THE BEGINNING OF the First World War, five days after Lowell’s dinner in the Berkeley Hotel, might be said to mark, among many other things, the end of the second major stage in the history of imagism. The Tour Eiffel period, as I suggested earlier, was the first, proto-imagist stage, with many of the ideas and techniques that appeared in later imagism already there – simplicity, directness, vers libre, brevity, imagistic intensity – but still a somewhat diffuse set of theories that did not immediately result in any clear change of poetic direction, though Hulme, Flint, Campbell and even Pound, who at that stage had paid so little attention to the theories, were moving at different paces to a sharper, sparer form of vers libre. The years 1912–14 saw those ideas both gain a critical mass, and, with a name and what Lewis would call a chef de bande, emerge as enough of a coherent programme, to say nothing of publicity stunt, to make a small but striking intervention in traditional poetic practice, much in the way Fry’s 1910 exhibition intervened in the practice of art in Britain. The Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1910, of course, presented works from abroad in a bid to revolutionise British art.31 Des Imagistes might at first sight seem to be rather different, the work of a group of Anglo-American poets (and one Irishman) who presented their own English-language poetry, bar the sprinkling of foreign titles. Yet in a sense they too were presenting works from elsewhere to revolutionise indigenous practices, but through the medium of translation: Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Latin and French originals or forms stand behind the poems in this book.
Where that 1910 exhibition was very different from the 1914 Des Imagistes was in the size of its impact, the crowds that it drew to the Grafton Galleries, and the heated and highly politicised debates that it provoked in the papers. Des Imagistes caused a ripple in some poetry-reading circles; it had a certain amount of press coverage, but it did not sell well and its immediate influence was more on individual writers than on the wider public. It was in retrospect that it would come to be seen as a milestone in the development of modernist Anglo-American poetry. Vorticism made much more of a public impact: an advantage of joining up with the visual artists, and one which cannot have escaped Pound’s notice, was that post-1910 modern painting and sculpture had established a presence in the press. It could command much more immediate newspaper attention; often coverage was more denunciation than praise but it would be welcome all the same. ‘The Press,’ as Lewis pointed out, ‘in 1914 had no Cinema, no Radio, and no Politics: so the painter could really become a “star”.’32 Blast had produced a noisy stir; and Pound through association with these painters had achieved a much higher profile – and greater opprobrium – with Blast than with Des Imagistes, even though the latter contained some of his best early poems, and the former some of his worst. But as far as poetry was concerned Vorticism was for Pound at the time more a new name than a new school: after all, his finest example of a Vorticist poem had been H.D.’s ‘Oread’, which would appear in the 1915 Some Imagist Poets.
Now, however, the third and final stage of imagism was beginning; Pound was no longer undisputed leader. Indeed, the imagism that would soon be attracting attention was one independent of Pound. Pound dismissed this version of his movement as Amygism, and complained that the high standards that he had instituted had vanished. Certainly not every poem in the later imagist anthologies would be entirely successful nor entirely in keeping with imagist precepts, though, as already pointed out, one could say that of the poetry that Pound had published in Des Imagistes. But Lowell was determined to make her imagist anthologies reach a wider audience than Des Imagistes had done, and she would succeed spectacularly. In the meantime, back in the States, her own book appeared on 22 September and, unlike her first, immediately attracted considerable attention. Like Pound’s Ripostes, it was a transitional work. Although the book included some of her earlier more conventional work, she had added several of her new vers libre poems as well as four prose poems, including one of quite daring subject-matter for her Boston neighbours, ‘The Forsaken’, about an unmarried pregnant woman contemplating suicide. She used as epigraph for the book an extract from Henri de Régnier’s ‘Médailles d’argile’, by now something of a touchstone for the imagists, and in her introduction acknowledged her debt to the French, and defended her use of vers libre, or as she says she prefers to call it, drawing on Flint’s phrase, ‘unrhymed cadence’. ‘Henley,’ she says, ‘speaks of “those unrhyming rhythms in which I have tried to quintessentialise, as (I believe) one can scarce do in rhyme”. The desire to “quintessentialise,” to head-up an emotion until it burns white-hot, seems to be an integral part of the modern temper, and certainly “unrhymed cadence” is unique in its power of expressing this.’33 The book was widely reviewed, and received both praise and criticism; she would never go unnoticed again. Many of the free verse poems had been published in the Egoist, where Aldington reviewed it in November, dismissing the Keatsian rhymed narratives out of hand but giving warm praise to her most recent work: ‘Miss Lowell’s short vers libre poems,’ he wrote, ‘are sometimes extremely good. She has – besides her Gallic training – a natural gift of eloquence, a sense of rhythm, a sensitive appreciation of beauty, irony, and a facility for coining new images’.34 Yet of the fifteen reviews mentioned by Lowell’s biographer, Damon, Aldington’s was the only English one. Amy’s impact was very much in the States, as imagism’s would be. Five hundred copies of the book would be sold by Christmas in America, but only four in Britain, though sales there must have been, as she feared, affected by the war. The poetry that was selling in Britain that autumn was, judging from the reviews, hackneyed but soothingly patriotic war poetry.
