Introduction to literary scene
He decided to return to Europe in February 1908, arriving by cattle boat in Gibraltar in April with $80 in his pocket. He sent poems to
Harper's Magazine and began writing fiction that he hoped he could sell, and by the summer was in Venice, living over a bakery near the San Vio bridge. In July he self-published his first book of poetry, the 72-page
A Lume Spento (
With Tapers Spent), which sold 100 copies at six cents each. The
London Evening Standard called it "wild and haunting stuff, absolutely poetic, original, imaginative." The title was from Dante's
Purgatoria, and alluded to the death of a friend, the Philadelphia artist William Brooke Smith, who died of consumption in his 20s.
In August he moved to London, where he ended up staying almost continuously for 12 years. He wanted to meet W.B. Yeats, the greatest living poet in Pound's view, and they became close friends, although Yeats was older by 28 years. He had sent Yeats a copy of
A Lume Spento, and Yeats had replied that he found it charming. Pound told William Carlos Williams, a friend from university: "London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy." English poets such as Maurice Hewlett, Rudyard Kipling, and Alfred Lord Tennyson had made a particular kind of Victorian verse...stirring, pompous, and propagandistic...popular with the public. James Knapp cites an example from Tennyson: "And here the singer for his art/Not all in vain may plead/'The song that nerves a nation's heart/Is in itself a deed.'" Knapp writes that Pound wanted to focus on the individual experience, the particular, the concrete, and rejected the idea of poetry as versified moral essay.
Arriving in the city with ?3 (today ?}}), he rented a room at 8 Duchess Street in the West End. When he found it too expensive he moved briefly to Islington in the north, then when his family sent more money...another ?4...it was back to the West End and a room a penny bus-ride from the British Museum at 48 Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street. The house (see right) sat across an alley from the Yorkshire Grey pub, which made an appearance decades later in the
Pisan Cantos, "concerning the landlady's
doings/with a lodger unnamed/az waz near Gt Titchfield St. next door to the pub". He persuaded the bookseller Elkin Mathews...publisher of Yeats's
Wind Among the Reeds and the
Book of the Rhymer's Club...to display
A Lume Spento, and by October he was being discussed around town. In December he published a second collection,
A Quinzaine for This Yule, and after the death of a lecturer at the Regent Street Polytechnic, he managed to acquire a position lecturing in the evenings on "The Development of Literature in Southern Europe". He would spend his mornings in the British Museum Reading Room, followed by lunch at the Vienna Café on Oxford Street. Ford Madox Ford described him, apparently more in connotation than denotation, 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."
Meeting Dorothy Shakespeare
He met the novelist Olivia Shakespear...Yeats's former lover and the subject of his
The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love...at a literary salon in February 1909, and was introduced to Dorothy, Olivia's daughter, who became his wife in 1914. The critic Iris Barry described Dorothy as carrying herself with the air of a young Victorian lady out skating. She lived with her mother, spending her days reading and doing needlework while she waited for a potential suitor. She was enthralled by Ezra, writing in her diary on 16 February:
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Listen to it...Ezra! Ezra! And a third time...Ezra! He has a wonderful, beautiful face, a high forehead, prominent over the eyes; a long delicate nose, with little, red, nostrils; a strange mouth, never still & quite elusive; a square chin, slightly cleft in the middle...the whole face pale; the eyes grey-blue; the hair golden-brown, and curling in soft wavy crinkles. Large hands, with long, well-shaped fingers and beautiful nails.
The Shakespears were among a number of women who effectively became Pound's patrons. Through them he was introduced to Yeats, the artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, and the rest of London's literary circle. Another patron was the American heiress Margaret Cravens, who after knowing him for just one or two days offered him such a large amount of money that he was able to focus entirely on completing
The Spirit of Romance (1910), based on his notes from the evening lectures. Cravens killed herself in 1912, probably because the pianist Walter Rummel, long the object of her affection, had married someone else, but possibly also because she learned of Pound's engagement to Dorothy, an engagement so unofficial that over the next few years Dorothy became increasingly angry about it. She had to abide by social convention, while Pound was free to roam, befriending and often bedding any woman he wanted.
