Abstract
In the previous chapter I examined the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of Pound’s desired Renaissance. In considering the practical aspects of this, his first attempt to realise an ideal forma of civilisation, I now wish to offer a new interpretation of the external history of Vorticism.
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Notes
For details see my D Phil thesis, ‘The Transition from Symbolism to Imagism, 1885–1914’ (Oxford, 1982) 303–5; and Cyrena N. Pondrom (ed.), ‘Selected Letters from H.D. to F. S. Flint: a Commentary on the Imagist Period’, Contemporary Literature, 10 (Autumn 1969) 557–86.
See Pound, Literary Essays, 8–12. On the article’s data see Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound, 137.
See Hilda Doolittle, End to Torment: A Memoϊr of Ezra Pound, ed. Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King (New York, 1979) 18; also Richard Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake (1968), 122.
Pound, Literary Essays, 3.
Pound, Letters, 10.
‘Notes and Announcements’ for Nov 1913, quoted in Stock, Life of Pound, 157; Pound, ‘Status rerum’, Poetry, I (Jan 1913) 126; Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake, 123.
Pound, Letters, 18. In ‘Documents on Imagism from the Papers of F. S. Flint’, Review, XV (Apr 1965) 36–8, Christopher Middleton reprints the original draft for the interview with Pound’s MS amendations. Peter Jones, in Imagist Poetry (Harmondsworth, 1972) 129–34, conveniently reprints the finished article.
ALI to Flint postmarked 20 Jan 1913, ALI to Flint postmarked 23 Jan 1913, in HRC, Texas.
Glenn Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists (1931; repr. New York, 1960) 35–6; S. Foster Damon, Amy Lowell: A Chrònicle (Boston, Mass., and New York, 1935) 208; Stanley K. Coffman, Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetty (1951; repr. New York, 1972), 16–17.
Letters, 213; Literary Essays, 80. Aldington, ALS to Flint 12 Sep 1913; Robert Frost, ALS to Flint 17 June 1913; both in HRC, Texas.
See J. G. Fletcher, Life is my Song (New York and Toronto, 1937) 62–3.
Pound: ‘Peals of Iron’, Poetry, III (Dec 1913) 112–13; Letters, 22; ‘In Metre’, New Freewoman, I (15 Sep 1913) 131–2.
Stock, Life of Pound, 173. This poem is presumably the one now printed as ‘The Death of the Hired Man’.
See Charles Norman, Ezra Pound (New York, 1960) 110–11; Damon, Amy Lowell, 209–16; Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists, 130–1. Fletcher’s account for public consumption, presenting himself more genially, is in Life is my Song, 80–2.
See Pound/Joyce, 18–19. Cf. Pound, Letters, 129–30, advising Margaret Anderson to make use of Lowell’s capital.
Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake, 124.
See Stock, Life of Pound, 182; and Pound, Letters, 27.
Pound, ‘A Letter from London’, Little Review, III (Apr 1916) 8.
Patria Mia, 31, 34–5. (The ‘Patria Mia’ articles and ‘America: Chances and Remedies’ series were written by Pound early in 1911 shortly after his return from an extended visit to America. The book version often differs substantially from these. Where there is no difference I have referred to the book version; where the book omits significant passages or alters important readings, I have referred to the original articles.) See also ‘Patria Mia, XI’, New Age, XII (14 Nov 1912) 34; ‘To Whistler, American’ (1912), in Shorter Poems, 251; ‘Letters from Ezra Pound’, Little Review, IV (Oct 1917) 38.
For the primary sense see Selected Prose, 386. The quotation is from ‘Through Alien Eyes, III’ New Age, XII (30 Jan 1913) 300. Cf. Letters, 28; Gaudier-Brzeska, 117; ‘Pastiche. The Regional. II’, New Age, XXV (26 June 1919) 156.
See Letters, 7, 8, 25; Literary Essays, 214; Selected Prose, 169–73.
‘Patria Mia, I’, New Age, XI (5 Sep 1912) 445. Cf. Patria Mia, 14, 16–17, with J. A. McN. Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 2nd, enlarged edn (1892; repr. New York, 1967) 144. Pound had alluded to this passage in 1910 in The Spirit of Romance, 154.
