by Ezra Pound
2 ore rotundo: Round or full sound.
3 Casella: Alfredo Casella (1883-1947), Italian composer, pianist, and conductor who became professor of piano at the Liceo of Santa Cecilia, Rome, in 1915 and introduced the music of Ravel and Stravinsky to Italy.
VORTICISM
This essay by Pound, first published in the Fortnightly Review (XCVI [N.S.], 573, September 1, 1914, [461]-471), was reprinted as chapter XI of Gaudier-Brzeska (1916). In it he identifies the characteristics of Vorticism as he traces the origin of the movement via a history of Vorticist art and poetry. For other statements on Vorticism, see Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, ed. Harriet Zinnes (New York: New Directions, 1980), 150-57.
1 Ibycus and Liu Ch’e: Ibycus was a Greek lyric poet and contemporary of Anacreon, who flourished in the sixth century B.C.E. He wrote seven books of lyrics, many of them erotic, and in the Aeolian melic style. Liu Ch’e, also known as the emperor Wu-Ti of the Han Dynasty, was born in 156 B.C.E. and died c. 87 B.C.E. A patron of the arts, he also instituted the study of Confucius as a state religion; the I Ching or Book of Changes was completed during his reign. Pound’s poem entitled “Liu Ch’e,” in the Chinese style, appeared in Des Imagistes (1914) and was reprinted in Lustra (1916-17).
2 Mr. Epstein’s flenites: Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), American-born British sculptor admired by Pound. After studies with Rodin in Paris in 1902, Epstein moved to London in 1905, where he worked in a bold, harsh style, a bronze portrait sculptor and creator of large figures. His expressionistic figure titled Rock-Drill, composed of harsh planes, would become the title and image of Pound’s late volume of The Cantos entitled Section: Rock-Drill (1955). “Flenites” appears to be Pound’s term for the sculpture of intersecting planes and edges Epstein favored. Pound wrote on Epstein in “Affirmations,” published in The New Age (January 21, 1915, 311-12); enlarged and reprinted in GB, 95-102. In “Art Notes,” from 1919, Pound referred to Epstein as “the devastator” (EP and the Visual Arts, 104).
3 Guido Cavalcanti: In Pound’s introduction to The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (1912), he writes, “I believe in an ultimate and absolute rhythm as I believe in an absolute symbol or metaphor” (xxi).
4 Kandinsky: Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was an early abstract painter born in Moscow. His Concerning the Spiritual in Art appeared in English in 1914; Pound refers to it in this essay. He also considered Kandinsky a forerunner of Vorticism.
5 Mr. Wadsworth and Mr. Lewis: Edward Wadsworth (1889-1949) was an English artist whose illustrations and translations from Kandinsky’s Uber das Geistige in der Kunst (Concernng the Spiritual in Art) appeared in BLAST, no. 1. Wadsworth also participated in the June 1915 Vorticist Exhibition. Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was an English painter, novelist, and satirist who met Pound in 1909. He edited BLAST and wrote Tarr (1918), a novel about expatriate Paris before World War I that Pound favored. His series of illustrations, Timon, were challenging, warlike Cubist forms that appeared in BLAST and were admired by Pound.
6 Mr. Etchells: Frederick Etchells (1886-1973), English artist who contributed illustrations to BLAST, nos. 1 and 2, and participated in the June 1915 Vorticist Exhibition.
AFFIRMATIONS ... AS FOR IMAGISME
Number four in a series of eight weekly articles under the heading “Affirmations” appearing in the New Age in 1915. Pound, in this segment, published in New Age (XVI, January 28, 1915, 349-50, reprinted in Selected Prose 1909-1965, ed. William Cookson [London: Faber and Faber, 1978], 344-47), defines Imagism and its link to Vorticism. He reiterates his claim that for poetry to be “good poetry [it] should be at least as well written as good prose,” while developing a theory of image creation and expression.
