"Pound and Imagism" is the first part of the third installment of a series that focuses on poetic development in the United States. The second installment is a superficial examination of realism; the first installment is a superficial examination of romanticism.
Preface
One aspect of history fundamental to the comprehension of Western literature is the idea that regardless how novel a cultural development may seem, it is not discontinuous from the aggregate intellectual and artistic achievements that precede it. Even Sigmund Freud's and Albert Einstein's great imaginative leaps must be viewed as a part of the intellectual environment in which their theories were born. Such a sense of continuity leads to two important conclusions. First, a sympathetic understanding of the past permits a more complete appreciation of current achievements. Second, the past, in contrast with being a repository, is the root of an organic process that continuously nourishes present and future achievements. The continuity of Western literature is best illustrated by the way in which writers continue to draw from the past to create original works. To demonstrate the creative continuity, we will attend to Ezra Pound, who is recognizably an imagist, his imagism rooted in and continuous with the achievements of his predecessors.
Historical Background
After 1900 American literary activity increased so that by 1912 another era of literary expression had begun. The numbers of unfamiliar writers, the high level of creativity, the acceptance of unusual forms, and a larger audience more critical than before produced a new national literature. By 1920 the patterns had been set for the literature which followed. The new writers were characterized, like the generation before them, by their aesthetic rebellion and originality, by their emphasis on physical and psychological actuality, by their search for spiritual enlightenment via symbols and myths, and by their concern for human welfare and the advancement of social reforms. The leaders of the literary revolution attacked the fundamental institutions of society to affirm the diginity and value of the individual governed by natural laws and dwarfed by the magnitude of modern events.
The first event, World War I (1914 -- 1918), disrupted the liberal, rational atmosphere in the United States and opposed the idea of progress in Euroope. Because governments needed to mobilize resources and populations, they centralized their power over their citizens. Civil liberties--press, speech, assembly, movement--were restricted for the reason of national security. And governments allotted consumer goods, restricting the economic freedom of their citizens. Although Americans had experienced the extension of governmental authority into their lives, World War I made the federal government more powerful.
The United States' entrance into the war tipped the scales in the Allies' favor. Confronting a seemingly limitless influx of American troops, the Central Powers signed an armistice on 11 November 1918. The peace treaties that ensued attempted to create a sense of nationalism via new borders and states, but disputes over the regions soured relations in eastern Europe for years. Furthermore, many Germans viewed the Treaty of Versailles as unreasonable, especially the high reparations, and sought its revision. President Woodrow Wilson (1913 -- 1921) had realized the treaties contained unwise provisions that could lead to conflicts, so he placed many of his hopes for the future in the League of Nations. To successfully enforce the Treaty, its principal architects needed to be involved in the process of recovery and in the development of a new German state, but the failure of the Senate to ratify the Treaty meant the United States never joined the League. The Senate also rejected Wilson's defensive alliance with Great Britain and France. As a result, Britain withdrew from the League which forced France to deal with Germany independently.
By the end of 1919, peace already seemed precarious. The League was not effective in maintaining harmonious relations because it could use only economic sanctions to restrain aggression. The United States' retreat into isolationism undermined the influence of the League, and France's strong actions against its old enemy only intensified German resentment. Germany, fettered by the Treaty, experienced depression--economic hardship and high unemployment--which led to the ascent of facist leadership in the 1930's.
While European nations tried to recover from the war, the United States experienced economic expansion. Henry Ford's Model T became the symbol of the potential of modern industry. Assembly-line techniques reduced the costs of production, making cars less expensive and more available. The effect of auto production spread to other industries--steel, glass, rubber, petroleum--and state programs to build roads and highways altered the nation's landscape. The automobile industry also pioneered ways to distribute and sell products. Companies sold cars through networks of dealers to customers who frequently used a new type of credit, the installment plan.
Assembly-line production, mass consumption, advertising, and easy credit characterized the nation's economy in the 1920's. As profits soared and incomes rose, business and government resumed their long-term affinity, and Americans' zeal for reform waned. But not all Americans enjoyed the rewards of prosperity. Industrial workers did not profit from increased productivity. Although their wages rose, prices rose faster. And labor unions continually clashed with company unions, which had been established by the employers. The annual income of farmers declined after the army's purchases had ended and European agriculture had revived. Like many other Americans, they became caught in a cycle of credit and comsumption.
