The Secret Society of Modernism: Pound, Yeats, Olivia Shakespear, and the Abbé de Montfaucon de Villars

Abstract

In November 1913 Ezra Pound began the first of three successive winters he would spend at Stone Cottage in Sussex with W. B. Yeats, the man whom he had recently called “the greatest of living poets who use English“.¹ The following summer, Pound composed “Vorticism”, the manifesto he would publish in the September 1914 issue of the Fortnightly Review. In the essay, Pound situates Vorticism in the context of artistic movements past and present, and as a result, “Vorticism“ emerges as a compact survey of Pound’s own artistic development from 1908 to 1914; he even refers to the essay as his “autobiography”.² Before the end of “Vorticism”, Pound examines the growth of his own work from Personae and The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti to “A Few Don’ ts by an Imagiste” and the Imagist poems he would publish in Lustra. He contrasts Vorticism to contemporary movements that had captured his attention during his early London years: Symbolism, Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism, and Expressionism. He quotes or discusses the figures of the “tradition” who influenced his own aesthetic: Aristotle, Dante, Villon, Browning, Pater, Whistler, and Flaubert. And to reinforce the example of his own work, Pound invokes the work of his distinguished contemporaries: Apollinaire, H. D., Gaudier-Bzreska, Hueffer, Kandinsky, Lewis, and Picasso. The one figure whom Pound does not mention, oddly enough, is the man whose status as the “best poet in England’ he had just reaffirmed in the May 1914 issue of Poetry: W. B. Yeats.³