Personae, Imagism, Ripostes
In June 1909 another collection,
Personae, was published by Matthews. Several of the poems were from
A Lume Spento, with 17 new ones, and it was his first publication to have any commercial success. It was reviewed by
The Daily Telegraph,
The Evening Standard,
The Observer and the
Times Literary Supplement, among others; they said it was full of passion, magic, inspiration and "undoubtable promise." Rupert Brooke gave a negative review in
The Cambridge Review. Pound had great talent, Brooke said, but had fallen under the influence of Walt Whitman by writing in "unmetrical sprawling lengths."
In September another 27 poems appeared as
Exultations, and around the same time he moved into new rooms at Church Walk, off Kensington High Street, where he lived most of the time until 1914, and where he said the "Imagisme" movement was born in 1912. In June 1910 he returned for eight months to the United States, in part to try to persuade the New York Public Library, then being built, to change its design;
The New York Times wrote that he went almost daily to the architects' offices to shout at them. Walter Rummel, whom he had met the previous spring, arrived for a visit and invited him to Paris for a collaboration on setting troubadour poetry to music. He began work on translating Cavalcanti and Daniel, but he was unhappy in New York. His essays about America were written during this period, and became the book
Patria Mia, which remained unpublished until 1950. On 22 February 1911 he sailed from New York on the
R.M.S. Mauretania, arriving in Southampton six days later. He did not return to the United States for 28 years.
After a few days in London, he visited Paris again, where he worked on a new collection of poetry,
Canzoni (1911), panned by the
Westminster Gazette as a "medley of pretension." Through the project with Rummel he developed a greater interest in music, and began to focus on the role of rhythm and pitch in poetry. After returning to London in August 1911 he began work on the collection that became
Ripostes, and A. R. Orage, the editor of the socialist journal
The New Age, hired him to write a weekly column. Hilda Doolittle arrived in London, and Pound introduced her to the poet Richard Aldington, whom she married in 1913. The three of them lived in Church Walk, and worked daily in the British Museum Reading Room, where in the tearoom one afternoon they decided to start a movement, "Imagisme". The aim was to fight the Victorian use of abstraction, romanticism, symbolism, rhetoric, the inversion of word order, and the over-use of adjectives. One contemporary said: "The concrete image, unruled by an adjective, was a thing [Pound] would have died for. Rhetoric was a thing he would gladly have murdered."
Imagisme, as they defined it, must adhere to three tenets:
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 the sequence of a metronome.
An example of the style is Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" (1913). "I got out of a train at, I think, La Concorde," he wrote, "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." The poem reads in its entirety:
It is in
Ripostes (1912) that Pound's poetry moved toward more contemporary language. The collection includes his translation of the eighth-century Old English poem "The Seafarer", which apparently upset scholars, as did his translations from Latin, Italian, French, and Chinese, either because of errors or because he lacked familiarity with the cultural context. Lionel Kelly writes that Pound produced a modern version of "The Seafarer" by recreating the sound of the words and the pattern of the rhythm, and that his translation practices were innovative and important. His translation from the Italian of
Sonnets and ballate of Guido Cavalcanti was also published in 1912.
He was hired in August 1912 by Harriet Monroe as a regular contributor to
Poetry and within months submitted poems by himself, H.D, Aldington, Yeats, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce. The Imagist movement began to attract attention from critics. In 1913 Pound collected poems for the 64-page
Des Imagistes, an anthology of
Imagisme poets, published in February 1914, which included Joyce's "I Hear an Army Charging Upon the Land." Of great importance was Pound's work on Ernest Fenollosa's papers, given to him to organize by Fenollosa's widow. Fenollosa, an American professor who had taught in Japan, had started translations of Japanese poetry and Noh plays, with which Pound became fascinated. Eventually Pound used Fenollosa's work as a starting point for what he called the ideogrammic method.
