The Verse Revolutionaries

H.D.’s mother, Helen Doolittle, née Wolle, as a young woman, with her paintbrushes

H.D.’s home in Upper Darby, near the Flowers Observatory

Ezra Pound at Cheltenham Military Academy in 1898. Pound is in the upper middle of the picture, the only boy with glasses

Pound, second from left, as a maiden in the 1903 University of Pennsylvania production of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, seen by both Williams and H.D.

H.D. (front row on the right) at Bryn Mawr, c.1906

Elkin Mathews’ bookshop at 6bVigo Street, ‘the smallest shop in the world’, Ernest Rhys said, as it appeared in an ink drawing, c.1891

Ford Madox Ford, then Hueffer, c.1915. When Pound met him in 1909, Ford was editor of the English Review, ‘the greatest editor in the world’, as he claimed May Sinclair described him

Dorothy Shakespear, c.1910, about the time when she met Pound; she looked, Yeats said, ‘as if her face was made out of Dresden china’

Olivia Shakespear, c.1910, ‘undoubtedly the most charming woman in London’, according to Pound

T.E. Hulme, probably in his late twenties, in a pencil sketch by Dolly Kibblewhite

F.S. Flint, poet, linguist and socialist. He never forgot his painful childhood, or as he put it, ‘the child for whose wounds I bear the scars’

Aubrey Beardsley’s title page for Florence Farr’s 1894 New Woman novel, The Dancing Faun. (The faun here is probably a caricature of Shaw, one of Farr’s lovers and satirised in the book)

Songs published for the 1904 Festival of the Glens, which Joseph Campbell helped organise, a central event in the Ulster Celtic Revival

Aubrey Beardsley’s poster, regarded as very shocking at the time, but widely exhibited none the less, for Florence Farr’s 1894 season at the Avenue Theatre, on the London Embankment, in which she appeared in Yeats’ The Land of Heart’s Desire and Shaw’s Arms and the Man

W.B. Yeats in about 1910, when Pound first met him, introduced by Olivia Shakespear

John Gould Fletcher in 1914, a moody and reluctant imagist, who thought of himself as a ‘grey ghost’ and ‘one of the never born’

Frances Gregg, c.1912. H.D. wrote of her that, after Ezra left for Europe, Frances filled the gap in her life ‘like a blue flame’

‘A Decade’s Progress’: Punch’s version of the changes in women’s fashion from 1901 to 1911, the last year of Victoria’s reign to the year after the death of Edward VII

Brigit Patmore, whom Pound described as one of the ‘charming people on the planet’; from 1911 until his marriage in 1914, much of his time was spent with Brigit, H.D. and Aldington

Rabindranath Tagore, the gifted Bengali writer, musician and painter, in a drawing in sanguine and black and white chalk by William Rothenstein, 1930. Pound watched Rothenstein paint Tagore’s portrait in 1912, shortly before the publication of his poems, Gitanjali, Pound’s first great enthusiasm in non-Western literature

Harriet Monroe in Chinese dress with a citation for ‘further[ing] the cause of modern poetry’. Vanity Fair, New York, August 1920. Monroe had visited China in 1911 just before founding Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, and like Pound, she was a great admirer of Chinese poetry

Alice Corbin Henderson, a poet herself and Monroe’s associate editor at Poetry in the years when Pound was foreign correspondent. Pound later said (most unfairly) she was the ‘only means of getting an idea into dear ole ’Arriet’s hickory block’

Publicity for Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in Devonshire Street, opened in 1913. The model for the visiting poet may have been Arundel del Re, Monro’s young Italian assistant, who deeply offended Pound by his criticisms of his Cavalcanti translations

The diminutive but intrepid Dora Marsden, in one of her frequent brushes with the police during her suffragette years

Ezra Pound in October 1913, in his dressing gown at 10 Church Walk, photographed by Alvin Langdon Coburn, with whom he later developed the ‘Vortograph’

The photo to commemorate the Peacock Dinner, given to honour Wilfrid Scawen Blunt at his country house, Newbuildings, in Sussex in January 1914. From left to right: Victor Plarr, Thomas Sturge Moore, W.B. Yeats, Blunt, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington and F.S. Flint

Wyndham Lewis, in 1914, when he founded the Rebel Art Centre and launched Blast, ‘the most “advanced” of the painters’, Pound said, and ‘very clever and thoroughly enigmatic’

Horace Brodzky’s cartoon ‘The Lewis-Brzeska-Pound Troupe. Blasting their own trumpets before the wall of Jericho’, accompanying Aldington’s review of Blast in the Egoist in July 1914

Blast, which appeared on 2 July 1914, its cover being described variously as ‘purple’, ‘chill flannelette pink’, ‘cerise’ and ‘puce’

Page 6 of Blast, denouncing the entire Victorian era

Self-portrait by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the young sculptor of whom Pound said, ‘I like him very much. He is the only person with whom I can be really “Altaforte”’

The advertisement for Amy Lowell’s second volume of poetry that enraged Pound so much

T.S. Eliot with an admiring sister in 1910. Pound met him in 1914

Catholic Anthology 1914–1915, edited by Pound, cover designed by Dorothy; Pound said that his chief pleasure in publishing the anthology was to have Eliot’s poems appear in a book for the first time

Blast war number, with Lewis’s sombre black on off white cover, a Vorticist depiction of soldiers and guns