ONE afternoon in 1912, Ezra Pound, flamboyant poet and polemicist, already viewed by literary London with mingled amusement and alarm, met his fellow-American Hilda Doolittle in the British Museum tearoom. They had both been working in the Reading Room. Pound already had eight – admittedly slim – books to his credit: Doolittle had published nothing but a few children’s stories, though she had been writing poetry for some years. She had given him one of her recent poems to read. ‘But … this is poetry,’ Pound exclaimed. He scrawled ‘H.D. Imagiste’ at the bottom, and took it off to post to Poetry, Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based avant-garde magazine.1 The imagist movement was born.
That, at any rate, is H.D.’s version of the origin of imagism, though according to her future husband, Richard Aldington, the first poet to be published with the imagist label attached, it was in the Fuller tea-shop in Kensington that Pound first named the pair of them imagists. According to Pound himself, he thought up the term one evening, apparently in solitude, and tea-less. But they all three agree that imagism was named by Pound some time in 1912: indeed this is one of the few elements in the contentious and hotly disputed story of the imagist movement on which there is general agreement. Where it came from, whose ideas it represented, what indeed imagism meant, who was or was not an imagist were all fiercely debated questions for most of the movement’s existence, as they have been in literary history since.
All these are questions which I try to answer in this book. The advent of the imagists, one of the most turbulent and colourful poetic groupings of the twentieth century, marked the beginning of Anglo-American modernism, three decades of extraordinary creativity in which appeared the most important works of such writers as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams and many more. There were earlier works which would now be identified as modernist, Gertrude Stein’s 1909 Three Lives for example, but it was with the imagists that it became apparent that a new movement was launched. As Eliot was to say, appropriately reinvoking the imagist habit of turning anything they admired into French, the imagist movement was modern poetry’s point de repère.2 Yet what was the imagists’ significance for this richly productive period of radical and self-conscious experiment? A disparate, stormy group, who had dispersed before the 1920s began, there is no doubt that they achieved a succès de scandale. Their poetry – pared-down, elliptical, fragmentary, vivid, with unexpected images and juxtapositions – exerted a powerful influence on modernist writers, both poets and novelists, and their ideas and the debates they provoked played a vital role in the transformation of American and British cultural life that occurred at the time of the First World War.
The story of the imagists themselves is full of rich drama, involving passion, betrayal, sexual jealousy, literary envy, bereavement, shell-shock, class antagonisms, friendship, adultery, cruelty, bullying and pique. Three years before imagism was named by Pound, many of its ideas and practices were being tentatively explored by a group of young poets who met in the Tour Eiffel restaurant in Soho, led by the pugnacious T.E. Hulme. Of these, only the American Pound and the English F.S. Flint would go on to form part of the later imagist group, Hulme having given up poetry, though his ideas would still be influential, while two of the others, Joseph Campbell and Desmond FitzGerald, were by then more interested in a different kind of revolution, the fight for Irish independence. The new recruits included, besides H.D. and Aldington, two more Americans, Amy Lowell, rich, charismatic and determined, and the moody, super-sensitive John Gould Fletcher. The English D.H Lawrence would contribute to the anthologies, though always insisting he was not an imagist, but their way of writing undeniably had an impact on his poetry. There had been a possibility that Ford Madox Ford would join them, and though he did not, he plays a not insignificant role in this story; and while W.B. Yeats allegedly described imagist poetry as the ‘devil’s metres’, he was also a potent presence for many of them.3 Indeed the relative importance of the influence of Yeats, Ford and Hulme is one of the most disputed aspects of the story. Most contentious of all, however, is what one might describe as the third stage of imagism, when Pound’s role as impresario was taken over by Amy Lowell. Pound insisted that imagism became hopelessly diluted ‘Amygism’ after that, and would have nothing to do with the later anthologies. He incorporated his version of imagism into his next movement, Vorticism, which he launched with the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis and the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, and found a new poetic ally in T.S. Eliot. Yet it was Lowell’s promotion of imagism that had most impact in America. The Vorticists were aggressively masculine, described indeed as ‘masculomaniacs’ by the art critic, John Cournos; imagism after Pound was very much led by women.
Like the Russian Bolsheviks in 1917 – the year incidentally of the fourth and final annual imagist anthology – the imagists, those ‘verse revolutionaries’ as Aldington dubbed them, sometimes portrayed themselves as sweeping away the debris of a moribund system and effecting a clean break with their predecessors.4 Yet for all their attacks on Victorianism they did not so much repudiate the past as create a new story about the traditions they had inherited. Indeed, their insistence that they were upholding the best standards of the greatest writers has caused some critics to accuse them of being an anti-avant-garde, poetic Young Fogeys at heart. The truth was more complex than either position; they certainly wrote in a strikingly new way, a modern dolce stil nuovo, but there were many continuities, as well as much that they took over, and others at the time were changing in similar or related ways. As F.S. Flint was to insist, ‘Imagism, like all other literary movements, was a general movement, a product and impulse of the time’.5 It came out of a period of social and intellectual unrest, when the inequalities of a class-ridden and patriarchal society were under fire, and ideas of progress and the superiority of Western modernity increasingly questioned. London was full of people intent on changing the world: socialists, suffragettes, anarchists, proponents of free love, theosophists, Russian émigrés, Irish nationalists, Nietzscheans, Ibsenites, proto-psychoanalysts. The imagists wanted to change the world too, though they were by no means agreed on how or in what way; as a group they were not just from different countries but from very different class backgrounds, from those of working-class origin like Flint and Lawrence, to an American patrician like Lowell, a heterogeneous mélange perhaps only possible in a great metropolis like London. Meeting in what was already a multicultural city, at the hub of a great empire, they were acutely conscious that there were other ways of being and thinking than those of Victorian Britain. Dissatisfaction with the mechanised modern world, disenchantment with Western rationality, greater knowledge of other cultures, paradoxically the fruit of Western imperialism, had already led modernist painters to a new appreciation of non-Western art. The imagists too drew widely on other cultures, particularly the Japanese and Chinese. Working with translations, discovering themselves, as Paul Ricoeur has put it, by the detour of the other, would be crucial.
There have been books of literary criticism on the imagists before, as well as biographies of a good number of the figures involved in this story and a torrent of critical work on the movement’s central figures, on much of which I draw. This, however, is a group biography, an attempt to get beyond the partisan rewriting of history in which so many of its members later participated, to unpick the story of how they came together, what they gained from each other in the heady excitement of those early days, and what fissures eventually broke up the movement and their friendships in the dark days of the Great War. When Aldington asked himself in his memoir, Life for Life’s Sake, what the imagists achieved between 1912 and 1917, he had a variety of answers, but what he points out with most satisfaction is that ‘they livened things up a lot’: it is to that lively tale I now turn.6