For those whose incomes rose, durable goods previously considered luxuries--refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners--became necessities. Although air travel remained the preserve of the wealthy, trains, buses and automobiles made excursions to beaches and resorts more doable. New work patterns, such as the eight-hour day, expanded the amount of free time Americans could spend on leisure activities: reading mass-circulation magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest, and The Ladies' Home Journal; listening to radio programs broadcast by the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS); or watching motion pictures such as The Kid (1921), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The Gold Rush (1925), The General (1926), and The Jazz Singer (1927), which introduced sound to audiences. Fans followed the careers of movie stars in trade magazines. The press also tracked other celebrities, such as the pilot Charles Lindbergh, who completed the first transatlantic flight in 1927, and the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, who epitomized an icon of the 1920's, the flapper.
The flapper embodied many of the charcteristics of the Jazz Age--rebellion, independence, exhibitionism, competitiveness and consumerism. Although a symbol of liberation, the flapper was the ultimate consumer, dependent on a variety of products. Consumerism linked the carefree, adventurous mood of the 1920's with the dominance of corporations and their conservative values.
Many Americans endorsed conservative values in economics and politics, electing Republican Presidents who supported such values. Under Warren G. Harding (1921 -- 1923) and Calvin Coolidge (1923 -- 1929), tariffs reached new highs, income taxes fell for wealthy citizens, and the Supreme Court upset progressive measures, specifically the minimum wage and federal child labor laws. They shared isolationist inclinations in foreign policy, and they advocated pacifist policies. The United States began to limit immigration via the National Origins Act, which Congress enacted in 1924. The Volstead Act of 1919, which enforced the 18th Amendment, prohibited the manufacture and distribution of alcoholic beverages. Crime syndicates entered the liquor business; rival gangs and networks of speakeasies induced a crime wave. By the end of the 1920's, prohibition was discredited, and it was repealed in 1933.
The second event to discourage the individual was the Great Depression. The collapse of the stock market on 24 October 1929 did not cause the Depression; rather, the crash and the depression sprang from the same cause: easy credit. In the 1920's, stock prices climbed to unpresedented heights. Easy credit allowed speculators to buy stock on margin. If the price of the stock increased, the purchaser made money; if the price fell, the purchaser had to find the money elsewhere to pay off the loan. Furthermore, an unequal distribution of income meant that workers and farmers lacked money to purchase outright durable goods. Easy credit left them a debt burden they could not pay.
The effects of the Great Depression were conspicuous. Impoverished individuals, displaying "Hoover flags" (empty pockets) and sleeping in "Hoover blankets" (newspapers), lived in shanties that had appeared suddenly in parks or on the outskirts of town. Those who were lucky to have jobs accepted pay cuts. In the Great Plains, overstrained soil and severe drought created a dust bowl that turned agricultural families into migrant workers. Familial life changed drastically. Unemployed breadwinners experienced psychological depression; housewives struggled to make ends meet; young adults relinquished career plans and sought whatever work that was available. Marriage and birth rates fell, and divorce rates rose.
Under those circumstances Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover in 1932. Roosevelt was a progressive who had supported Woodrow Wilson. Using the United States' experience during World War I as a model, Roosevelt and his advisers pursued a policy of active governmental intervention in the economy, a policy known as the New Deal. The creation of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) was an attempt to restore proseperity by requiring leaders in government, labor and industry to develop regulations for each industry. The Supreme Court, in 1935, ruled the NRA unconstitutional. It was superseded by other efforts, including the establishment of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the passage of the Social Security Act (1935) and the National Labor Relations Act (1935). Although the New Deal provided some reforms that perhaps averted social revolution, it did not solve the unemployment crisis. Only World War II (1939 -- 1945) and the subsequent growth of armament industries brought American workers back to full employment.
The third event began when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933. Soon thereafter Hitler met secretly with Germany's leading generals, revealing to them his desire to create living space in the east. Between 1933 and 1939, Europeans watched as he rebuilt Germany into a military powerhouse. Hitler believed military power was an absolute prerequisite for the creation of a German racial empire that would dominate Europe for generations to come.
The Nazis lost the war but only after tremendous destruction, sacrifices and costs. Much of European civilization, which had dominated the world at the start of the twentieth century, lay in ruins. Europeans now watched at mid-century as two new superpowers created by their two world wars took control of their destinies. Even before the last battles had been fought, the United States and the Soviet Union had arrived at different visions of postwar Europe. Those differences led to a potentially more destructive conflict: the Cold War.
