BACK IN BOSTON, Lowell was delivering lectures on French poetry to the Bostonians. The six poets she had chosen were Henri de Régnier, Rémy de Gourmont, Albert Samain, Paul Fort, Emile Verhaeren and Francis Jammes. In his review of the published lectures, Flint would recount how he had tried to persuade her over the Berkeley dinner table to drop Albert Samain, as not of sufficient significance, and to include instead Stuart Merrill and Francis Vielé-Griffin, both Americans who wrote in French and played a central role in the development of a revivified French poetry: ‘But she only motioned the waiter to fill my glass with champagne, and what can a man do against such argument and such a will?’123 Amy worked frantically on these lectures, up to fifteen hours a day; each lecture would be 40 typed pages, and one of her secretaries would hand her the final pages as she stepped into her car on the way to the lecture. She was a superb performer, and the lectures were a great success. She was particularly pleased at the last lecture when her reading of one of Paul Fort’s poems, in the original French, moved her audience to tears.
Lowell’s enthusiastic review of Robert Frost’s North of Boston was published in the New Republic on 20 February 1915. Frost arrived back from England a couple of days later, and by chance bought a copy of the New Republic while walking into New York from the wharf. Frost, as might have been predicted, felt Amy misunderstood him quite as much as did Pound, but he was pleased by her warm praise, and would tell her later that he had felt that he was being welcomed back to his native land. When he came to Boston shortly after his return, he rang to thank her for her support, and she invited him to dinner. He accepted, refraining from telling her that when Pound had offered to introduce him to her in the summer of 1913, he had refused, saying he ‘knew the president of Harvard, and therefore had no desire to meet the president’s sister’.124 It was the beginning of what Amy thought was a pleasant friendship, but Frost, though outwardly agreeable, would become increasingly hostile, if not to her, at any rate to her poetry. Whether Frost and Lowell discussed Flint, one can only guess. Frost had seen little of him since the end of 1913, feeling he was too much of Pound’s camp, and had made his friends among the Georgians, with whose poetic aims he had more sympathy. He had written to Flint just before he sailed back from Liverpool, saying, with a typical mixture of aggrievedness and appreciation: ‘I ought to know by the length of your silence that you don’t want to write to me any more – cor silicis [i.e. heart of flint]. And if you don’t I ought to have pride enough not to ask you to. But no matter, I must at least say goodbye to the man who opened England to me. You are good.’125 One hopes Flint was touched.
Fletcher was also present at this dinner, having returned to Boston via Chicago, and liked Frost’s ‘quiet unworldliness, his serene detachment of manner’, qualities so unlike his own.126 Fletcher was not staying with Amy on this second and longer visit, but living in a boardinghouse in the centre of Boston, though visiting Sevenels regularly, and was always on hand to discuss the latest tactics in their poetic campaign, on which Amy was now focusing. She had rather been neglecting the imagist cause in the whirl of her lecture series, but when Aldington wrote to her in February 1915 to say that to promote the anthology he was planning a special imagist number of the Egoist for May, when it was due to appear in England, she decided she must play her part. In preparation for the American publication of Some Imagist Poets in April, Lowell decided to visit the Poetry Society of America, which met in New York, and to which Pound had gone briefly some four years earlier, and asked if she could read for five minutes. She caused a near riot. According to the secretary Jessie Rittenhouse, she set out to court controversy: her account of the imagist principles ‘bristled with so much provocative dicta that the right wing was stirred to action and primed for reply’.127 She then read two of her poems, ‘Venus Transiens’ and ‘Spring Day’. The former was one of her most evocative love poems for Ada:
Tell me,
Was Venus more beautiful
Than you are,
When she topped
The crinkled waves,
Drifting shoreward
On her plaited shell?
Was Botticelli’s vision
Fairer than mine …128
The Poetry Society disliked its form, but appear to have had no quarrel with the subject-matter. One might have thought that to read a lesbian love poem in public would have caused a stir, but Lowell was so eminently respectable that it never apparently occurred to her audience that that was what it was. As so often, they took it that she was writing in the persona of a man. ‘Spring Day’ was another matter. This was in her polyphonic prose, and consisted of five scenes from her day, the first entitled ‘Bath’. This was the one that caused the trouble, just as ‘In the Garden’ had made trouble for her in England; reading a poem about lying naked in the bath seemed truly scandalous, especially when the naked body in question was so very large. ‘Bath’ mainly concentrates on the sunlight reflected in the water, but that didn’t seem to help: ‘I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost too bright to bear; the green water covers me from the too bright day. I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots.’129 She read a couple more poems by other imagists, including H.D.’s ‘Oread’, and sat down, to receive a barrage of hostile comments and angry denunciations. There was a club rule that poetry read by guests, such as Amy Lowell, could not be discussed, but nobody paid any attention to it. Lowell appears to have rather enjoyed the sensation she was causing, and she certainly succeeded in drawing attention to the anthology. When it was published on 17 April, the same day, as it happens, as John Gould Fletcher’s Irradiations: Sand and Spray, of the 750 copies published, 481 had been ordered in advance.