1 The second article in the series dealt with Vorticism alone.
CHINESE POETRY
This two-part essay published in 1918 in To-day (“Chinese Poetry. I,” To-day, III.14, April 1918, 54-57; “Chinese Poetry. II,” To-day, III.15, May 1918, 93-95) reflects Pound’s new grasp of Chinese poetry and its importance for writers. Following the publication of Cathay in 1915, Pound thought himself something of an expert in Chinese and in this essay he makes the case for the excellence of Chinese writing by concentrating on the work of Li Po, a poet of the eighth century. Pound structures his response on the qualities of Chinese poetry he favors: the Chinese appreciation of complexity, the clarity of their verse (poetry without sentimentality), the presence of mythology, the “gracious simplicity” of the best writing and finally the completeness of Chinese writing in their nature poetry. He also acknowledges the importance of the work of Ernest Fenollosa, which introduced him to this literature.
1 Selwyn Image: Pound met Image (1849-1930) through Elkin Mathews, his London publisher. Appropriately, Image was a painter (mostly of stained glass), an illustrator, and a poet from the 1890s set. He was also a member of the Rhymers’ Club. He published and collected various Christmas carols, many of them contributed to the first edition of the English Carol Book (1913). Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’s middle name, from Pound’s 1920 poem of the same name, might possibly derive from Selwyn Image.
2 “The Jewel-Stairs Grievance”: This is Pound’s version taken from Cathay (1915), where it appears on page 13, the title alternately printed as “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance.”
3 The Dai horse: Pound’s version of this poem, entitled “South-Folk in Cold Country,” appears on page 31 as the final poem of Cathay (1915).
4 “The River-Merchant’s Wife”: Although there are variations in the stanza breaks and punctuation, this is Pound’s version from Cathay (1915), where it appears on pages 11-12.
THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER AS A MEDIUM FOR POETRY
Published first in four installments in The Little Review (VI, September-December 1919, reprinted in Instigations, 1920), the poem’s first separate publication was in 1936, with the subtitle “An Ars Poetica,” published by Stanley Nott in London as part of the “Ideogramic Series Edited by Ezra Pound.” This edition included a foreword by Pound, a brief “Terminal Note,” and an appendix titled “With Some Notes [on Chinese Written Characters] by a Very Ignorant Man.”
This lengthy work, written by the American Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908) and “amended” by Pound, although the words “Edited with notes by” appear just before Pound’s name, is an influential statement of Poundian aesthetics. At the opening of ‘Noh’ or Accomplishment (917), Pound writes that the “life of Ernest Fenollosa was the romance par excellence of modern scholarship. He went to Japan as a professor of economics. He ended as Imperial Commissioner of Arts.” In an introductory note to “The Chinese Written Character,” Pound explains that he has done “little more than remove a few repetitions and shape a few sentences,” but his editorial hand, marked by precise statements and clear sentences, seems everywhere.
In a letter to John Quinn of January 10, 1917, Pound wrote that Fenollosa “anticipated a good deal of what has happened in art (painting and poetry) during the last ten years and his essay is basic for all aesthetics, but I doubt it that will cut much ice” (Selected Letters of EP to Quinn, ed. Materer, 93). Yet, Pound found in Fenollosa an articulation of his own poetics, especially the idea that “poetic thought” crowds “maximum meaning into the single phrase.” The attitude of Fenollosa toward the art of the ideogram and Chinese poetry confirmed and extended many of Pound’s ideas concerning Imagism and the value of the ideogram, which Cathay (1915) demonstrated and which The Cantos would incorporate.
1 Davis, Legge, St. Denys and Giles: Fenollosa/Pound refers here to four early historian-scholars of Chinese literature: Sir John Francis Davis, governor of Hong Kong in the 1840s and author of such titles as The Chinese, A General Description of the Empire (1836), and The Poetry of the Chinese (1870); James Legge, who in the 1850s translated into English Confucian and Taoist texts and became the first professor of Chinese at Oxford, as well as publishing the seven-volume Chinese Classics (2nd ed. rev., 1893-95); Marquis d’Hervey-Saint Denys, who published a va
luable anthology of T’ang poetry in 1852 as well as other volumes; and Herbert Giles, a British consular official in China from 1867 to 1892 and later professor of Chinese at Cambridge. In 1892, he completed the first exhaustive Chinese-English dictionary but is perhaps best known for the Wade-Giles system of Romanizing Mandarin. Among his many books is the History of Chinese Literature (1901).