Image
Because image is among the most frequently used and poorly understood terms in poetic theory, it is necessary to recount the term's meaning and use at various points in the history of Western poetics. Image has a minor role in classical rhetorical theory in which relative notions such as figure and trope are the dominant terms. Under the influence of empiricism, English critics in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries deemed image important. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke use the term in their accounts of sensation, perception, memory, imagination and language--developing a theory of consciousness as a system of receiving, storing and retrieving mental pictures. Neoclassical poets used images to control nature by describing and decorating scenes. Reacting to the ornamental images of eighteenth-century poetry, romantic poets regarded images as symbols and the poetic process as an expressive rather than a mimetic endeavor. Modernist poetics combined the neoclassical and romantic concepts of the image. According to Ezra Pound, concrete and sensuous diction creates a matrix of imagery from which meaning emerges.
Though image connotes something seen, a poetic image is a word or sequence of words that refers to any sensory experience. The experience may be visual (sight), auditory (hearing), olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), tactile (touch), kinesthetic (movement), or organic (physiology). Such categories are preliminary to the comprehension of contemporary approaches to imagery, for they define the nature of the materials.
Imagery
The most prevalent figures of speech currently in currency are allegory, metaphor, metonymy, personification, simile and synecdoche. Each is a device through which one thing is said (analogue or vehicle) while something else is meant (subject or tenor). Either the analogue, the subject, or both may involve imagery. The related things may each be images or emotions or concepts; the subject may be an image and the analogue an emotion or concept; the analogue may be an image and the subject an emotion or concept.
Symbolic imagery corresponds to figurative imagery, for one cannot discuss imagery at length without gliding into symbolism. With respect to symbolic imagery, the essential question is how patterns of imagery--whether literal, figurative or both--in a work reveal facts about the poem or the poet. The assumption is that a poet will organize images by reason of their symbolic kinships. The recurrent images of light and dark in Romeo and Juliet, of disease in Hamlet, or of animals in King Lear, though they may not be evident, continually condition the audience's response to the play.
Patterns of imagery may appear within the work itself, among literary works (myth), or in both the work and the myth. It is not beyond reason that a cluster of images in a particular work is in other works. An image is the myth of the individual, and a myth is the image of humanity. In other words, the action of which a poem is symbolic often resembles a larger ritualistic pattern--feasting, initiating, primping, protecting, purifying, returning, et cetera--though the poet may express it in a personal way.
Imagery in poetry, therefore, has the following uses. It may serve as a device for externalizing and making clear the speaker's thoughts and emotions. Imagery may be where the speaker confronts and interacts with an environment or where the environment confronts and interacts with the speaker. It may serve to dispose the audience either favorably or unfavorably toward the various elements in the poem. Imagery may arouse and guide the audience's expectations. And it may serve to direct the audience's attention to symbolism, to the poem's inner meaning(s).
Imagism (1909 -- 1917)
Imagism was a school of poetry that formed around the Bergsonian philosopher T. E. Hulme who founded a club that began to meet regularly in London in 1909. Hulme regarded the language of poetry as visual and concrete and the image as the essence of poetry. The group included Richard Aldington (English), Hilda Doolittle (American), John Gould Fletcher (American), D. H. Lawrence (English), and Ezra Pound (American). They issued manifestos, wrote essays, and created poems that embodied their theories.
Imagism became a movement through the efforts of Pound. He coined imagiste when he suggested revisions to Doolittle's poem "Hermes of the Ways" (1912) and wrote "H. D. Imagiste" at the bottom of the page. In Novemeber 1912 Imagiste appeared in print for the first time when Pound published Hulme's "Complete Poetical Works" (five short poems) as an appendix to his Ripostes. In the March 1913 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, F. S. Flint, quoting an anonymous "imagiste" (Pound), lists these characteristics of the movement: "1. Direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome."1 In the same issue, Pound defines the poetic image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."2 Harriet Monroe included in the April issue of Poetry perhaps the finest of the imagist poems, Pound's "In a Station of the Metro":
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.3
His straightforward presentation renders the poem as an experience, and his verbal economy prevents emotional diffuseness. By breaking the pentameter, Pound creates a rhythmic variety and precision unique to the particular aesthetic presentation.
The climax of the movement was in the spring of 1914, when Pound published an anthology of verse, Des Imagistes, which included poems by Aldington, H. D., Flint, James Joyce, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams. Thereafter Lowell assumed leadership of the movement and published the anthologies Some Imagist Poets (1915, 1916, 1917). Pound repudiated "Amygism," declaring it violated the second imagist principle, and he aligned himself with vorticism. By 1917 Lowell herself felt that the movement had reached its end.