In November 1913 Yeats took Pound to stay with him in rooms he rented in Stone Cottage in Coleman's Hatch, Sussex, the first of three winters he spent there with Yeats, including one winter with Dorothy after they married. Pound was to act as his secretary and to read to him...Yeats's eyesight was failing...and they stayed there for 10 weeks, reading and writing, walking in the woods, and fencing for exercise. Yeats was interested in the occult, and he had Pound read him stories about ghosts. "He will be quite sensible," Pound told a friend, "till some question of ghosts or occultism comes up, then ... quality of mind goes."
Marriage, BLAST
Pound married Dorothy on 20 April 1914, despite some opposition from her parents who were concerned about his lack of income. He was dependent on his earnings from literary magazines, particularly
Poetry,
The New Freewoman, and
The Egoist, and was probably earning considerably less than £300 a year. Dorothy's income was £50 of her own, and £150 from her family. Her parents eventually agreed to the marriage, perhaps out of fear that Dorothy was getting older and no other suitor was in sight. Pound's concession to marry in church helped, though it came only after a frank exchange of views with Dorothy's father, Henry. "I would no more give up my faith in Christ than I should give up my faith in Helios or my respect for the teachings of Confucius," he wrote to Henry, "but I think this superficial conformity, an act which would amount, practically, to an outrageous lie at what should be one of [the] most serious moments of a man's life, interferes." Afterwards he and Dorothy moved into a room with no bathroom at 5 Holland Place Chambers, near Church Walk, with the newly wed Hilda and Richard Aldington in the flat next door.
Pound began writing for Wyndham Lewis's literary magazine
BLAST, the first issue of which appeared in June 1914. An advertisment in
The Egoist said it would discuss "Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and all Vital Forms of Modern Art." Pound took the opportunity to extend the definition of Imagisme to art, naming it Vorticism: "The image is a radiant node or cluster; it is ... a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing." When in reaction to the magazine, Lascelles Abercrombie called for the rejection of Imagism and a return to the traditionalism of William Wordsworth, Pound challenged him to a duel on the basis that, "Stupidity carried beyond a certain point becomes a public menace." Abercrombie suggested as their choice of weapon unsold copies of their own books. The publication of
BLAST was celebrated at a dinner attended by New England poet Amy Lowell, who came to London to meet the Imagists, but Hilda and Richard were already moving away from Pound's understanding of the movement, as he moved closer to Wyndham Lewis's ideas. When Lowell agreed to finance an anthology of Imagist poets, Pound's work was not included. He began to call Imagisme "Amygism," and in July 1914 declared it dead, asking only that the term be preserved, although Lowell eventually Anglicized it.
First World War
Between 1914 and 1916 he helped to have James Joyce's
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man serialized in
The Egoist then published in book form, and he persuaded
Poetry to published T.S. Eliot's
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in June 1915. Conrad Aiken writes that he had shown
Prufrock to every conceivable editor in England, but it was dismissed as crazy. He eventually sent it to Pound who, Aiken writes, instantly saw that it was a work of genius and sent it to Harriet Monroe of
Poetry. "[Eliot] has actually trained himself AND modernized himself ON HIS OWN," Pound wrote to Monroe in October 1914. "The rest of the promising young have done one or the other but never both. Most of the swine have done neither. It is such a comfort to meet a man and not have to tell him to wash his face, wipe his feet, and remember the date (1914) on the calendar."
In 1915 Pound published
Cathay, a collection of translated Chinese poems gathered by Ernest Fenollosa. That he saw himself as an outsider is evident from his remarks on the last page: "There are also other poems... But if I give them ... it is quite certain that the personal hatred by which I am held by many, and the
invidia which is directed against me because I have dared openly to declare my belief in certain young artists, will be brought to bear on the flaws of such translation ... Therefore I give only these unquestionable poems".
It was in the summer of 1915 that he began to speak of working on his long poem. He told a friend in August: "It is a huge, I was going to say, gamble, but shan't," and in September told another that it was a "cryselephantine poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the next four decades unless it becomes a bore." About a year later, he had the form of the first three attempts at Canto I, which he sent to Alice Henderson at
Poetry in January 1917 but continued to work on into 1919.