Thomas Hardy, to whom Amy had sent a copy, wrote a warm letter, not giving an overall judgement but tactfully mentioning poems that he particularly liked, including three of the vers libre poems, incidentally picking out some of the most sexually evocative, ‘The Captured Goddess,’ ‘The Tree of Scarlet Berries’ and ‘Clear with Light’. About those, however, he commented: ‘Whether I should have liked them still better rhymed, I do not know.’35 H.D. and Flint wrote praising her prose poems, as Aldington had also done, though Flint, like Aldington, was ready to point out faults as well as successes, being particularly critical of the regular metres in her narrative poems. Lowell, however, had already abandoned these. The prose poems, full of movement, colour and sound, she would continue to develop, contributing one entitled ‘The Bombardment’ to a special war issue of Poetry that November. This was a dramatic, not to say histrionic description of a town under attack, focusing more on the terror and destruction of houses than any actual blood, its emphasis being on the collapse of civilisation and culture that war brings. It featured repeated ‘BOOMS’, and later, when she gave readings, as she increasingly would of her poetry, she would get her musician friend Carl Engel to stand behind the curtains and dramatically sound a gong as she spoke the word: shades of Marinetti. The Poetry war issue as a whole was not, it must be said, overall an especially successful number. Joseph Campbell, Aldington and a young unknown called Wallace Stevens also contributed, but not their best work; perhaps it was too soon after the shock of the onset of war to expect an adequate response. When Lawrence received his copy of the November Poetry, he wrote to Harriet, condemning it out of hand, but picking out for particular contempt Amy’s references to the breaking of Bohemian glass, which he regarded as frivolous in the face of the mangling of human flesh that was taking place. Aldington, on the other hand, told Amy that he found the poem very moving in its depiction of the ‘horror and sadness’ of war. But he added, expressing a view that had some currency at the time: ‘I think perhaps we over-civilised ones are apt to think too highly of mere life; and I feel sometimes that perhaps after all a long peace becomes a disease which only war can remedy.’36 He would not think this way for long.
The success of Sword Blades and Poppy Seed gave Amy a new confidence in her poetic career, but, like Pound, she was anxious not just to be published herself but also to promote the work of those she admired. She had brought with her not only the manuscript for the imagist anthology, but also that of Fletcher’s Irradiations: Sand and Spray, and the British edition of Frost’s North of Boston, for which she was anxious to secure an American publisher. The latter she did not have to worry about, because Frost had found one for himself, and all she could contribute was a long and warm review. Lawrence wrote reminding her that she had promised to visit the publisher Mitchell Kennerley, who had brought out the American edition of Sons and Lovers, for which Lawrence was still owed £10, and who had in his possession a copy of the manuscript of the proto-Rainbow, which Lawrence was anxious to retrieve to offer to a more reliable publisher. Lawrence sounded wretchedly miserable, and was clearly very hard up. Not only did Amy contact Kennerley, but she also wrote at once to Harriet, whom she knew had some poems from Lawrence, begging her to publish them as soon as possible, and saying she herself didn’t want to insult him by offering him money (though later she would make such an offer several times, and Lawrence would accept gratefully, finding no insult at all). Casting about for what she could do to help, she decided to send him a typewriter that she claimed to be discarding. Lawrence was delighted with the typewriter, though suspicious of her story. It was a splendid typewriter, he said, and he was sure she had really wanted to keep it. He was by then sounding much more cheerful; since he had written before, he had had a grant of £50 from the Royal Literary Fund, which, though he disparaged, was obviously very useful, and £8 from Harriet, who published the poems in the December issue, though probably only because she was intending to do so in any case, not at Amy’s bidding.