Imagism was a reaction against the abstract and verbose language into which much of the poetry of the nineteenth century had declined. As a movement it paralleled the romantic reaction a century earlier against the conventional diction of neoclassicism. But imagism has more complex associations. Its preoccupation with technique and with surfaces, light and color linked it with impressionism. Another nineteenth-century influence was the French tradition of symbolisme, which the word imagiste echoed. And Pound's concept of presentation recalls Henry James' insistence that a writer should show rather than tell.
The principles of imagism were to some extent a set of instructions to improve the craft of writing, and they influenced the formalist poetics of T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, and I. A. Richards. Recent critics have considered imagism as an attempt to create an individual poem which, unlike a symbolic or allegoric poem, intensifies its objective reality rather than expressing the poet's subjective experience. Regardless, the primary point about the influence of imagism is that it became the basis for modern poetic procedure.
Pound
The early twentieth century was a time of immense industrial expansion in the United States, and many poets found the conditions for creating poetry unfavorable in a culture focused on consumerism. Ezra Pound composed much of his poetry as an expatriate in Europe, which he deemed more conducive to art. Born in Hailey, Idaho, he attended the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study in romance languages. He earned an M.A. in 1906, spent the summer abroad, and returned for a fellowship for another year of study. In 1908 he again went abroad and became a permanent expatriate.
In 1909, in London, Pound joined Hulme's Poet's Club, and he became the polemicist for imagism. By 1912 Pound was the author of seven volumes which identified him as a distinct poetic personality who combined fin-de-siecle aesthetics with astute originality. When Monroe in 1912 issued from Chicago the prospectus for her new magazine, Poetry, Pound proposed himself as its foreign correspondent. He was an unselfish and persistent champion of unknown and experimental artists whom he approved--H. D., Joyce and Eliot, among others. Eliot candidly acknowledged the value of Pound's assistance in the final revision of The Waste Land. Both poets became early leaders in restoring to poetry the use of literary reference as an imaginative instrument. Such figures of speech assume that the poet and audience share a common cultural inheritance. Both Pound and Eliot required of their audience a familiarity with the classics, with the productions of the Italian and English Renaissance, and with genres of continental literature. After The Waste Land (1922), Eliot's poetry became relatively less abstruse, whereas Pound's poetry continued to be recondite.
Pound's search for new poetic techniques led him from imagism to vorticism. Founded by the writer and artist Wyndam Lewis in 1914, the movement was a reaction to the romantic theories of futurism. The stimulus to the formation of vorticism was the publication in The Observer (7 June 1914) of the "Vital English Art Futurist Manifesto," in which the Italian futurist leader Filippo Marinetti claims that certain English avant-garde artists, including Lewis and his colleagues, are essentially affiliates of the Italian futurist movement. Lewis responded with the first issue of Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex (20 June 1914, issued 2 July 1914), in which he blasts and blesses various places, things and people. The vague manifesto--signed by Aldington, Pound, Lewis and eight other artists--contains statements of belief, such as the importance of the primitive in modern art and the superiority of northern culture over southern culture.
Although presented by Lewis as a distinctive national development, vorticism combines the geometrical fragmentation of cubism with futuristic imagery to depict the dynamism of the modern world. The strong structure of cubist paintings impressed him, but Lewis thought they lacked vigor. And he criticized the futurists' emphasis on blurry images to suggest speed. Vorticism attempted to combine the best elements of both movements: the angularities in cubist compositions and the energy in futurist works. Although futurist and vorticist paintings may seem similar, there were important philosophical differences between the movements. Whereas in futurist compositions the machine serves as a melodramatic symbol of the modern world, it is not a central part of vorticist imagery. Lewis regarded the mechanical metropolis as a severe place that dehumanized its dwellers. Thus vorticist works exhibit the impersonal harshness of the twentieth century. Furthermore, because speed did not interest the vorticists, their paintings are quieter than futurist paintings.
Imagistic poems lacked energy, according to Pound, and he coined vorticism to suggest the greater energy of the vorticist image. In the inaugural issue of Blast, he declares that a "vortex is the point of maximum energy."4 To move beyond static representations, vorticist painters must use colors and vorticist poets must use imagery in unique ways, as H. D. does in "Oread":
Whirl up, sea--
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.5
The poem is not a picture but a dynamo. Vorticism's ambition to create form that is still yet moving was paradoxical, and it became central to modern poetics.
Vorticism did not survive the outbreak of World War I. The devastation caused by the war deepened Pound's disillusion with the West, specifically the United States and Great Britain. His bitterness is apparent in the satirical collection Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts (1920), which focuses on the experiences of a poet. It would be easy to equate the speaker to Pound, but the tonal indifference in Mauberley as a whole complicates that equation. However, the first poem--"E. P. Ode Pour L'Election de son Sepulchre" ("E. P. Ode on the Choice of His Tomb")--which frames the collection, is undoubtedly personal.
