Ezra Pound: Poems Ezra Pound

A Lume Spento

Pound arrived in Gibraltar on 23 March 1908, where he earned $15 a day working as a guide for an American family there and in Spain.[46] After stops in Seville, Grenada, and Genoa, by the end of April he was in Venice, living over a bakery near the San Vio bridge.[47] In the summer he decided to self-publish his first collection of 44 poems in the 72-page A Lume Spento ("With Tapers Quenched"), 150 copies of which were printed in July 1908.[48] The title is from the third canto of Dante's Purgatorio, alluding to the death of Manfred, King of Sicily. Pound dedicated the book to the Philadelphia artist William Brooke Smith, a friend from university who had recently died of tuberculosis.[49]

In "Canto LXXVI" of The Pisan Cantos, he records that he considered throwing the proofs into the Grand Canal, abandoning the book and poetry altogether: "by the soap-smooth stone posts where San Vio / meets with il Canal Grande / between Salviati and the house that was of Don Carlos / shd/I chuck the lot into the tide-water? / le bozze "A Lume Spento"/ / and by the column of Todero / shd/I shift to the other side / or wait 24 hours".[50]

Move to London

In August 1908 Pound moved to London, carrying 60 copies of A Lume Spento.[51] English poets such as Maurice Hewlett, Rudyard Kipling, and Alfred Tennyson had made a particular kind of Victorian verse—stirring, pompous, and propagandistic—popular. According to modernist scholar James Knapp, Pound rejected the idea of poetry as "versified moral essay"; he wanted to focus on the individual experience, the concrete rather than the abstract.[52]

Pound at first stayed in a boarding house at 8 Duchess Street, near the British Museum Reading Room; he had met the landlady during his travels in Europe in 1906.[53] He soon moved to Islington (cheaper at 12s 6d a week board and lodging), but his father sent him £4 and he was able to move back into central London, to 48 Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street.[54] The house sat across an alley from the Yorkshire Grey pub, which made an appearance in "Canto LXXX" (The Pisan Cantos), "concerning the landlady's doings / with a lodger unnamed / az waz near Gt Tichfield St. next door to the pub".[55]

Pound persuaded the bookseller Elkin Mathews on Vigo Street to display A Lume Spento, and in an unsigned article on 26 November 1908, Pound reviewed it himself in the Evening Standard: "The unseizable magic of poetry is in this queer paper book; and words are no good in describing it."[56] The following month he self-published a second collection, A Quinzaine for this Yule.[57] It was his first book to have commercial success, and Elkin Matthews had another 100 copies printed.[58] In January and February 1909, after the death of John Churton Collins left a vacancy, Pound lectured for an hour a week in the evenings on "The Development of Literature in Southern Europe" at the Regent Street Polytechnic.[59][e] Mornings might be spent in the British Museum Reading Room, followed by lunch at the Vienna Café on Oxford Street, where Pound first met Wyndham Lewis in 1910.[61] "There were mysterious figures / that emerged from recondite recesses / and ate at the WIENER CAFÉ".[62] Ford Madox Ford described Pound as "approach[ing] with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent":

He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue earring."[63]

Meeting Dorothy Shakespear, Personae

At a literary salon in 1909, Pound met the novelist Olivia Shakespear[64] and later at the Shakespears' home at 12 Brunswick Gardens, Kensington, was introduced to her daughter, Dorothy, who became Pound's wife in 1914.[65] The critic Iris Barry described her as "carrying herself delicately with the air, always, of a young Victorian lady out skating, and a profile as clear and lovely as that of a porcelain Kuan-yin".[66] "Listen to it—Ezra! Ezra!—And a third time—Ezra!", Dorothy wrote in her diary on 16 February 1909.[67]

Pound mixed with the cream of London's literary circle, including Hewlett, Laurence Binyon, Frederic Manning, Ernest Rhys, May Sinclair, Ellen Terry, George Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc, T. E. Hulme, and F. S. Flint.[68] Through the Shakespears, he was introduced to the poet W. B. Yeats, Olivia Shakespear's former lover. He had already sent Yeats a copy of A Lume Spento, and Yeats had apparently found it "charming".[69] Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams on 3 February 1909: "Am by way of falling into the crowd that does things here. London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy."[70] According to Richard Aldington, London found Pound amusing. The newspapers interviewed him,[71] and he was mentioned in Punch magazine, which on 23 June 1909 described "Mr. Ezekiel Ton" as "the most remarkable thing in poetry since Robert Browning ... [blending] the imagery of the unfettered West, the vocabulary of Wardour Street, and the sinister abandon of Borgiac Italy".[72]

"Thank you, whatever comes." And then she turned And, as the ray of sun on hanging flowers Fades when the wind hath lifted them aside, Went swiftly from me. Nay, whatever comes One hour was sunlit and the most high gods May not make boast of any better thing Than to have watched that hour as it passed.

— Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (1926)[73]

In April 1909 Elkin Mathews published Personae of Ezra Pound (half the poems were from A Lume Spento)[58][f] and in October a further 27 poems (16 new) as Exultations.[76] Edward Thomas described Personae in English Review as "full of human passion and natural magic".[77] Rupert Brooke complained in the Cambridge Review that Pound had fallen under the influence of Walt Whitman, writing in "unmetrical sprawling lengths that, in his hands, have nothing to commend them". But he did acknowledge that Pound had "great talents".[78]

In or around September, Pound moved into new rooms at Church Walk, off Kensington High Street, where he lived most of the time until 1914.[79] He visited a friend, Walter Rummel, in Paris in March 1910 and was introduced to the American heiress and pianist Margaret Lanier Cravens. Although they had only just met, she offered to become a patron to the tune of $1,000 a year, and from then until her death in 1912 she apparently sent him money regularly.[80]

The Spirit of Romance, Canzoni, the New Age

In June 1910 Pound returned for eight months to the United States; his arrival coincided with the publication in London of his first book of literary criticism, The Spirit of Romance, based on his lecture notes from the polytechnic.[81] Patria Mia, his essays on the United States, were written at this time.[82] In August he moved to New York, renting rooms on Waverly Place and Park Avenue South, facing Gramercy Square.[83] Although he loved New York, he felt alienated by the commercialism and newcomers from Eastern and Southern Europe who were displacing the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.[84] The recently built New York Public Library Main Branch he found especially offensive.[85] During this period his antisemitism became apparent; he referred in Patria Mia to the "detestable qualities" of Jews.[86] After persuading his parents to finance his passage back to Europe, he sailed from New York on the RMS Mauretania on 22 February 1911. It was nearly 30 years—April 1939—before he visited the U.S. again.[87]

After three days in London he went to Paris,[88] where he worked on a new collection of poetry, Canzoni (1911),[89] panned by the Westminster Gazette as "affectation combined with pedantry".[90] He wrote in Ford Madox Ford's obituary that Ford had rolled on the floor with laughter at its "stilted language".[91] When he returned to London in August, he rented a room in Marylebone at 2A Granville Place, then shared a house at 39 Addison Road North, W11.[92] By November A. R. Orage, editor of the socialist journal the New Age, had hired him to write a weekly column.[93] Orage appears in The Cantos (Possum is T. S. Eliot): "but the lot of 'em, Yeats, Possum and Wyndham / had no ground beneath 'em. / Orage had."[94]

Pound contributed to the New Age from 30 November 1911 to 13 January 1921,[95] attending editorial meetings in the basement of a grimy ABC tearoom in Chancery Lane.[96] There and at other meetings he met Arnold Bennett, Cecil Chesterton, Beatrice Hastings, S. G. Hobson, Hulme, Katherine Mansfield, and H. G. Wells.[95] In the New Age office in 1918, he also met C. H. Douglas, a British engineer who was developing his economic theory of social credit, which Pound found attractive.[97] Douglas reportedly believed that Jews were a problem and needed to abandon a Messianic view of themselves as the "dominating race".[98] According to Colin Holmes, the New Age itself published antisemitic material.[99] It was within this environment, not in Italy, according to Tim Redman, that Pound first encountered antisemitic ideas about "usury".[95] "In Douglas's program," Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2008, "Pound had found his true muse: a blend of folkloric Celtic twilight with a paranoid hatred of the money economy and a dire suspicion about an ancient faith."[100]