Before then, however, in England, on 6 April, Pound’s Cathay was published; it would prove to be his most widely admired book of poems so far, however much he was coming to conceive of himself as a poetic pariah. Even Amy wrote to Harriet to say that ‘Ezra’s new book “Cathay” is full of the most beautiful things. What a pity the boy does not confine himself to working and leave strictures on other people’s work alone.’130 William Carlos Williams wrote to Harriet Monroe: ‘I suppose you’ve seen [Pound’s] “Cathay” the Chinese things are perhaps a few of the greatest poems written.’131 The collection contained some of his most moving poems, in one way or another very much in tune with the mood of the time; they deal with departure, loss, loneliness and exile, while some are directly concerned with warfare. Some critics indeed, like Hugh Kenner, have seen them all as war poems, which might be said to be true if one thinks about them as wartime poems, that is, about the emotions experienced in time of war, by civilians as well as soldiers. Ronald Bush has pointed out that originally Pound was going to include four poems that in no way bore on the war climate, but at quite a late stage he substituted four much more explicitly concerned with warfare, an indication of his growing realisation of the seriousness of the war. Pound, who had commented in the January Egoist that ‘you have to go back to Rihoku to find a man telling the truth about warfare’, earlier sent some of them to Gaudier in the trenches, who had said that ‘the poems depict our situation in a wonderful way’.132 ‘Lament of the Frontier Guards’, one of those included at a late stage, must have struck many as movingly applicable to that particular moment in 1915:
There is no wall left to this village.
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous kings.
A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars – men, spread over the middle kingdom …
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning.133
Ford captured the sense Pound evokes of a hitherto unknown but instantly comprehended world when he described the book as being ‘like a door in a wall, opening suddenly upon fields of an extreme beauty, and upon a landscape made real by the intensity of human emotions’.134 This, he points out, is in spite of their being translations of poems written over a thousand years ago; on this occasion Pound had proved to him that emotions felt around them in the modern world could sometimes be best conveyed by a parallel from another time.
Pound reprinted ‘The Seafarer’ as a companion piece to a poem called ‘The Exile’s Letter’, and would later say that these two, along with Homage to Sextus Propertius, which he would write in 1917, were his most important personae. Ronald Bush has pointed out that Pound has shifted the emphasis of the original of the ‘Exile’s Letter’, which is a lament for separation from a particular friend, to the loss of a close band of friends, who ‘made nothing of sea-crossing or of mountain crossing,/If only they could be of that fellowship,/And we all spoke out our hearts and minds, and without regret’.135 The exile’s sorrow over that parting ‘is like the flowers falling at Spring’s end/Confused, whirled in a tangle./What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking,/There is no end of things in the heart.’136 Both the seafarer and the exile are lonely figures, but in different ways. The seafarer has chosen his path across the sea, leaving the burghers and prosperous men in order to pursue his passion. But the Chinese exile has known rewarding friendship, now gone; only what Pound would in other contexts call his métier, his calling as a poet, drives him on. From Pound’s return to England in 1911 until the outbreak of war, he might have done battle with the public, but he had done so with good friends on his side. What with the war, and what with quarrels, his circle was breaking up.
Pound had, of course, wanted to be acknowledged as superior in his artistic community; in 1913, he had written in warm praise of the editor of the Smart Set for having ‘the good sense to divide all of the poets here [in London] into two classes; Yeats and I in one class, and everybody else in the other’.137 His complaint to Amy Lowell about her plan for the new anthology had been that he would have to accept his fellow-poets as his equals. Yet when Aldington complained that Pound wanted them as disciples, not friends, he was not quite right.138 Pound wanted them as disciples and friends, if friends who knew their place. Lewis would later conclude that Pound was an inherently gentle character, who constructed for himself an antithetical persona as the authoritarian maestro. There is much in that, though Pound should not be thought only superficially authoritarian; the need for mastery was as much part of him as his frequent warmth and kindliness. Lewis was perhaps closer to the mark when he identified Pound as having a ‘tragic fracture’ in his nature.139 Pound lived his life by a set of doctrines which inevitably made him enemies, when temperamentally, as Williams had realised when he was a student, he would much rather have been liked. His frustration at his failure to achieve much-desired fame, and his talent for provoking hostile reactions, instead of what he really wanted, friendship and praise, was making him paranoid and bitter. There is in the Cathay poems a compassion for the human condition and a perceptive and sympathetic understanding of human pain that, as Lewis pointed out, seems the voice of a different person from the hectoring and vituperative Pound that was beginning to emerge in many of his letters, and in some of the Blast poems: at this stage as the violent scourge of poetasters and magazine editors, later as the coruscating flail of bankers and usurers. Neither the embittered speaker of ‘Salutation the Third’ nor the melancholy exile is giving up hope, but these are two very different ‘masks of the self’, two starkly contrasting developments from Pound’s Provençal poets, cheerfully picking themselves up again after rejection. The strange mixture in the Cantos of angry denunciation and warm memories of friends (there are of course many other things too) was part of that sad and strange dislocation of his personality.
During April came the news of Rupert Brooke’s death. The loss of this handsome young poet was widely covered in the press, and his patriotism praised by a range of establishment figures. Dean Inge quoted one of his poems in a sermon at St Paul’s. Winston Churchill wrote to The Times, portraying him as the ideal poet-soldier, writer of a ‘few incomparable war sonnets’, who loved his country beyond his life: ‘Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, ruled by high undoubting purpose, he was all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be.’140 Thus was the legend endorsed by the government itself. That Brooke had seen himself as an opponent of convention and a poetic revolutionary was forgotten. He became in the public eye the model of the young patriot, upholder of all that was best in England. Hence the popularity after his death of his poem that begins: ‘If I should die, think only this of me:/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England.’141 The public backlash against the avant-garde in both literature and the visual arts increased. The New Age, with its growing conviction that modernist experiment was suspiciously foreign and unpatriotic, had already in February, much to Pound’s indignation, unexpectedly terminated ‘Affirmations’, his series promoting his fellow avant-garde artists.142 After Brooke’s death had been seized on as propaganda for the war effort, things grew steadily worse.