The ode is a statement of farewell to London. The technique is both traditional (He employs rhythm, capitals, end rhyme, quatrains, and seventeenth-century wit.) and original (He incorporates allusions, bilingualism, free verse, and anaphora.). Pound's primary concern was poetry; he was, in the strictest sense, an aesthetician. In the ode the speaker is reflecting, in third person, on a life devoted to the cultivation of artistic fastidiousness. He no longer is attempting to revive poetry, nor is he observing beauty in the world. The speaker is appraising his microcosm in an effort to determine its significance.
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
In the old sense. Wrong from the start--
No, hardly, but seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait;
[For we know all the things that in Troy]6
Caught in the unstopped ear;
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.
His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe's hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.
Unaffected by "the march of events,"
He passed from men's memory in [the thirty-first year
Of his age]; the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses' diadem.
II
The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;
Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!
The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.
II
The tea-rose tea-grown, etc.
Supplants the mousseline of Cos,
The pianola "replaces"
Sappho's barbitos.
Christ follows Dionysus,
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
Caliban casts out Ariel.
All things are a flowing,
Sage Heracleitus says;
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall outlast our days.
Even the Christian beauty
Defects--after Samothrace;
We see [the beautiful]
Decreed in the market place.
Faun's flesh is not to us,
Nor the saint's vision.
We have the press for wafer;
Franchise for circumcision.
All men, in law, are equals.
Free of Pisistratus,
We choose a knave or an eunuch
To rule over us.
O bright Apollo.
[Which man, which hero, which god,]
What god, man, or hero
Shall I place a tin wreath upon!
IV
These fought in any case,
and some believing,
[for the sake of home], in any case ...
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later ...
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, [for country],
non "dulce" non "et decor" ...
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
ursury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
V
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.7
The irony of the first line progressively builds: "out of key with his time" is delineated throughout the composition via precise rhythms that seem loose. The variations reflect changes in mood and attitude. Similar to the seventeenth-century poets, Pound is simultaneously serious and playful, savage and delicate. For example, the speaker had attempted to civilize the United States ("a half savage country") by exposing it to scholarly poetry, but he had labored to no avail. The reference to Homer ("For we know all the things that in Troy") suggests his romantic addiction to the classics. But thoughout his romantic diversions, the speaker remained true to his art, true to precision as represented by Gustave Flaubert. "He fished by obstinate isles" suggests the speaker's search of beauty in various periods and cultures: classical, Italian, Provencal, Chinese, et cetera. What has been the effect of his devotion to aesthetic discrimination and technical perfection? The speaker concludes that the poet's career yielded "No adjunct to the Muses' diadem."
The first canto is a representative sensibility of a poet who began his journey with Nineties' eagerness, survived the reign of Edward VII (1901 -- 1910), watched his friends disappear in the war, and realizes that the past holds more for him than the future. The second and third cantos introduce the modern world of mass production and despondency, a world that has destroyed traditions and is oppressive. The fourth and fifth cantos impart the impact of the war on decorum. The war disrupts the form of the poem, which symbolizes the deterioration of Western culture.
In "Yeux Glauques" ("Grey Eyes"), the speaker transports the audience to the nineties, to the period of prosperity and peace before the war. The audience can sense the changes in attitude that had become conspicuous in the final decade of the nineteenth century. William Ewart Gladstone and John Ruskin represent Victorian morality; Algernon Charles Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti represent Victorial immorality. In "Siena Mi fe'; Disfecemi Maremma" ("Siena Made Me; Maremma Undid Me"), the speaker introduces Ernest Dowson, a member of The Rhymers' Club founded by W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys. Dowson also was a member of the tragic generation, poets who died prematurely from intemperance. Arnold Bennett offers advice in "Mr. Nixon," the theme of which is success in modern letters. "XII" begins with an allusion. The speaker is imagining elegant patronage, a crown of laurels from a stylish dilettante, Lady Valentine. His preoccupation with aestheticism, of discerning "the elegance of Circe's hair" instead of "the mottoes on sun-dials," gains tragic significance in the first and second cantos of "Mauberley." The economical diction contributes to the impersonal tone, yet the cantos are poignantly personal. The theme of the third canto, "The Age Demanded," is similar to the aforementioned cantos. The artist absorbed in aesthetic contemplation is unfit for survival in the modern world, in Lady Valentine's world.
