1914 It was Ezra Pound’s idea. From 1913 to 1916 he shared the six-room Stone Cottage in Sussex with W.B. Yeats, serving as the elder poet’s secretary. One day Pound suggested that they do something to mark the 74th birthday of Wilfred Scawen Blunt, the revered poet of love and nature, and campaigner against British imperialism in Egypt and India.
Yeats and Pound rounded up some poetic allies – the former drawing Victor Gustave Plarr and Thomas Sturge Moore from the old London-based Rhymers’ Club that he had founded, the latter inviting fellow imagists Frederic Manning, F.S. Flint and Richard Aldington. According to Yeats’ biographer Roy Foster, all seven travelled down on this day to Blunt’s stud farm in Horsham in a car hired for £5, carrying their poems of homage in ‘a stone casket carved with a recumbent figure by Gaudier-Brzeska’ (the sculptor was another of Pound’s enthusiasms).
Despite the cold, the occasion went off well. ‘The meal included a roast peacock, allegedly at WBY’s request’, Foster adds. Blunt himself ‘responded to his lionization with a slightly crusty amusement. He claimed he had never really been a poet, had only ever written verse “when I was rather down on my luck and made mistakes either in love or politics or some other branch of active life”, and preferred to be celebrated as a horse breeder’1.
A few mundane questions remain. How did they all fit in the car? Since £5 is worth over £400 in today’s money, it may have been a very big car. And where did they find the peacock? Not at the local butchers, surely.
In any case, it’s a good story in which everyone plays out according to form: Yeats exotic, Pound generous and Blunt – well, blunt. Do poets have so much fun nowadays?
1 R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. 1, The Apprentice Mage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 509.