Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Ezra Pound: the Pre-Imagist Phase

  • Chapter
Poetry, Painting and Ideas, 1885–1914

Abstract

Pound’s early poetry is, by critical consensus, pervaded by transcendentalism. There is, however, disagreement about the intermediate position between this early verse and the acknowledged visionary Cantos occupied by Imagism/Vorticism. That movement is generally explained as a formalistic preparation for the major epic and its place in Pound’s continuum of thought ignored. As with the contemporary movements in the visual arts discussed in the previous chapter, I feel that such an approach neglects a crucial aesthetic dimension. This chapter provides accordingly a prolegomenon to Chapter 8 by analysing the transcendentalism which remained central to Imagism/Vorticism.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. See Thomas Parkinson, ‘Yeats and Pound: The Illusion of Influence’, Comparative Literature, VI. 3 (Summer 1954) 256–64; Richard Ellmann, ‘Ez and Old Billyum’, in New Approaches to Ezra Pound, ed. Eva Hesse (1969) 55– 85; K. L. Goodwin, The Influence of Ezra Pound (1966) 75–105; N. Christoph de Nagy, The Poetry of Ezra Pound: The Pre-Imagist Stage (Bern, 1960); Thomas H. Jackson, The Early Poetry of Ezra Pound (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). For a different approach see Herbert N. Schneidau, ‘Pound and Yeats: The Question of Symbolism’, ELH, XXXII (1965) 220–37.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Pound: Early Poems, 313; Selected Prose, 116; Early Poems, 269–72, 209.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Yeats: Uncollected Prose, I, 187; Letters, 63, 106.

    Google Scholar 

  4. See Pound, ‘Hilda’s Book’, in Hilda Doolittle, End to Tormeiǹt: A Memoir of

    Google Scholar 

  5. Ezra Pound, ed. Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King (New York, 1979) 73–4, 83, 84.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Ibid., 79–80, 12; Pound, Early Poems, 28; Doolittle, End to Torment, 23, 68.Cf. ‘Threnos’, Early Poems, 30, and Pound’s transmogrification of fencing-lessons at Pennsylvania University in ‘For E. McC.’ (ibid., 39–40).

    Google Scholar 

  7. Ibid., 79–80, 26–7, 30–1, 295. Cf. the later Dantesque ‘La Nuvoletta’ ibid., (151–2); ‘Scriptor Ignotus’ (ibid., 24–6) similarly depicts Katherine Heyman as muse.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Doolittle, End to Torment, 83–4 71–2; Pound, Early Poems, 236–7.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Ibid., 43, 52, 77. ‘The Tree’ and ‘A Girl’ further reveal Pound’s sympathy with a desire to identify with a world of imaginative richness generally condemned as ‘folly’, while ‘Planh’ and ‘An Idyl for Glaucus’ are mythopoeic renderings of the need to escape into a form of alternative experience. The aspiration to escape from the phenomenal to the noumenal world inspires also the insipid ‘Paracelsus in Excelsis’. See ibid., 35, 186, 126, 83–5, 148.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Yeats, Letters, 210–11.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Pater seems a plausible mediator for both Hegel and Schiller; see Ch. 2, n. 81. Yeats’s comments in Uncollected Prose, I, 103, 113–14, 295, and Explorations, 148–9, 210–13, are particularly close to the Schillerian antithesis; Yeats defined naïveté in this sense in 1906 (Explorations, 203) but had employed it as early as 1889: see Letters to the New Island, 178.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Yeats, Letters, 31; cf. Essays and Introductions, 102–3.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Later defined by a control as ‘Complete harmony between physical body, intellect & spiritual desire’; see A Critical Edition of Yeats’s ‘A Vision’ (1925), ed. George Mills Harper and Walter Kelly Hood (1978) Notes, 12. Its social ramifications were outlined in Autobiographies, 190–2.

    Google Scholar 

  14. On Ferguson see particularly Uncollected Prose, I, 81–2, 84, 90–1, 92, 159; Letters to the New Island, 177. By 1896 Yeats’s fervour had abated somewhat; see Uncollected Prose, I , 404–5. Cf. also Yeats’s comments on the ‘bardic’ quality of R. D. Joyce and his criticism of ‘Michael Field’ (ibid., I, 105, 109, 112–13, 225–6). Other favourite phrases for this quality were ‘barbaric sincerity’ or ‘spontaneity’, linking an idealised view of heroic antiquity with post-Romantic veneration for the childlike. Frank Kermode offers a seminal discussion of ‘Unity of Being’ in Yeats’s poetry in Romantic Image (1971) particularly chs 3–5.