Poetry magazine, Ripostes, Imagism

In May 1911, H.D. left Philadelphia for London. She was accompanied by the poet Frances Gregg and Gregg's mother; when they returned in September, H.D. stayed on. Pound introduced her to his friends, including Aldington, who became her husband in 1913. Before that, the three of them lived in Church Walk, Kensington—Pound at no. 10, Aldington at no. 8, and Doolittle at no. 6—and worked daily in the British Museum Reading Room.[79]

At the British Museum, Laurence Binyon introduced Pound to the East Asian artistic and literary concepts Pound used in his later poetry, including Japanese ukiyo-e prints.[103] The visitors' book first shows Pound in the Prints and Drawings Students' Room (known as the Print Room)[104] on 9 February 1909, and later in 1912 and 1913, with Dorothy Shakespear, examining Chinese and Japanese art.[105] Pound was working at the time on the poems that became Ripostes (1912), trying to move away from his earlier work.[106] "I hadn't in 1910 made a language," he wrote years later. "I don't mean a language to use, but even a language to think in."[h]

In August 1912 Harriet Monroe hired Pound as foreign correspondent of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a new magazine in Chicago.[108] The first edition, in October, featured two of his own poems, "To Whistler, American" and "Middle Aged". Also that month Stephen Swift and Co. in London published Ripostes of Ezra Pound, a collection of 25 poems, including a contentious translation of The Seafarer,[109] that demonstrate his shift toward minimalist language.[79] In addition to Pound's work, the collection contains five poems by Hulme.[110]

Ripostes includes the first mention of Les Imagistes: "As for the future, Les Imagistes, the descendants of the forgotten school of 1909, have that in their keeping."[111] While in the British Museum tearoom one afternoon with Doolittle and Aldington, Pound edited one of Doolittle's poems and wrote "H.D. Imagiste" underneath;[112] he described this later as the founding of a movement in poetry, Imagisme.[113][i] In the spring or early summer of 1912, they agreed, Pound wrote in 1918, on three principles:

1. Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or objective.

2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.[115]

Poetry published Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagist" in March 1913. Superfluous words, particularly adjectives, should be avoided, as well as expressions like "dim lands of peace". He wrote: "It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol." Poets should "go in fear of abstractions".[116] He wanted Imagisme "to stand for hard light, clear edges", he wrote later to Amy Lowell.[117]

The apparition    of these faces    in the crowd: Petals    on a wet, black   bough.

— Poetry (April 1913)[118]

An example of Imagist poetry is Pound's "In a Station of the Metro", published in Poetry in April 1913 and inspired by an experience on the Paris Underground. "I got out of a train at, I think, La Concorde," he wrote in "How I began" in T. P.'s Weekly on 6 June 1913, "and in the jostle I saw a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful face. All that day I tried to find words for what this made me feel. ... I could get nothing but spots of colour." A year later he reduced it to its essence in the style of a Japanese haiku.[119]

James Joyce, Pound's unpopularity

In the summer of 1913 Pound became literary editor of The Egoist, a journal founded by the suffragette Dora Marsden.[120] At the suggestion of W. B. Yeats, Pound encouraged James Joyce in December of that year to submit his work.[121] The previous month Yeats, whose eyesight was failing, had rented Stone Cottage in Coleman's Hatch, Sussex, inviting Pound to accompany him as his secretary, and it was during this visit that Yeats introduced Pound to Joyce's Chamber Music and his "I hear an Army Charging Upon the Land".[122] This was the first of three winters Pound and Yeats spent at Stone Cottage, including two with Dorothy after she and Ezra married in 1914.[123] "Canto LXXXIII" records a visit: "so that I recalled the noise in the chimney / as it were the wind in the chimney / but was in reality Uncle William / downstairs composing / that had made a great Peeeeacock / in the proide ov his oiye."[124][j]

In his reply to Pound, Joyce gave permission to use "I hear an Army" and enclosed Dubliners and the first chapter of his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.[122] Pound wrote to Joyce that the novel was "damn fine stuff".[125] Harriet Shaw Weaver accepted it for The Egoist, which serialized it from 2 February 1914, despite the printers objecting to words like "fart" and "ballocks", and fearing prosecution over Stephen Dedalus's thoughts about prostitutes. On the basis of the serialization, the publisher that had rejected Dubliners reconsidered. Joyce wrote to Yeats: "I can never thank you enough for having brought me into relation with your friend Ezra Pound who is indeed a miracle worker."[126]