Amy had also sent the Lawrences a copy of Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, and when she wrote to say it would be arriving, Lawrence promised that she would see him ‘prowling through your verses like a beast of prey: and oh, the hyena howl I shall send up when I seize on a lameness’.37 In the event, though not as savage as this suggests, he delivered a candid verdict that was more incisive and perceptive about her faults than either Aldington or Flint. Like Aldington, he admired the short free verse poems, but not her ‘story-poems’, which he thought that she spoilt ‘with a sort of vulgar, artificial “flourish of ink”’. ‘I like you in your poetry,’ he told her. ‘I don’t believe in affecting France … Why don’t you always be yourself … If it doesn’t come out of your heart, real Amy Lowell, it is no good, however many colours it may have. I wish one saw more of your genuine strong, sound self in this book, full of common-sense and kindness and the restrained, almost bitter, Puritan passion. Why do you deny the bitterness in your nature, when you write poetry? … Why do you take a pose? It causes you to shirk your issues.’38 Lawrence was right that the more conventional narrative poems were still hampered by Bostonian gentility. Lowell’s most successful poems were arguably her more personal ones, as Jean Gould contends, especially on the one hand her love poems, and on the other those on the miscasts in life, powerful poems where the bitterness that Lawrence wanted certainly appears. One of the most admired poems in the volume, ‘The Taxi’, picked out by both Aldington and Lawrence, as well as by several other reviewers, brings together both love and bitterness:
When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars.
And shout into the ridges of wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night!39
Lawrence described it as ‘very clever and futuristic – and good’. His final summing up of the volume was to say that he liked the poems ‘because after all they have a lot of you in them – but how much nicer, finer, bigger you are, intrinsically, than your poetry is’, a verdict about which Amy must have had ambivalent feelings.40 In the ‘democratic’ system of imagism that Amy was to set up, the tensions caused by the poets’ criticism of each other’s poetry would prove the most tricky to overcome, but if Amy were put out by Lawrence’s comments, she did not hold them against him.
Since Lowell’s return to Boston, Aldington and H.D. had been waiting to hear how her plans for the next anthology were materialising. Pound was still keeping his distance from the venture, but luckily, for now, also his peace. That rapidly changed some six weeks after Lowell had left England. On 5 October she saw an advertisement for her book, which described her as the ‘foremost member of the “Imagists” – a group of poets that includes William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Hueffer’.41 She realised immediately this would enrage Pound, and cabled Aldington to warn him, as well as writing a letter of protest to her publishers. Aldington replied that he wasn’t quite sure from the cable what the ‘crime’ was, but guessed it was that ‘your publishers have advertised you as American founder or leader of the imagists’. He had shown her wire to Pound, who, he said, had taken it quite calmly at the time, while H.D. had said that she would ‘far rather have [Amy] as leader than anyone else’.42 The advertisement only appeared in the American press, not the British, but if nowhere else Pound would undoubtedly have seen it when it appeared in the October Poetry. Pound wrote a furious letter to Lowell on 19 October, though curiously enough, he had already written to Monroe a week before, saying he didn’t suppose that Lowell herself was much to blame and venting his anger on that ‘lying grocer’ Macmillan, and on Monroe herself for accepting the advertisement just because it would earn Poetry some much-needed dollars.43 In the event, he had plenty of spleen left for Lowell, and she cannot have guessed that he did not think her to blame. He pasted the offending advertisement on the first page of his letter, and then thundered: ‘In view of the above arrant charlatanism on the part of your publishers, I think you must now admit that I was quite right in refusing to join you in any scheme for turning Les Imagistes into an uncritical democracy with you as intermediary between it and the printers.’ This seems a somewhat illogical response, since the publishers’ offence was precisely going against the idea of a democracy by making Amy the leader. Pound, however, told her that she had better cease to call herself an imagiste, arguing that the Dome was not imagist, something of course Amy would never have claimed, and she could have pointed out that neither was Canzoni. Yeats, he said, was ‘more amused than delighted’ at being identified as an imagist; if her publishers, who she had claimed were ‘of good standing’, had tried to sell cement or soap in that way they would be sued. He concluded caustically: ‘Blessed are they who have enterprise, for theirs is the magazine public.’44 Pound must understandably have found it galling to be proclaimed in the States as a mere follower in the movement that he had launched, and to be seen as coming second to this woman to whom he had taught so much. Yet perhaps he also found it disturbing that Macmillan clearly thought the new poetry would indeed find an audience. The advertisement said that Amy Lowell ‘had won wide recognition for her writing in new and free forms of poetical expression’, and that Sword Blades and Poppy Seed was ‘an unusual book. It contains much that will arouse criticism, but it is a new note in American poetry. Miss Lowell has broken away from academic traditions and written, out of her own time, real singing poetry, free, full of new effects and subtleties.’45 Pound would always remain in a double-bind towards the public. He was angry when it refused to accept his judgements, yet he felt that the fact that the crass public was unable to appreciate work that he promoted was proof of that work’s artistic merit. Success would mean standards had been lowered. When he later wrote of Walter Savage Landor that ‘Landor has not been a popular author’, that was significant praise.46 If Lowell was going to be a success, it was a cause for simultaneous envy and scorn.
Aldington, when he heard about the letter, told Lowell not to worry: ‘If I were you, I would just have a smoke and a read and forget it’.47 Lowell, however, had already written apologising, pointing out she had done all she could to correct Macmillan’s errors. Calling her the ‘foremost member’ was ‘undoubtedly due to an underling’s error in the office. I told Macmillan last spring that inclusion of those two names was foolish, as neither Yeats nor Hueffer were Imagistes.’ The names were there simply to ‘boom the book’, a common American practice. One wonders if this recalled to Pound his earlier demands that his father ‘boom’ his work; a month later, he would be telling Alice Corbin Henderson he used the Egoist as a vehicle for ‘booming’ his favourite writers, and wondering if he should ask her to ‘boom’ his latest idea, a College of Arts.48 Amy was, perhaps, simply more honest about the fact that writing was, as we might now put it, a cultural industry, and that attention had to be paid to marketing. Whilst in her preface she had, as she pointed out, said that she belonged to no school, she thought that Pound could hardly object to her being known as an imagiste, having included her – against her wishes – in the Des Imagistes anthology: ‘Having been given the name of Imagiste I shall certainly not repudiate it,’ she told him. She had every right to be called one of the foremost members of the group, both because of the amount she had published and the attention it had gained. ‘You have only yourself to blame,’ she added, ‘for including me in the group, and it is not agreeable to feel that you only wished the inclusion as long as I could be kept obscure and insignificant.’ As for suing, she pointed out that ‘even in cement and soap you would have to get out a patent in order to sue anyone’; as the name had not been patented, it could not be done. She might be on shaky grounds there under modern intellectual copyright law, but she added cheerfully that she would be delighted if he sued, ‘as they would then put new jackets on the book which I should greatly prefer. Also, it would be a good advertisement.’49
Much has been made in recent years of the modernists’ bad faith over their professed scorn for the marketplace; Lowell was engagingly straightforward in her approach. Pound had added a postscript to the letter, saying it was a pity Macmillan had not mentioned some of the lesser known members of the group, which at least would have helped to promote them. Amy’s reply on this point perhaps illustrates the difference between their ideas of how to ‘boom’, a practice, even if Pound was not admiting it at that moment, to which they both paid acute attention. It was unrealistic, she argued, to expect the publishers not to use names ‘of world-wide reputation’ (Pound should have felt something of a warm glow from that, since he was one of them). Amy took a pragmatic approach to the publishing world, sometimes rather too pragmatic, her fellow-imagists felt, but on the whole they were grateful to her for her business sense. Pound found compromise impossible; he wanted control, everything done his way, and found it hard to distinguish between his principles and his prejudices. Though, through his use of patrons and little magazines, he succeeded in promoting a range of highly gifted writers and artists, with greater tact he might have helped them even more. Lowell was able to point out that in this instance her methods would aid the others most in the end. In the anthology, she reminded him, their names would be in alphabetical order, so she would come last. ‘Far from wishing to keep the other members of the group insignificant and unknown I have given a very handsome tribute to Richard and Flint in an article I wrote from London to “The Little Review”.’50 She was as concerned as he was to boost them, she implied, and possibly would be more successful. Pound was not mollified.