    Google Scholar 

  15. An account is repr. in Uncollected Prose, I, 266–75.

    Google Scholar 

  16. See also ibid., I, 147–8, 248–50; Letters to the New Island, 158–9, 190–2; Autobiographies, 189–95. Home Rule propagandism undoubtedly conditioned Yeats’s distinction between the imaginative purity of Ireland and the vulgar commercialism of England and her literary realism. His aim was to shatter the distorted literary image of Ireland which existed in the popular ‘West British’ writers as an extension of England’s political hegemony. See Uncollected Prose, I, 104, 255–6 and II, 240–1, 245–6, 321, 326; Letters to the New Island, 109–10, 153–4, 172–4.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Denis Donoghue, Yeats (1971) 14. See also T. R. Henn, The Lonely Tower, 2nd edn (1965) 105–6, 111, 128, 162, 276.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Yeats, Autobiographies, 355.

    Google Scholar 

  19. See Uncollected Prose, I, 137, 164–5; II, 119–21, 281–2.

    Google Scholar 

  20. See Essays and Introductions, 184–8; and Uncollected Prose, I, 382. Cf. Yeats’s argument that bereft of popular living (Irish) folklore Shelley was driven to a factitious classical mythology to express his subjective inspiration, just as Blake was forced to devise an esoteric system to clothe his imaginative revelations: Uncollected Prose, I , 287–8; Autobiographies, 150; Essays and Introductions, 111–15.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Uncollected Prose, I , 284. Cf. the vatic strains of I, 183, 322–3; II, 42–3, 44–5.

    Google Scholar 

  22. Ibid., I, 247.

    Google Scholar 

  23. See Yeats, Essays and Introductions, 189–94, and Uncollected Prose, I, 260, 367, 374; George Mills Harper, Yeats’s Golden Dawn (1974) 148.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Yeats, Uncollected Prose, I, 423.

    Google Scholar 

  25. Ibid., I, 336–7.

    Google Scholar 

  26. See, for example, Nagy, Poetry of Pound: The Pre-Imagist Stage, 36–52; Jackson, Early Poetry of Pound, 4–7, 63–72.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Pound, Early Poems, 61–2, 44, 37.

    Google Scholar 

  28. I ignore the widespread use in Pound’s early poetry of personae in dramatic monologues. ‘Masks’, Early Poems, 34, defines ‘myth’ in the acceptation I intend.

    Google Scholar 

  29. Early Poems, 40–3, quotation on 42; 244–5, 321.

    Google Scholar 

  30. Pound, The Spirit of Romance, 92.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Early Poems, 10–12, 9–10, 86–7.

    Google Scholar 

  32. Early Poems, 36 and n. 296; 322 (variants omitted), my italics. Cf. Shelley’s ‘A Defence of Poetry’ in English Critical Essays: Nineteenth Century, ed. Edmund D. Jones (1971) 110. Pound’s essay explicates directly ‘Aube of the West Dawn. Venetian June’ (Early Poems, 63) which employs a trope similar to the transformation of the ‘thaumaturgic’ sky in Hulme’s contemporaneous ‘A City Sunset’. Cf. Pound’s praise of Dante’s use of the metamorphosis of Glaucus as a simile for the ‘mystic ecstasy’ Beatrice inspired; it was an expression of ‘pantheism’ or ‘cosmic consciousness’ more convincing than Wordsworth or Whitman (Dante, Paradiso, I , 67–9; Pound, Spirit of Romance, 141, 155).

    Google Scholar 

  33. Pound, Literary Essays, 431 (emphasis added).

    Google Scholar 

  34. Yeats: Memoirs, 123–1; cf. The Celtic Twilight (1902) passim, particularly 45, 106–8, 151–2.

    Google Scholar 

  35. Uncollected Prose, I, 287; cf. Letters to the New Island, 101.

    Google Scholar 

  36. For details see Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1961) 118– 30; Harper, Yeats’s Golden Dawn, 18–19, 164–5; Virginia Moore, The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats’ Search for Reality (New York, 1954) 66–82.

    Google Scholar 

  37. Letters from AE, ed. Alan Denson (London, New York and Toronto, 1961) 17–18, 35, 46. See also Yeats, Essays and Introductions, 474–5.

    Google Scholar 

  38. The Rosicrucian details derive from Virginia Moore, The Unicorn, 140, 147, 150.

    Google Scholar 

  39. Yeats: Autobiographies, 253–4; Memoirs, 123. Cf. Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats, 2nd edn (1964) 305–6.