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is foremost a summary of an artist's life. It also is a representation of modern culture: the absence of direction, the lack of a predominant idiom, the uncongeniality of the modern world to artists, and the poet's dubious status. Mauberley reveals the exhaustion of the romantic tradition; emotional detachment is achieved via technical precision.
After the publication of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound, believing that capitalism marginalized poets, sought countries that he believed were more hospitable and departed for Paris, France, and thence to Rapallo, Italy, where he resumed his life-long epic, The Cantos. Pound's discovery of the work of the American Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa provided the catalyst for The Cantos. He had read Fenollosa's lecture notes on the nature of Chinese pictograms in 1914, had published translations of Chinese poems based on Fenollosa's work as Cathay in 1915, and had edited the notes into an essay which he published in 1920.
In An Essay on the Chinese Written Character, Fenollosa states that the characters of the Chinese alphabet are, in greater or lesser degreee, images or visual representations of the things they signify. Thus the ideogram, or pictogram, for East is a synthesis of the characters, or ideograms, for sun and tree: the sun in the trees. Whereas in Western languages graphemes denote sounds which refer to objects purely by arbitrary convention, in Chinese abstract concepts arise not out of abstract symbols but out of concrete particulars and the immediacy of experience. Fenollosa only contrasted Chinese and Western modes of thought; it remained for Pound to formulate the pictogram as a poetic principle and to develop it into a poetic method.
Pound hoped his ideogrammic method would help modernist poets escape the traps of late-Victorian vagueness, metaphor and sentimentality and avoid the loss of immediacy created by the syntax of discursive, representational speech. The essence of the method is juxtaposition, without conjunctions, of distinct objects or events to evoke a matrix of new meaning. The poet carefully selects and combines separate items so that the audience can organize the elements into a coherent pattern. The ideogrammic method thereby imitates perception itself. And in that respect, it is a mimetic strategy, for ideograms are motivational signs. Futhermore, poets are able to shift from static description, for symbols represent not objects but relations, motion, energy and action. Thus poetry gains an immediacy of presentational form absent in the discursive, descriptive, rationalist nature of Wesern prose.
Pound actually misunderstood part of Fenollosa's observations, and Fenollosa himself misunderstood part of Chinese. Only 10% of its characters are pictographic; the majority of them are phonetic. Nevertheless, Fenollosa's essay was the impetus Pound needed to create a wholly new poetics, arguably a method which became more infuential than any other in the twentieth century.
Pound organized his modern epic not via narrative but via the ideogrammic method. He published The Cantos in segments throughout his life, and the posthumous collection (1972) ends with Canto 120. The ideogrammic method, historical scope, mythological references, and erudite sources of The Cantos demand much from the audience. Despite the massive egotism of the venture, the poem is an impressive effort to resolve oppositional attributes, principles and tendencies: psychologically, reason with instinct, Apollonian control with Dionysian energy, archetypal masculine with archetypal feminine, carnality with spirituality; philosophically, Greek Neoplatonism with Confucianism; economically, governmental regulation with individual freedom; and historically, violence with peace. In the following ideogram from the second canto, the union of the nymph Tyro with the god Poseidon presents a brief realization of the sexual and metaphysical energy inherent in natural and human activity:
And by the beach-run, Tyro,
Twisted arms of the sea-god,
Lithe sinews of water gripping her, cross-hold
And the blue-grey glass of the wave tents them,
Glare azure of water, cold-welter, close cover. (23 -- 27)8
The underlying romantic premises become more explicit in the course of the poem. Pound insists that the individual submit to the Tao and find his/her humble place within nature, that healthy economics extend the Tao into social organization, and that art seek to express such truths.
Final obstacles for the audience include Pound's vehement distrust of capitalism, his anti-Semitism, and his allegiance to social credit. in 1933 he met Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, who praised his poetry. Pound became an active supporter of fascism, promoting it on radio broadcasts to Great Britain and the United States during World War II. When Allied troops occupied Italy near the end of the war, he was imprisoned for weeks in an open-air cage. After Pound was transferred to a medical tent, he wrote the Pisan Cantos (1948), which describes the prison, its environment, and its inhabitants. After the war Pound was taken to Washington, D.C., to be tried for treason. But he was declared legally insane and was committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the criminally insane, where he continued to write and to receive visitors. In 1949 the Pisan Cantos won the first annual Library of Congress Bollingen Award for Poetry. Stongly defended by several prominent writers--including Robert Frost, Archibald MacLeish, and Ernest Hemingway--Pound was released from the hospital in 1958. He returned to Italy and spent his final years in self-imposed literary silence, leaving The Cantos incomplete.