Around this time, Pound's articles in the New Age began to make him unpopular, to the alarm of Orage.[127] Samuel Putnam knew Pound in Paris in the 1920s and described him as stubborn, contrary, cantankerous, bossy, touchy, and "devoid of humor"; he was "an American small-towner", in Putnam's view. His attitude caused him trouble in both London and Paris.[128] English women, with their "preponderantly derivative" minds, were inferior to American women who had minds of their own, he wrote in the New Age. The English sense of what was right was based on respect for property, not morality. "[P]erched on the rotten shell of a crumbling empire", London had lost its energy. England's best authors—Conrad, Hudson, James, and Yeats—were not English. English writers and critics were ignorant, he wrote in 1913.[129]

Marriage

Ezra and Dorothy were married on 20 April 1914 at St Mary Abbots in Kensington,[130] the Shakespears' parish church, despite opposition from her parents, who worried about Ezra's income. His concession to marry in church had helped. Dorothy's annual income was £50, with another £150 from her family,[131] and Ezra's was £200.[132] Her father, Henry Hope Shakespear, had him prepare a financial statement in 1911, which showed that his main source of income was his father.[133] After the wedding the couple moved into an apartment with no bathroom at 5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington, next door to the newly wed H.D. and Aldington.[131] This arrangement did not last. H.D. had been alarmed to find Ezra looking for a place to live outside the apartment building the day before his wedding. Once Dorothy and Ezra had moved into the building, Ezra would arrive unannounced at H.D.'s to discuss his writing, a habit that upset her, in part because his writing touched on private aspects of their relationship. She and Aldington decided to move several miles away to Hampstead.[134]

Des Imagistes, dispute with Amy Lowell

The appearance of Des Imagistes, An Anthology (1914), edited by Pound, "confirmed the importance" of Imagisme, according to Ira Nadel.[135] Published in the American magazine The Glebe in February 1914 and the following month as a book, it was the first of five Imagist anthologies and the only one to contain work by Pound.[136] It included ten poems by Richard Aldington, seven by H. D., followed by Flint, Skipwith Cannell, Lowell, Carlos Williams, James Joyce ("I Hear an Army", not an example of Imagism), six by Pound, then Hueffer (as he was known as the time), Allen Upward and John Cournos.[137]

Shortly after its publication, an advertisement for Lewis's new magazine, Blast promised it would cover "Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and all Vital Forms of Modern Art."[138] Described by Pound as "mostly a painter's magazine with me to do the poems,"[139] and bearing the heavy influence of Futurism,[140] Blast was the magazine of a London art movement formed by Lewis with Pound’s collaboration. Pound named the movement Vorticism.[k] Vorticism included all the arts, and in Blast "the Imagist propaganda merged into the Vorticist."[143] In the end, Blast was published only twice, in 1914 and 1915. In June 1914 The Times announced Lewis's new Rebel Arts Centre for Vorticist art at 38 Great Ormond Street.[144]  

Lowell, who was to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926, was unhappy that only one of her poems had appeared in Des Imagistes. She arrived in London in July 1914 to attend two dinners at the Dieudonné restaurant in Ryder Street, the first to celebrate the publication of Blast and the second, on 17 July, the publication of Des Imagistes. At the second, Ford Madox Hueffer announced that he had been an Imagiste long before Lowell and Pound, and that he doubted their qualifications; only Aldington and H.D. could lay claim to the title, in his view. During the subsequent row, Pound left the table and returned with a tin bathtub on his head, suggesting it as a symbol of what he called Les Nagistes, a school created by Lowell's poem "In a Garden", which ends with "Night, and the water, and you in your whiteness, bathing!" Apparently his behavior helped Lowell win people over to her point of view, as did her offer to fund future work.[145]

H.D. and Aldington were moving away from Pound's understanding of Imagisme anyway, as he aligned himself with Lewis's ideas.[146] Lowell agreed to finance an annual anthology of Imagiste poets, but she insisted on democracy; according to Aldington, she "proposed a Boston Tea Party for Ezra" and an end to his despotic rule.[147] Upset at Lowell, Pound began to call Imagisme "Amygism";[148] he declared the movement dead and asked the group not to call themselves Imagistes. Not accepting that it was Pound's invention, they refused and Anglicized the term.[149]