See ‘Affirmations… I. Arnold Dolmetsch’, New Age, XVI (7 Jan 1915) 247; ‘Pastiche. The Regional. II’, New Age, XXV (26 June 1919) 156; ‘On Criticism in General’, Criterion, I (Jan 1923) 143.
Quotation from Literary Essays, 220. Cf. Gaudier-Brzeska, 113; ‘To a City Sending Him Advertisements’, Early Poems, 287–8 and Literary Essays, 222; ‘America: Chances and Remedies… V’, New Age, XIII (29 May 1913) 115–16.
Literary Essays, 224–5.
‘Patria Mia, VII’, New Age, XI (17 Oct 1912) 587–8, repr. as Patria Mia, 50–3 (emphasis added); ‘America: Chances and Remedies… V. Proposition III —The College of the Arts’, New Age, XIII (29 May 1913) 115–16; Patria Mia, 70–3 (quotation from 73). cf. Literary Essays, 221–6.
See Pound/Joyce, 38–40; and Letters, 172–6, 182.
Cf. the crucial article ‘Murder by Capital’ (1933), repr. in Selected Prose, 197–202; Letters, 239; Guide to Kulchur, 62.
Selected Prose, 200–1.
Ford Madox Ford, Preface to Collected Poems (1914) 24–5. Cf. Pound: ‘This Hulme Business’, repr. in Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) 308; Selected Prose, 433; Letters, 296.
On this publishers’ conspiracy against genius see Pound/Joyce, 247, and ‘Obstructivity’, The Apple, I (1920) 168, 170, 172. For the Futurists and Storer see Ch. 5.
See Pound’s remarks on John Quinn’s purchase of work by living artists (Gaudier-Brzeska, 64) and letters to Quinn (particularly Letters, 51–4) and Simon Guggenheim (ibid., 196–7).
On Robert Frost see Literary Essays, 382, 384–5. For Upward see Selected Prose, 377–82; Letters, 22–3, 25; Literary Essays, 372. Michael Sheldon, ‘Allen Upward: Some Biographical Notes’, Agenda, XVI. 3–4 (Autumn–Winter 1978– 9) 108–21, provides a useful and suggestive summary of Upward’s varied career and curious inability to capture public attention. See also Kenneth Cox, ‘Allen Upward’, ibid., 87–107.
On Epstein see particularly Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 95–6, 100–1. In a letter of November 1913 Pound termed Epstein ‘a great sculptor’ (Letters, 26). On Gaudier see Gaudier-Brzeska, 44–5, 47–50, 109, 141; and Letters, 27. Chronology established from Jacob Epstein, Epstein. An Autobiography, 2nd edn (1963) 56; and Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age (London, Berkeley, Calif., and Los Angeles, 1976), 179–83. Cf. also Letters, 36 (Apr 1914) on a writer and his family near starvation after attempting to run a magazine. A letter written by Gaudier in January 1913 gives a vivid idea of his penury; see H. S. Ede, Savage Messiah (1931) 225.
See Yeats: Variorum Poems, 818–20; and Uncollected Prose, II, 408–10.
See Yeats: Memoirs, 215; and Autobiographies, 518.
Pound, ‘Affirmations… II. Vorticism’, New Age, XVI (14 Jan 1915) 277; ‘Affirmations… VII. The Non-existence of Ireland’, New Age, XVI (25 Feb 1915) 451–3; ‘The Rest’, Shorter Poems, 101–2. Cf. Yeats, Variorum Poems, 287–8. ‘Coole Park, 1929’ and ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’ (ibid., 488–92) lend superb expression to the notion shared by Yeats and Pound of a ‘vortex’ on the Italian Renaissance model, here concentrated by the presiding energy of Lady Gregory. Cf. Pound’s comment in 1918 that the secret of quattrocento aristocracy and hence the whole force of the Renaissance was ‘the personaliy of its selection.’ (Literary Essays, 319; emphasis added).
For the background see William C. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Manchester, 1972), 58–72; and Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art, 85–101, 146–61. Although Marinetti did appear there and Ford and Pound deliver lectures (the latter a version of ‘Vorticism’ published in the Fortnightly Review, Sep 1914) and some ‘workshop’ items were displayed at the Allied Artists’ Association exhibition in June, the art-school never materialised. The most comprehensive account of the Omega Workshops feud is in Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London and Henley, 1980) 39–48.
For dating see Wees, Vorticism and the English Arant-Garde, 161–3.