Conclusion
The literary innovations at the turn of the century had been primarily the province of a small group of avant-garde artists and critics. That group expanded in quantity and scope as more artists and critics began to connect intimately those ideas with their environments.
Prior to the United States' entance into the war in 1917, Robert Frost published his first two collections: A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914). Edwin Arlington Robinson ensured his reputation with The Man Against the Sky (1916) and Merlin (1917), the first of his Arthurian poems. And Edna St. Vincent Millay published, in the same year of her college graduation, Renascence and Other Poems (1917). Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg all startled the country with their Midwestern voices and images. On the West Coast, Robinson Jeffers found a suitable subject but not his mature voice in California (1916).
With respect to fiction, its growth in popularity was more congruent with its past. Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome (1911) is a short naturalistic masterpiece that had an immediate effect. The successive appearance of The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The "Genius" (1915) established Theodore Dreiser as the consummate naturalist of his generation. Willa Cather found a congenial subject in the plains of Nebraska (O Pioneers!, 1913) and later in the deserts of the Southwest (Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927). Contemporary moralists regarded David Graham Phillips' posthumous Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917) and James Branch Cabell's Jurgen (1919) as outrageous. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920) closed a decade in which realism tempered with naturalism confirmed the degradation of the individual and prepared the way for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
To most of the artists of the 1920's, the totality and horror of the war and the procedure of mass consumerism were conclusive demonstrations of mechanistic determinism. Considering they were writing during a period of extreme extravagance, political corruption, and social decadence, Gertrude Stein's comment to Hemingway--"You are all a lost generation"--was appropriate. Some of the more important literary manifestations of that mood are Fitgerald's The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and The Great Gatsby (1925) and Millay's The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923), all of which serve as remembrances of the roaring twenties and the age of the flapper. Hemingway used Stein's comment as an epigraph for The Sun Also Rises (1926), which is a depiction of a desperate expatriate society in Europe.
But the "lost generation" was not lost to literature, for they created, between 1919 and 1929, a disproportionate share of the best American literature of the twentieth century. And they responded to their disenchantment in different ways. The writers who had expatriated themselves and resided in the literary colonies of London, Paris or Rome absorbed European aesthetics into their works and promoted those influences at home. Naturally the war was a vital subject. Personal experience animates e. e. cummings' The Enormous Room (1922), in which he combines in different proportions the spiritual, physical and emotional consequences of the war. The Waste Land (1922), a dramatic statement of postwar spiritual and moral collapse, furthered T. S. Eliot's literary status. William Faulkner's first novel, Soldier's Pay (1926), was a false start, but he gained stature with Satoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), and As I Lay Dying (1930). Other novelists focused on the flaws in American society. In Main Street (1920) and Babbit (1922), Sinclair Lewis satirizes small-town mentality and bourgeois success, and in Manhattan Transfer (1925), John Dos Passos explores the somber ends of a materialistic culture.
Sigmund Freud's speculation about unconscious motives and Carl Jung's theory of universal archetypes affected some writers. Robinson's poetic psychological exploration of personality was augmented especially by Eugene O'Neill's dramatic Freudianism. Constantly experimenting with form, he emphasized a content of psychological analysis and symbolic representation of character. Between 1920 and 1928, O'Neill developed his distinctive spiritual symbolism in the plays Beyond the Horizon (1920), The Emperor Jones (1920), Anna Christie (1921), The Hairy Ape (1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), and Strange Interlude (1928). Freudian images are in the poems of Jeffers, beginning with Tamar and Other Poems (1924) and Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems (1925), and Freudianism is in the latter novels of Faulkner, beginning with The Sound and the Fury. In the same Year, 1929, another southerner, Thomas Wolfe, published Look Homeward, Angel, the first in a succession of novels that focus on a spiritually homeless generation's search for a sense of harmony in a world that has become too vast, too complex, and too impersonal.
The revolution in poetry, fiction and drama coincided with a general intellectual expansion that included the vigorous criticism of James G. Huneker, Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, Joel E. Spingarn, H. L. Mencken, and Van Wyck Brooks. Although Mencken had begun his crusade before 1910, he reached the pinnacle of his effectiveness as a satirist after 1924 as editor of The American Mercury. Through the Mercury Mencken continually waged war on popular culture, eloquently attacking the self-appointed defenders of official decency and advocating such supposed immoral authors as Dreiser, Cabell and Anderson.