He was devastated when Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in the trenches in June 1915, and the next year he published
Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, with letters, illustrations and photographs, establishing the sculptor's reputation. Publication of
Lustra was stopped in 1917 when the editor Elkin Mathews objected to the tone, writing that it was "unsuitable for the innocent Young Person and the right-thinking Family". Pound refused any suggested revisions, and the volume was published as a private edition that June.
He was now a regular contributor to three literary magazines. From 1917 he wrote music reviews for
The New Age under the pen name William Atheling, and weekly pieces for
The Little Review and
The Egoist. The topics were varied: he wanted better education in the United States, he began to write about economics, discovered and reviewed a French folk singer, and continued to translate Arnaut. The volume of writing exhausted him, and he began to believe he was wasting his time with prose. He blamed American provincialism when the Comstock Laws...which made it illegal to send obscene material through the mail...were applied to
The Little Review, suppressing the October 1917 issue, and again applied to stop the serialization of Joyce's
Ulysses. In September 1917 T.E. Hulme was killed by shell fire in Flanders. In 1918, the Arnaut manuscript was lost at sea, and Pound became sick, presumably with the Spanish influenza. When the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, he wandered among the crowds in Piccadilly, standing just two feet away from the King at one point, listening to the singing, and thinking, "the sense of rhythm is not dead in this island."
Disillusionment with England
The war shattered Pound's belief in modern western civilization to the extent that he came to believe that art had not survived the war. Hulme and Gaudier had been killed and Lewis severely wounded. Pound saw the Vorticist movement was finished and doubted his own future as a poet. In 1919 he collected and published his essays for
The Little Review into a volume called
Instigations, and published "Homage to Sextus Propertius" in
Poetry. "Homage" is considered an example of modernism rather than strict translation; Moody describes it as "the refraction of an ancient poet through a modern intelligence". When Harriet Monroe, editor of
Poetry, was told by a professor of Latin that Pound was "incredibly ignorant of Latin", she decided to publish only the "more decorous parts". Outraged, Pound ended his association with her. His separation from
Poetry signaled the culmination of the decline in his reputation, which had been damaged by the lack of compromise during the publication of
Lustra, and was damaged again when
The Little Review lost readership when he failed to find new interesting writers. By 1919, to his surprise, he found himself unemployed.
A summer trip to France with Dorothy confirmed his disillusionment. He returned to England to a meager income. He had only the
New Age to write for, with other magazines ignoring his submissions or not reviewing his work. During the fall of 1919 and the early winter of 1920 he earned money through a series of articles for
The New Age, attacking what he saw as the three enemies of artistic enlightenment: nationalism, capitalism and organized religion. It was in the
New Age offices around this time that he first met Major C. H. Douglas, from whom he learned about social credit, a halfway house between capitalism and socialism, an idea in which he became increasingly interested. His poem
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)...about a poet whose life, like Pound's, has become sterile and meaningless...marked a farewell to his involvement in the London literary scene. He was disgusted by the lives lost during the war, and could not reconcile himself with it: "There died a myriad/And of the best, among them/For an old bitch gone in the teeth/For a botched civilisation".
During the war he had financially supported Joyce while the latter finished
Ulysses, and in June 1920 he convinced Joyce, who was living in poverty and considering returning to Ireland, to join him in France. Pound gave him a suit and traveled with him to Paris, where he provided introductions and rented lodgings for the family. Six months later he and Dorothy also moved to Paris. A. R. Orage wrote in the January 1921 issue of
The New Age:
... Mr. Pound has shaken the dust of London from his feet with not too emphatic a gesture of disgust, but, at least, without gratitude to this country. Mr. Pound has been an exhilarating influence for culture in England: he has left his mark upon more than one of the arts, upon literature, music, poetry and sculpture ... With all this, however, Mr. Pound, like so many others who have striven for advancement of intelligence and culture in England, has made more enemies than friends, and far more powerful enemies than friends. Much of the Press has been deliberately closed by cabal to him; his books have for some time been ignored or written down; and he himself has been compelled to live on much less than would support a navvy. His fate, as I have said, is not unusual ... by and large England hates men of culture until they are dead.