    Google Scholar 

  40. See Some Passages from the Letters of AE to W. B. Yeats, ed. E. C. Yeats (Dublin, 1936) 1–3; Letters to W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, George Mills Harper and William M. Murphy, 2 vols (1977) 27. For a less specific analogy with America see Uncollected Prose, I, 255–6.

    Google Scholar 

  41. Pound, Selected Prose, 53; see also 58, 290.

    Google Scholar 

  42. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, paperback edn (Berkeley, Calif., and Los Angeles, 1973) 318–48. Yeats, Memoirs, 124; cf. Essays and Introductions, 475 and Autobiographies, 378.

    Google Scholar 

  43. Yeats, Uncollected Prose, II, 184–96; see particularly 190–6 (quotation from 195). Cf. Uncollected Prose, II, 55–7, 74, 127; Essays and Introductions, 205–6, 233; Explorations, 12–13.

    Google Scholar 

  44. Repr. in Essays and Introductions, 293–7 (quotation from 294). Cf. Essays and Introductions, 213–14 and the crucial comments in Memoirs, 184 and 185§96. See also Autobiographies, 295.

    Google Scholar 

  45. Pound, ‘Letters to Viola Baxter Jordan’, ed. with a commentary by Donald Gallup, Paideuma, I (1972) 109.

    Google Scholar 

  46. Pound, Letters, 3–4; see also The Spirit of Romance, 8, 82. For a fine analysis of Pound’s ‘expressive’ poetry of the significant moment, see Jackson, Early Poetry of Pound, 14–28.

    Google Scholar 

  47. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, 174–6, 178–9 (quotations from 176, 178).

    Google Scholar 

  48. Pound, Early Poems, 8.

    Google Scholar 

  49. Ibid., 114–15, 115–16, 121, 126, 117–20; Yeats, Variorum Poems, 155–6.

    Google Scholar 

  50. Pound: Early Poems, 205; ‘Raphaelite Latin’, Book News Monthly, XXV (1906) 33, 34; ‘M. Antonius Flamininus and John Keats: A Kinship in Genius’, Book News Monthly, XXVI (1908) 447.

    Google Scholar 

  51. Pound, The Spirit of Romance, 223, 227 (emphasis added); see also 231.

    Google Scholar 

  52. Pound: ‘M. Antonius Flamininus and John Keats’, Book News Monthly, XXVI, 447; ‘Three Cantos’, Poetry, X ( June 1917) 118–19. See also the reference to Metastasio and Lake Garda in ‘Prolegomena’ (1911), repr. in Literay Essays, 8–9.

    Google Scholar 

  53. See Pound: Patria Mia (first drafted early in 1911) 13–17, 26–7, 48–9; Literay Essays, 219.

    Google Scholar 

  54. Pound, ‘Tagore’s Poems’, Poetry, I (Dec 1912) 93; cf. his ‘Rabindranath Tagore’, Fortnightly Review, n.s., XCIII (1 Mar 1913) 574, where a comparison with Dante’s Paradiso is added, and 579, with ‘Three Cantos’, Poetry, X, 116.

    Google Scholar 

  55. Pound, ‘Rabindranath Tagore’, Fortnightly Review, n.s., XCIII, 571.

    Google Scholar 

  56. Ibid., 573. Pound employed this Juvenalian phrase elsewhere to characterise Stilnovist mysticism: see The Spirit of Romance, 94; and Literary Essays, 152.

    Google Scholar 

  57. Pound, ‘Rabindranath Tagore’, Fortnightly Review, n.s., XCIII, 574; cf. The Spirit of Romance, 92–3.

    Google Scholar 

  58. See The Spirit of Romance, 223–4; Literary Essays, 153; The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1964) 245. Pound’s choice of 1527 presumably derives from the sack of Rome, which drastically reduced artistic patronage and constricted research into the Classical period, while the Reformation, Pound held, destroyed the habit of mystical ‘contemplation’ and fostered usury; see Selected Prose, 120, 243, 287. In art this resulted in the displacement of the medieval clean line in both painting and cut stone (synonymous for Pound with moral discrimination) by Mannerist exuberance and distortion.

