not carry feminist overtones, and Marsden’s preference was for the Egoist, a title that was much closer to her present philosophical position. Some of the original suffragist supporters who had bought shares were alarmed, but realised, as one put it, that Dora ‘would do exactly as she liked’.112 In December, Pound, Aldington, Allen Upward and two other male contributors wrote a letter published in the journal, throwing their support behind the change to a title ‘which will mark the character of your paper as an organ of individualists of both sexes, and of the individualist principle in every department of life’.113 The letter was a gesture of solidarity with Dora’s move, not a cause of her action. Although Harriet Shaw Weaver, many years later, remembered that ‘the new masculine element which had allied itself with the paper before long raised objections to the title’, it was Marsden’s change, not theirs.114 When Pound returned to London in January, the magazine was appearing under the title of the Egoist. Dora for now remained editor in name, though she had gone back to live in Southport, and her main contribution would now be her articles, though Weaver always consulted her over any decisions. Weaver and Aldington both used the offices in Oakley House, Bloomsbury, which was the home of the Blavatsky Institute, set up for the study of Theosophy, Mystical and Occult Philosophy, whose secretary was one of Dora’s supporters. The Egoist’s most profitable sales were through the Institute’s bookshop, as they charged no commission, and theosophist shoppers appeared very happy to mix a little avant-garde writing, calls for free love and a philosophy of individualism with their own occult interests.
Much work meanwhile was being accomplished in Stone Cottage. Yeats always had reservations about Pound as a poet – rather more than Pound ever appears to have realised – but he enjoyed his company. The letter Yeats had written to Harriet recommending him as recipient for the prize makes interesting reading: ‘I suggest him to you because, although I do not really like with my whole soul the metrical experiments he has made for you, I think those experiments show a vigorous imaginative mind. He is certainly a creative personality of some sort, though it is too soon yet to say of what sort. His experiments are perhaps errors, I am not certain; but I would always sooner give the laurel to vigorous errors than to any orthodoxy not inspired.’115 Unqualified praise it was not. Yeats valued Pound more for his advice than his art; he had written earlier in the year to Lady Gregory, saying that Pound ‘is full of the middle ages and helps me get back to the definite and concrete away from modern abstractions. To talk over a poem with him is like getting you to put a sentence in dialect. All becomes clear and natural. Yet in his own work he is very uncertain, often very bad though very interesting sometimes. He spoils himself by too many experiments and has more sound principles than taste.’116 Pound might well have been mortified if he had known of this judgement, but luckily he didn’t, though he would report in Poetry the next year that Yeats thought the imagists wrote in the ‘devil’s metres’.117 In January 1914 he published an editorial in Poetry which reads as if it was written as an attempt to convince Yeats of the merits of vers libre. Entitled ‘The Tradition’, it argues that the two most important traditions for lyric poetry are ‘that of the Melic Poets [early Greek] and that of Provence’, both of whom bring the arts of music and poetry together; in the case of the Melic poets, they even practised a kind of vers libre, ‘compos[ing] to the feel of the thing, to the cadence, as have all good poets since’.118
Yet if Yeats and Pound continued to differ on the question of rhyme and metre, in many other ways that winter together led them each to a greater appreciation of the other. In the first place, although Pound had predicted that he would be bored by Yeats’ psychical research, he was in fact fascinated. He had taken with him the first batch of papers from Mary Fenollosa and was working on the Japanese Noh plays, while Yeats was applying himself again to the material he had been working on in Paris two years before, continuing to correlate folk beliefs with contemporary occult practices. Both of them were intrigued by the Noh plays. As Pound would write in 1916, ‘These plays are full of ghosts, and the ghost psychology is amazing. The parallels with Western spiritist doctrines are very curious … The suspense is the suspense of waiting for a supernatural manifestation – which comes.’ He acknowledged that ‘Some will be annoyed at a form of psychology which is, in the West, relegated to spiritistic séances’, and he added, perhaps a little defensively, ‘If the Japanese authors had not combined the psychology of such matters with what is to me a very fine sort of poetry, I should not bother about it.’119 Pound worked that winter on Nishikigi, one of the Noh plays translated by Fenollosa, giving its dialogue a curiously Irish lilting tone, as critics have noticed, a deliberate ploy to make the parallel between Celtic and Far Eastern thought.120 (T.S. Eliot, for one, strongly objected to the Irish tone when he came to review the volume in which Pound’s Noh plays appeared.) In 1918, referring to this play, Pound commented that ‘Chinese poetry is full of fairies and fairy lore’, ‘quite Celtic’ in fact, illustrating the point through the similarities between this play and a legend from the Aran isles that Yeats had found.121 In making this parallel between the Noh and the Aran legends, Pound implies not solely or even primarily likenesses between these two cultures, but, à la Frazer, that they echo a universal truth that might be uncovered in numerous places.
That winter with Yeats thrust Pound back again to his earlier concern with mysticism and visions. For most of the year he had concentrated on his satires of one form or another, diagnosing, as he put it in ‘The Serious Artist’, social diseases. Now he was returning to what he had said was the second kind of poetry: that concerned with the creation of beauty. He wrote in a brief prose poem entitled ‘Ikon’, published that December, that ‘the highest business’ of art is ‘to create the beautiful image’, and these ‘images of beauty’ will ‘furnish the life of our minds with a noble surrounding’, so that if, ‘as some say, the soul survives the body; if our consciousness is not an intermittent melody of strings that relapse between whiles into silence, … [this] abundance of sounds and patterns [will] entertain us in that long dreaming [and] strew our path to Valhalla’.122 Yeats had been convinced by his medium that the soul survived the body, one reason for his present preoccupation with ghosts. Pound here does not commit himself, but he uses the possibility to add a new dimension to his theory of the image; ‘images of beauty’ create a certain quality of consciousness, sustaining and enriching. The images become the equivalent of objects buried with the dead by the Egyptians and others to furnish them with all they need in the next world. In other words, images of beauty are potentially what lead the soul to Paradise. It is an idea that would lie behind the structure of the Cantos.