2 serious literary performance: Pound responded strongly to a similar view concerning the inadequate reception and understanding of poetry in England and America in “The Serious Artist.” See the essay reprinted above.
3 Gray’s line: Fenollosa/Pound refers to the first line of Thomas Gray’s (1716-1771) “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751).
4 Laocoön statue ... Browning’s lines: Pound refers to Laocoön and His Sons, the statue in the Vatican from the first century, discovered in 1506 in Rome. It depicts the Trojan priest Laocoön struggling with sea monsters sent by the gods who favored the Greeks. Laocoön tried to warn the Trojans not to bring in the wooden horse, but to little avail. The two lines of poetry are from the opening stanza of Robert Browning’s (1812-1889) “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845).
5 Skeat: W. W. Skeat (1835-1912), philologist and professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge from 1878 to 1912. Pound likely refers to Skeat’s A Primer of English Etymology (1892). Ten years earlier, Skeat published A Concise Etymological Dictionary of English (1882).
JAMES JOYCE, AT LAST THE NOVEL APPEARS
Pound’s praiseworthy review of A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, to celebrate publication of the first English edition (London: Egoist Press, 1917), appeared in the Egoist IV (February 1917) 21-22, the very month the volume became available. The edition used American sheets because English printers (seven in all) would not accept responsibility for printing it; under British law, printers, as well as publishers, could be prosecuted for printing immoral work. In his remarks, Pound states that clear thinking depends on clear prose and declares a link between good writing and good government: “a nation that cannot write clearly cannot be trusted to govern, nor yet to think.”
1 Quarterly Review: Edited by the conservative G. W. Prothero, the Quarterly Review resisted new movements and authors. When BLAST first appeared, Prothero wrote to Pound saying that he would never publish anything by a contributor to that magazine, although he had previously published Pound’s “Troubadours—Their Sorts and Conditions” (QR, CCXIX, October 1913, 426—40) and in 1914 would publish “The Classical Drama of Japan” (QR, CCI, October 1914, 450-77), which Pound edited from Fenollosa’s manuscript.
2 Landor’s Imaginary Conversations: Walter Savage Landor (1775- 1864) was a poet, classicist, and essayist best known for the informal style of his popular Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824-1829, with a later set in 1853. The conversations—more gentle debates—took place between various historical and literary figures and were known for their successful evocation of personality and often pithy statements, such as “we talk on principle but we act on interest.” They also contained sentiments Pound would recognize, such as “North America may one day be very rich and powerful; she cannot be otherwise: but she will never gratify the imagination as Europe does” (“William Penn and Lord Peter-borough”). Additionally, Pound admired Landor’s critical attitude and his often argumentative nature, which, because of various legal issues, caused him to live in Europe at two different periods of his life (1814-1835; 1858-1864). Landor died in Florence and is buried there.At Stone Cottage, in the winter of 1915-1916, Pound and Yeats, taking turns, read Landor’s nine-volume Imaginary Conversations out loud. Landor, however, had great difficulty at first finding a publisher for his work. Pound published a note on Landor in the Future (11, November 1917, 10-12) and began to imitate his style in a set of “Imaginary Letters” (some of them written by Wyndham Lewis), which began to appear in the Little Review (IV, September 1917, 20-22). These would continue to November 1918. Dickens caricatured Landor as Boythorn in Bleak House (1853); the novelist Ian Sinclair more recently titled his 2001 mystery Landor’s Tower; Or, the Imaginary Conversations and drew on Laridor’s character.
3 E pur si muove: Italian, “but one also moves” or changes.
4 New York City: B. W. Huebsch of New York published the first edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on December 29, 1916. Harriet Shaw Weaver’s Egoist Press purchased 750 sets of sheets for the English publication of the novel, which appeared on February 12, 1917.
PARIS LETTER, MAY 1922, ULYSSES
Pound’s celebration of Ulysses, part of his “Paris Letter” series, appeared in the American journal the Dial (LXXII, June 1922, [623]-639), edited by Scofield Thayer. The purpose of the review was to introduce American readers to a banned but revolutionary book, which Pound calls a “super-novel.” Representative quotes illustrate the power of the prose. Other contributors to the June 1922 issue include Picasso, D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, George Santayana, and Yeats.