    Google Scholar 

  59. Cf. his later description of ‘totalitarian’ mythology in Romantic organicist terms in Selected Prose, 101.

    Google Scholar 

  60. See Pound, Translations, 18; Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (Harmondsworth, Middx, 1974) 131.

    Google Scholar 

  61. Pound, The Spirit of Romance, 87, 18–21, 90; cf. Selected Prose, 53, 58–9.

    Google Scholar 

  62. See Pound, ‘Interesting French Publications’, Book News Monthly, XXV (1906) 54–5; Leon Surette, A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Oxford, 1979) 34–6; Pound, The Spirit of Romance, 90–2.

    Google Scholar 

  63. See Peter Makin, Provence and Pound (Berkeley, Calif., Los Angeles and London, 1978) 217–50, 168–75; the section summarised is 172–3.

    Google Scholar 

  64. Ibid., 351, 173, 246–7. Leon Surette, who believes that Pound’s association of the Stilnovisti with the Eleusinian mysteries is unparalleled, also discusses the Albigensians and argues that a major structural pattern in the Cantos derives from the Eleusinian mysteries; see A Light from Eleusis, passim, particularly 34–80.

    Google Scholar 

  65. Pound: The Spirit of Romance, 94; Guide to Kulchur, 328, 77. Cf. Spirit of Romance, 22; and Early Poems, 99, where Pound adds that ‘Poetry in its acme is expression from contemplation’. On Pound’s limited acquaintance with Richard of St Victor, see Letters, 109; and Stock, Life of Pound, 80.

    Google Scholar 

  66. Pound: Spirit of Romance, 93–100; Guide to Kulchur, 299.

    Google Scholar 

  67. Pound, Early Poems, 89 (emphasis added). It is practically impossible to isolate the diverse sources of Pound’s hermetic theories. In America he had read Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell and Balzac’s Séraphita (see Doolittle, End to Torment, 23) and in London knew the Theosophist and occult expert G. R. S. Mead, but probably not very well before 1911 (see Stock, Life of Pound, 131, 141). The question is further complicated by Pound’s reading of Plotinus and the Italian Renaissance Neoplatonists. I believe nevertheless that Pound’s phraseology and line of argument is closest to Yeats’s and probably indicates his influence. Compare Pound’s well-known letter to Taupin: ‘Symbole?? Je n’ai jamais lu “les idées des symbolistes” sur ce sujet. Dans ma jeunesse j’avais peut être quelqu’idée reçue du moyen âge. Dante, St Victor, dieu sais qui, des modifications via Yeats… mais je ne sais pas dénuder les traces’ (Letters, 218).

    Google Scholar 

  68. Pound, Spirit of Romance, 14; see also 127.

    Google Scholar 

  69. See Yeats, Essays and Introductions, 28–52, particularly 28, 48–52; 78–80, 141– 2, 156–60; and also Autobiographies, 183, 185–7, 258–65, 272, 371–5. Yeats later explained instinct as communication by association with the living memories of the dead, and inspiration as proceeding from one’s spiritual Mask or Daimon; see Mythologies (1959) 359–63; Explorations, 330–2.

    Google Scholar 

  70. Repr. in Harper, Yeats’s Golden Dawn, 259–68. See also 269–70, 244–5, 246–9, and Harper’s comment on 99.

    Google Scholar 

  71. Ibid., 247–8, 263–4, 269–70, 54–6, 177. On ‘energy’ see also Yeats’s ‘Magic’, Essays and Introductions, 28.

    Google Scholar 

  72. Yeats: Uncollected Prose, I, 367, 380, 394, 400–2, 408; Essays and Introductions, 116–20 (quotation from 116).

    Google Scholar 

  73. Ibid., 148; see also 140.

    Google Scholar 

  74. Pound, Spirit of Romance, 89.

    Google Scholar 

  75. Pound, Literary Essays, 162 (emphasis added). Kermode, Romantic Image, 150; cf. 159.

    Google Scholar 

  76. Pound: Translations, 18; Literary Essays, 154 (emphasis added). I suggest that the seemingly transparent phrase ‘a definite meaning’ carries in its context (ibid., 152–5) the same overtones as Pound’s tantalising ‘I mean or imply that certain truth exists’ (Guide to Kulchur, 295), in which a plain, declarative statement implies an esoteric interpretation which it then withholds or merely alludes to obliquely.

    Google Scholar 

  77. Literary Essays, 154; cf. ABC of Reading, paperback edn (1961) 104.

    Google Scholar 

  78. Spirit of Romance, 105; Literary Essays, 344 (emphasis added).

    Google Scholar 

  79. Spirit of Romance, 96–7; Selected Prose, 390. Cf. the incantatory catalogue of ‘The Alchemist’ (Early Poems, 225–9).

    Google Scholar 

  80. For the connotations of this word see, for example, Spirit of Romance, 105, 145; Translations, 26, 46, 50–1, 118, 132–3, 136–7; ‘The House of Splendour’, ‘Apparuit’, ‘A Virginal’, Early Poems, 170–1, 182–3, 195.