See Pound, ‘Preliminary Announcement of the College of Arts’, Egoist, I (2 Nov 1914) 413–14.
Pound, ALS to Flint, datable only from attached envelope postmarked 25 Mar 1914, in HRC, Texas. On the ‘germanic’ system, see supra, p. 188; and ‘The Logical Conclusion’, Early Poems, 274. On these lectures see also Fletcher, Life is my Song, 136, 137. The identity between Pound’s aspirations in spring and autumn 1914 is confirmed by an APCS (postmarked 23 Sep 1914, in HRC, Texas) to Flint requesting him, as he had in March, to give lectures on Contemporary French Poetry.
For a detailed examination of the Pound-Flint relationship see my D Phil thesis, ‘The Transition from Symbolism to Imagism’, 305–10, 313–22; and Middleton, ‘Documents on Imagism’, Review, XV, 33–51.
References to Arundell [sic] del Re, ‘Georgian Reminiscences’, University of Tokyo Studies in English Literature, XIV (1934) 33; Pound/Joyce,19–20; EP to LU, ed. J. A. Robbins (Bloomington, Ind., 1963) 11.
See Pound, Letters, 31–4; and Coffman, Imagism, 17.
Richard Sieburth, Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1978) 20 (who, however, does not make any of my points) referring to Paige TS no. 323, 25 Mar 1914. On Pound’s attempt in 1915, with John Quinn’s finance, to take over the Academy, and in 1915–17 to establish a new international fortnightly or to infiltrate established magazines editorially, see B. L. Reid, The Man from New York (New York, 1968) 223–5, 248–9, 284–6.
Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, 127–30. See Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton, NJ, 1976) 49–51, for an equally unsatisfactory explanation.
Pound: ‘The New Sculpture’, Egoist, I (16 Feb 1914) 67–8; ‘Wyndham Lewis’, Egoist, I (15 June 1914) 233–4.
Selected Prose, 386.
On Tarr see Literary Essays, 428–9. On Ulysses see Literary Essays, 416; Guide to Kulchur, 96; Pound/Joyce, 145. On Yeats see ‘The Later Yeats’ (May 1914), repr. in Literary Essays, 378–81; ‘Mr Yeats’ New Book’, Poetry, IX (Dec 1916) 150–1.
See Yeats, Variorum Poems, 262, 289–90, 291. Cf. Pound: Early Poems, 284; Letters, 178; ‘On Criticism in General’, Criterion, I (1923) 144.
Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings 1913–1956, ed. Walter Michel and C. J. Fox (1969) 25. The title page of Blast states incorrectly ‘20 June 1914’.
See Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937; repr. 1961), 32–6.
Lewis quoted in Douglas Goldring, South Lodge (1943) 65. See Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, 165.
See William C. Wees, ‘Ezra Pound as a Vorticist’, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VI (1965) 56–72 (see particularly 57–67; the quotations here are from 57 and 59); William C. Lipke and Bernard W. Rozran, ‘Ezra Pound and Vorticism: A Polite Blast’, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VII (1966) 201–10.
Richard Aldington, ‘Blast’, Egoist, I (15 July 1914) 273. Nevertheless Aldington signed the manifesto, and Lewis had intended to append Flint’s name also, but with characteristic inefficiency forgot to ask permission in time. Lewis apparently intended to include some material by Flint in Blast, II; there was accordingly no straight-forward break with Imagism. (Aldington, TLS to Flint 4 July 1914, HRC, Texas.)
See Goldring, South Lodge, 67–8.
Quoted by Geoffrey Wagner, ‘Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticist Aesthetic’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XIII (1954–5) 17.
See Fletcher, Life is my Song, 146–7, 148–9.
See Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake, 127; Damon, Amy Lowell, 237–40; Coffman, Imagism, 21–3; Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists, 36–7.
See Amy Lowell, ALS to Flint, 18 Aug 1914, in HRC, Texas.
Pound, Letters, 50. For a wholly partisan account from Pound’s viewpoint see Kenner, The Pound Era, 291–2.
Cf. Yeats, ‘Blood and the Moon’, Variorum Poems, 482.
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© 1985 Alan David Robinson
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Robinson, A. (1985). The London Vortex: Pound’s Renaissance Forma . In: Poetry, Painting and Ideas, 1885–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07190-6_7
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