1 Bouvard et Pécuchet: Flaubert’s unfinished comic novel of 1881, favored by Pound, who expanded the ideas on Flaubert and Joyce he expressed in “Paris Letter, Ulysses” in “Joyce et Pécuchet” in Mercure de France (CLVI, June 1, 1922, 307-20), written in French. On November 22, 1918, Pound wrote Joyce that he had just reread Bouvard et Pécuchet and that “Bloom certainly does all Flaubert set out to do and does it in one tenth the space” (EP to JJ, ed. Read [New York: New Directions, 1967], 145.)
2 James (H.): Henry James (1843-1916), American novelist; Pound met him in London in February 1912, introduced to him by Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford).
3 Poynton ... In Old Madrid . . . “low back car”: Reference is to Henry James’s novel The Spoils of Poynton (1897), which deals with the possession and loss of antiques and treasures of the great Poynton home. “In Old Madrid” refers to a song in the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses by Henry Trotere; it is also a 1911 film of the same name, directed by Thomas H. Ince. Joyce uses the phrase “Low back car” in the “Eumaeus” section of Ulysses; it refers to a poem of the same name, one version by Samuel Love, another by John McCormick. See Ulysses, ed. H. W. Gabler (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 11.733 and 16.1886, for the two citations. Numbers refer to the episodes and lines.
4 Mr. Young’s once ubiquitous poem: Edward Young (1683-1765), English poet and author of The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742-1745). This ten-thousand-line blank verse poem remained popular throughout the eighteenth century. William Blake illustrated a deluxe edition of the work in 1797. Joyce quotes a line from the poem in the “Ithaca” section of Ulysses at 17.644.
5 the Arbuckle case: Roscoe Conkling Arbuckle (1887-1933), known as “Fatty” Arbuckle, was an American silent-film comedian. In September 1921, Arbuckle and two friends drove to San Francisco and held a party in the Saint Francis Hotel. One of the invited women, Virginia Rappe, became seriously ill and died three days later of peritonitis. The district attorney, however, pursued charges against Arbuckle for raping or attempting to rape the woman. A doctor who conducted the autopsy on Rappe found no evidence that violence played any part in her death. A trial nevertheless proceeded, but although Arbuckle was acquitted (the jury took three minutes to decide “Not guilty”), his career in the movies ended. The sensational event made national and international headlines.
6 Griffith ... “the sincerity of his trousers”: Arthur Griffith (1872- 1922), Irish patriot instrumental in the final achievement of Ireland’s independence in 1921-1922. He was briefly the first president of the Irish Free State. In 1899, he founded the Celtic Literary Society and the United Irishman newspaper. He also organized the Sinn Fein (“We Ourselves”) movement, which agitated for Irish independence and promoted separatist policies c. 1905-1906, and founded a newspaper of that name in 1906. The phrase was also understood to mean “Stand Together.”Molly Bloom uses the phrase “sincerity of his trousers” at 18.1231 of the “Penelope” section of Uly
sses in reference to Arthur Griffith.
7 our present ruler: The Republican Warren G. Harding (1865-1923), twenty-ninth president of the United States, from 1921 to 1923, referred to in the previous paragraph of the essay as “our best dressed Chief Magistrate.” A Democrat, William G. McAdoo, once referred to Harding’s speeches as “an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea.”
Index of Titles and First Lines
1915: February
A Pact
A Song of the Degrees
A touch of cold in the Autumn night—
Above the Dock
Above the quiet dock in mid night
All the while they were talking the new morality
Among the pickled fœtuses and bottled bones
An image of Lethe
Ancient Music
Another’s a half-cracked fellow—John Heydon
At Rochecoart
Autumn
Bah! I have sung women in three cities
Ballad of the Goodly Fere
“Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula,”
Brennbaum
Cino
Come, my songs, let us express our baser passions
Commission
Conversion
Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace
Dido choked up with tears for dead Sichaeus