    Google Scholar 

  81. Spirit of Romance, 90; cf. Translations, 106–7. See also Spirit of Romance, 106.

    Google Scholar 

  82. Selected Prose, 28–31; Translations, 18. Cf. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873), 5th edn (1910) VII–XI.

    Google Scholar 

  83. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, 121.

    Google Scholar 

  84. Pound, Translations, 18 (first emphasis added).

    Google Scholar 

  85. See also ibid., 19–20.

    Google Scholar 

  86. On Pound’s occult interests from 1909 see Stock, Life of Pound, 92. On his praise for Mead, who appeared about twice monthly at Yeats’s Mondays and whose lectures Pound attended in December 1911, see Schneidau, ‘Pound and Yeats’, ELH, XXXII, 226–7.

    Google Scholar 

  87. See Stock, Life of Pound, 103.

    Google Scholar 

  88. Pound, Selected Prose, 346. Cf. ‘Through Alien Eyes, I’, New Age, XII (16 Jan 1913) 252; ‘Affirinations… II. Vorticism’, New Age, XVI (14 Jan 1915) 277, 278; Literary Essays, 154; Guide to Kulchur, 152.

    Google Scholar 

  89. Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, Thought-Forms (London and Benares, 1905) 11–14.

    Google Scholar 

  90. Ibid., 25; cf. 14.

    Google Scholar 

  91. For example in ‘Rosa Alchemica’ (1896), repr. in The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats, ed. Phillip L. Marcus et al. Ithaca, NY, and London, 1981) 142–4; ‘The Moods’ (1895), as repr. in Uncollected Prose, I, 367; ‘The Autumn of the Body’ (1898), repr. in Essays and Introductions, 189–94.

    Google Scholar 

  92. Yeats, Letters, 402; cf. letter to Quinn, ibid., 403.

    Google Scholar 

  93. See Pound: Selected Prose, 47–52 (quotations from 47, 49, 50); Cantos, 488 (cf. 465, 563, 653).

    Google Scholar 

  94. First used in ‘Through Alien Eyes, I’, New Age, XII, 252.

    Google Scholar 

  95. Selected Prose, 331 (emphasis added).

    Google Scholar 

  96. Besant and Leadbeater, Thought-Forms, 27–9 (quotation from 29); cf. 18.

    Google Scholar 

  97. 96.. Pound, Selected Prose, 331–2 (quotations from 332; emphasis added).

    Google Scholar 

  98. Selected Prose, 25.

    Google Scholar 

  99. Literary Essays, 443, 444.

    Google Scholar 

  100. See also Spirit of Romance, 127.

    Google Scholar 

  101. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, 157 (emphasis added).

    Google Scholar 

  102. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd edn (1951) 145.

    Google Scholar 

  103. The magical aspect of this symbolist theory is emphasised by Yeats in ‘Rosa Alchemica’, The Secret Rose, 142–4.

    Google Scholar 

  104. See Stéphane Mallarmé, Propos sur la poésie, ed. Henri Mondor, 2nd edn (Monaco, 1953) 65–6, 77, 78, 79–80, 81–3, 87–9, 91, 95, 97, 101–2. Hegelian influences on Mallarmé are assessed in Jean-Pierre Richard, L’Univers imaginaire de Mallarmé (Paris, 1961) 231–3; A. W. Raitt, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam et le mouvement symbolisté (Paris, 1965) 282–6; D. J. Mossop, Pure Poetry: Studies in French Poetic Theory and Practice 1746–1945 (Oxford, 1971) 131–42. More recently Malcolm Bowie has re-emphasised the (neo-) Platonic cast of Mallarmé’s thought; see Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge, 1978) 29–30 and passim.

    Google Scholar 

  105. Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris, [1951]) 663; see also 875–6.

    Google Scholar 

  106. Ibid., 378; Propos, 82.

    Google Scholar 

  107. Ibid., 79–80. On correspondential aspects cf. ibid., 174, and the emphasis on seizing ‘rapports’ in Œuvres complètes, 647–8, 871. See also ‘Le Démon de l’Analogie’, ibid., 272–3.