H.D. was unhappy at the dissension in their ranks. She was always ambivalent – understandably – about Pound, but she did not want a rift. It was an added upset at a difficult time. She thought Pound was being unreasonable, but she still hoped for peace on that front at least. Lowell’s productivity and energy she much admired, but she could not help contrasting it with her own anxious, enervated state. ‘Mine seems to be a most tenuous shoot of this Imagist Tree of Life!’ she wrote to her.51 Mentioning her pregnancy was, of course, out of the question, but she could refer to the wartime tensions. Yet she was continuing to write poetry, poems not overtly connected with the hostilities, but certainly suggestive of the lacerating climate of the time: ‘each leaf is rent like split wood,’ she wrote in a poem entitled simply ‘Storm’, ‘You burden the trees/with black drops,/you swirl and crash’.52
H.D., as always, wrote soothingly to Lowell, and was probably talking soothingly to Pound. Aldington, whilst he agreed Pound was unreasonable, less tactfully expressed his irritation at the way the American arm of Macmillan had behaved. ‘Macmillan’s advertisement over here is perfectly correct and calm,’ he wrote to Amy, ‘but Ezra should have known that in America advertisement is a different thing … We are out to write poetry not advertisements. And is poetry a fine art or a jar of pickles? (I can’t help girding at American commercialism; it is hell, and strangles art absolutely.)’53 Aldington was an idealist, constantly disappointed and angered by the modern commercial world. In his next letter he said to Amy: ‘It is a matter of great regret to me that Ezra should have been so “uncultured” in the English sense, as to write the idiotic letters he did. For after all, our little group was a small and efficient organism for the fostering of such remnants of “culture” as are left in this industrial world. It was Ezra’s business, as it is the business of all of us, to care primarily for the art rather than for notoriety, and to work for the benefit of others rather than for his own.’ In spite of this high-mindedness, however, he was obviously exasperated by Pound’s ‘peculiar irritable vanity’, which he rather thoughtlessly described to Amy as a ‘form of exaggerated Americanism’. He also complained about Ford, whom he was seeing almost every day: ‘He is incurably vain and self-satisfied. He repeatedly tells me that he is “the only poet there has been during the last three hundred years” and “the greatest intellect in England”. And about a fortnight ago he said that he was after all the only real Imagist. So I shan’t be sorry when I am through with this job. I could tell you lots more about him and lots more about Ezra and his present position but I had rather not write it. Perhaps I shall see you soon and we can talk these noble tragedies over.’
Aldington’s own irritable frame of mind was probably caused as much by the war as by the foibles of his friends. He had told Amy earlier in that letter that he thought he would have to join up after Christmas, because he doubted if his work for the Egoist and Ford would go on much longer, and he would need to earn money; ‘the king’s shilling,’ he said dourly, ‘would at least settle the matter temporally – perhaps permanently’.54 Although he does not mention it, a further problem must have been that the war had affected the exchange rate; there were now $7 to a pound instead of $5, so H.D.’s allowance was worth less. Aldington dreaded the prospect of joining the army. He loathed militarism, and, at twenty-two with a pregnant wife, must have found the thought of risking injury and death a profoundly depressing, not to say terrifying prospect. Even if he had found Dover College so alien, he had imbibed too much of the British public school spirit to admit in his letters to fear, but his poetry makes it increasingly apparent that he was living with dread. The next May he would write a poem about his tortured response to the loveliness of spring in time of war:
A pear-tree, a broken white pyramid
In a dingy garden, troubles me
with ecstasy …
And I am tormented,
Obsessed,
Among all this beauty,
With a vision of ruins,
Of walls crumbling into clay.55
His ‘religion of beauty’ was powerless to save him from the horror he saw ahead.