Economic distress and ideological unrest during the Great Depression prompted a general reappraisal of American values, and many writers discovered the depths of their loyalty to traditional American idealism. Archibald MacLeish returned to the United States, published New Found Land (1930) and Conquistador (1932), and supported President Roosevelt's New Deal. Sandburg, who had been a campaigner for reform with the Social Democrats, wrote affectionately about The People, Yes (1936) and devoted much of his spare time to the completion of Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939). Leftist sympathies emerged in mainstream literature: Dos Passos' trilogy U.S.A. (1930 -- 1936) and Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).
This is the only period in the United States distinguished by a stong presence of proletarian literature. Money lost its glamour except in the escapist worlds of popular fiction and film; serious writers sermonized about the plight of the poor and the isolation of the rich. Many writers, forced to decide between leftist and rightist extremes, chose the left in a time when Marxist propaganda was prevalent. Edward Dahlberg's Bottom Dogs (1929) and Michael Gold's Jews Without Money (1930) served as early models for later proletarian novels about immigrant poverty. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is a record of the unprecedented sufferings of formerly independent farm families, and Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) is a powerful evocation of African-American frustration and anger.
American involvement in World War II was gradual before Pearl Harbor but rapid afterward. Men and women in the armed services, like James Jones and Norman Mailer, or engaged in defense work, like Harriet Arnow, found the material for major works which they published after the end of hostilities. Hemingway, Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, John Hersey, and other established writers served their country as war correspondents. Writers on the home front scripted patriotic movies and topical plays. Eliot's Little Gidding (1942), based on his experience as a block warden during London air raids, provided a capstone to his eminent career. Saul Bellow, who would have an equally eminent career, published his first novel, Dangling Man, in 1944. In it Joseph, the protagonist, who is awaiting his draft notice, asks, "How should a good man live; what might he do?"9 The existential thrust of that "how" is similar to the "why" posed in Little Gidding.
Between 1912 and 1945, American poetry generally became more precise with respect to imagery, more concise with respect to diction, less formal with respect to structure and rhythm, more subtle with respect to symbolism, more dependent on allusions, and more difficult to comprehend. Ezra Pound and the imagists found inspiration in ancient Chinese and Japanese forms, the classics, the troubadour poets, the Italian Renaissance, and the French symbolists. Eliot also found inspiration in philosophy, religion, mysticism and mythology, and he revived interest in the Elizabethan poets and dramatists and the Jacobean metaphysical poets. The intense metaphysical images--the features of which are introspection, realism and irony--although they required the mediation of the intellect for complete comprehension, expanded the symbolic range of poetry, allowing the modernists to represent abstractly the emotional significance of their ideas. The influence of Pound and Eliot's aesthetics was great. Hilda Doolittle, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren to some extent adopted their aesthetics. But not all poets followed Pound or Eliot into the more extreme recesses of their theories and practices. Robinson Jeffers focused on bleakly naturalistic narratives, and Yvor Winters shifted from imagistic free verse to reasonable, formal poetry. And the African-American poets Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen responded to the atmosphere of openness with their own renaissance.
In contrast to romanticism, modernism postulated a disjunction between art and life. One did not reveal meaning; one made meaning. Composition was itself the cognitive act. Command of the medium disclosed the organic form of perception, which was linked not to the operations of nature but to the internal relations of its structure. But imagism and symbolism--the two most influential and persistent strains within modernist poetry--represent different approaches to the organic form of perception. As the romantic synthesis of subject and object through the agency of Spirit became more difficult to maintain, the focus of perception destabilized. Symbolism--originating from Edgar Allan Poe and developing through Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, and Paul Verlaine--became a technique of subtly expressing emotion and mood via turning inward on subjective consciousness and absorbing impressions of the external world. Imagism was an alternative to symbolism. Both are modernist rather than romantic because modernism validates subject (symbolism) and object (imagism) in the authority of the artwork rather than of Spirit. But whereas symbolism involves the evocativeness of metaphor and the imprecision of music, imagism involves a precise delineation of image and a painterly disposition of elements.
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1F. S. Flint, "Imagisme," Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, March 1913, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/1/6#!/20569729/1 (1 April 2014).
2Ezra Pound, "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste," Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, March 1913, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/1/6#!/20569729/2 (1 April 2014).
3Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro," Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, April 1913, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/2/1#!/20569747 (1 April 2014).
4Ezra Pound, "Vortex," Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex, 15 February 2010, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/238700 (1 April 2014).
5Ibid.
6I realize my translations detract from Pound's technique, but my goal is to make the poem easier to comprehend.
7Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1957) 61-64.
8Ibid., 99.
9Saul Bellow, Dangling Man (New York: Meridian, 1964) 39.