    Google Scholar 

  108. Ibid., 363–4, 368, 375.

    Google Scholar 

  109. Ibid., 854; cf. the speculation on the evocative properties of individual letters in ‘Les Mots anglais’, ibid., 923–62, and the general comment on 920–1.

    Google Scholar 

  110. Otherwise inexpressible ideas were evoked by the suggestive, virginal whiteness of the spatial intervals of the mise en page, and the silence of the enforced pauses in the delivery of the poem (cf. the stimulating comments in Œuvres complètes, 310, 366–7, 379–81, 387; Propos, 207–8). Mallarmé’s typographical experiments effectively transformed the book into a musical score, dictating the mode in which it must be performed rather than read. Language thus became a gestural vehicle as flexible, suggestive and aesthetically neutral as the dancer who represented another variety of Mallarmé’s desired ‘incorporation visuelle de l’idée’. On literature as performance see Œuvres complètes, 455–6, 369–72, and the comments on punctuation on 407.

    Google Scholar 

  111. See, for example, ibid., 662; Propos, 89, 91. Cf. Yeats’s reference to ‘the Great Work’ in Variorum Poems, 849.

    Google Scholar 

  112. Mallarmé, Œuvres complèes, 646, 400. On poetry as creation see also 870. For comparable formulations of Mallarmé’s aim of evocation see, for example, ibid., 365–6, 367–8, 868–9; Propos, 46–7.

    Google Scholar 

  113. Œuvres complètes, 462–4, 472–7. Cf. ‘Ses purs ongles…’, ibid., 68–9. 113. See particularly ‘Toast funèbre’ and ‘Prose pour des Esseintes’, ibid., 54–7.

    Google Scholar 

  114. The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (1969) 172, 191. Cf. particularly the sonnet triptych in Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, 73–4.

    Google Scholar 

  115. See Pound: Letters, 25, 140, 141; Translations, 222, 236.

    Google Scholar 

  116. Cf. Selected Prose, 47–8; and Translations, 325.

    Google Scholar 

  117. Ibid., 324: Yeats: ‘Anima Mundi’, Mythologies, 343–66; A Vision (1925) 224– 8; A Vision, 2nd edn, reissued with Yeats’s final revisions (New York, 1966) 223–31; Variorum Plays, 976.

    Google Scholar 

  118. Yeats, Explorations, 330–1; see also 35–6. Pound, Translations, 135 (cf. Cantos, 182, 370, 480); Cantos, 485 (cf. 474, 495, 556); Yeats, Variorum Poems, 350.

    Google Scholar 

  119. Pound, Cantos, 9.

    Google Scholar 

  120. Yeats, Variorum Poems, 270–6, 323–8, 470–4; Pound, Early Poems, 215–22. 121. Yeats, Explorations, 55–6; see also the references to ‘drinking the blood’ in Variorum Plays, 968–9, 976.

    Google Scholar 

  121. See, for example, Explorations, 330–2; ‘The Curse of Cromwell’, Variorum Poems, 580–1; Purgatory, Variorum Plays, 1041–9.

    Google Scholar 

  122. Pound: Guide to Kulchur, 57–8; Cantos, 457.

    Google Scholar 

  123. Cf. Polite Essays (1937) 51.

    Google Scholar 

  124. Cantos, 487.

    Google Scholar 

  125. See ‘Victorian Eclogues’ I and II; ‘Song in the Manner of Housman’; ‘Translations from Heine’; ‘Leviora’ (Early Poems, 156–8, 163–7, 213–14). At the other extreme: ‘Canzon’, stanza i; ‘Canzone: Of Angels’, stanzas iv and v; ‘Sonnet: Chi è questa’, ll. 3–4; ‘Ballatetta’, ‘The House of Splendour’, and ‘The Flame’ (Early Poems, 136, 140–1, 143, 147, 170–1, 171–2).

    Google Scholar 

  126. Early Poems, 167–74.

    Google Scholar 

  127. Nagy has indicated the refutation of Symons in the phrase ‘of days and nights’ in ‘The Flame’; see Poetry of Pound: The Pre-Imagist Stage, 41.

    Google Scholar 

  128. Pound, Early Poems, 215–22; cf. the wry self-consciousness of ‘N. Y.’, ibid., 185.

    Google Scholar 

  129. Ibid., 218.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors
  1. Alan Robinson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 1985 Alan David Robinson

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Robinson, A. (1985). Ezra Pound: the Pre-Imagist Phase. In: Poetry, Painting and Ideas, 1885–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07190-6_6

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation