William Skaff

[In the following essay, Skaff focuses on the importance of metaphor and the unconscious in the poetic theories advanced by Ezra Pound and the Surrealists.]

SOURCE: "Pound's Imagism and the Surreal," in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 12, July, 1985, pp. 185-210.

I

In an essay of 1937, "D'Artagnan Twenty Years After," in which Ezra Pound reminisces of the few years when Imagism came to maturity, soon to be subsumed by Vorticism, two topics continually recur: Surrealism and metaphor. Since Blast, 1914, and in particular, The Little Review, 1917/19, Pound finds "very little news intervening between that date and the present on the literary frontier." He then mentions what might possibly have been considered innovative: "1923 winter of the same periodical showed a fair list of surrealists with all the subsequent features of that little coterie."¹ But Pound proceeds to assert that the Surrealist program was not new: "so unmoving was the air in the French parlour and dining room that Aragon's generation doesn't yet know that at given date the French were missing a train already gone from the Ormond St. and Kensington junction,"² an imaginary depot that represents the collaboration of Pound and the activities of the Rebel Art Centre.³ That "train" left in the year in which Pound codified the Imagist movement: "by 1912 it was established, at least in Ormond St.… "⁴ With a characteristic boldness Pound is implying, in fact, that the principles of Imagism are so similar to those of Surrealism that the former should be considered not the precursor, but the founder of the aesthetic mode that we usually associate with the latter: "I should reiterate the sentence on a great deal of Paris being chronologically later than the London of 1914, … and so far as I can make out from incipient London 1936-37 there is ten years of time lag still in your city."⁵ Ten years after 1914 is 1924, the year in which the first "Manifesto of Surrealism" appeared.

Significantly, not only is Surrealism on Pound's mind in relation to Imagism, but also metaphor itself in relation to both movements, as Pound resorts to what had become by that time a customary allusion: "Aristotle spoke the true word about metaphor, the apt use whereof is the true hall-mark of genius; … the writer's blood test is his swift contraposition of objects."⁶ That the surreal could exist before 1924 is not surprising when we note that the definition of the Surreal image that Andrö Breton provides in the "Manifesto" is a prophetic quotation from Pierre Reverdy that was originally published in 1918 and that, incidentally, specifies the metaphoric: "the image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be—the greater its emotional power and poetic reality."⁷

Pound gave further indication in 1930 in "Epstein, Belgion and Meaning" of the relationship between Surrealism and the concerns, in addition to metaphor, of the early formative period of his poetic: "anyone who has for a quarter of a century held to an admiration for thirteenth-century poetry and fifteenth-century painting has very little difficulty in adjusting himself to surrealism"; and we observe that Pound is using the term generically, not historically: "surrealism that comes after a period of aesthetic purism." The variety of mysticism in Provençal and Tuscan poetry, especially Cavalcanti, through which Pound viewed his own profoundest psychic experiences he finds present in Surrealist verse: "one could, I think, consider Guido [Cavalcanti] surrealist, in a sense that Bertrand de Born was not." Mysticism is then associated with the unconscious mind: "the mystics have always annoyed the enchaired professors. There is no reason why MM. Breton, Péret, Aragon should have their sub-consciousness decorated with the universe of Avicenna." Pound continues to relate the surreal and the mystic with a favorite allusion: "the surrealists are making a fresh start with a hitherto undigested content. 'I saw three angels,' wrote Swedenborg, 'they had hats on their heads.'"⁸ Breton will quote this same statement as Swedenborg's an example of the Surreal.⁹ Significantly, the topic of Surrealism itself reminds Pound of the relationship between poetry and science as well, a theoretical correspondence also present since The Spirit of Romance. Issues related to a "scientific poetic" then emerge, such as an approval of the Surrealists' acknowledgment of "an external reality," and a demand for the overthrowing of the logic of "monolinear sentence structure,"¹⁰ as Pound proceeds to laud two French poets, Apollinaire and Cocteau, whose Surrealist tendencies Breton would later praise."

Pound's assertion of the affinity between-Imagism and Surrealism comes as no surprise when we recall that Pound originally defined the Image in terms of the neopsychoanalytic psychology of Bertrand Hart. The immediate technical characteristics of Imagist theory—metaphor, objectivism (simple, concrete statement), and visuality—are found to be integrally related when illuminated by a comparison with Surrealist theory and technique.¹² Further, the relationship of Imagism to Pound's perpetual quest for a poetic at once mystical and scientific is clarified by a consideration of the role of the unconscious And finally, a consideration of Imagism in terms of Surrealism will help to illuminate the similarities and differences between the Image and the poetic figure into which it evolved, the Ideogram.¹⁴

II

Through their poems and paintings the Surrealists sought to express or stir the unconscious region of the mind, which they considered to be the source of true knowledge about the world. From Freud they learned that the mind's powers far exceed its customary logical, deductive operations, though they reversed the direction of his therapeutic program from repression to liberation, rejecting his assumption that the subliminal was harmful to conscious, everyday life. From Hegel they acquired the concept of a dialectic process that would reconcile the antinomies of this world through a theory of knowledge that posited the synthesis of subject and object, and mind and matter, though they rejected the theory of a transcendental Idea realizing itself through man and his world in a manner in accord with conceptual reasoning.¹⁵ The unconscious for the Surrealists becomes, then, by implication, a force through which all of the discrete objects and experiences of the phenomenal world are fused into a state of unity. As Ferdinand Alquié explains, Surrealism

presupposes the kinship of the powers which construct the Universe and the principles that direct our thoughts; it calls for the liberation of forces common to man and Nature.… Surrealism is not a flight into the unreal or into dream, but an attempt to penetrate into what has more reality than the logical and objective universe[,] … an immanent beyond.… [F]or surrealism is a question not of giving free rein to a fantasy void of sense but of unveiling the nature of things and of man.¹⁶

The unconscious, however, can never be perceived directly; we experience only its manifestations: in sleep, the dream, and, in a waking state, the poetic. Thus the surreal state sought by Surrealist art is simultaneously conscious and unconscious, a synthesis of the psychological and the concrete, as primal motivational forces dislocate the ordinary course of events, expressing a truth about reality through the fusion of the previously separate: a fundamental relationship operative in the world but previously unavailable to deductive processes is thus revealed.

The basic Surrealist image is, as a result, the metaphor itself, through which two ordinarily incongruent or disparate experiences are wrenched out of their customary context in the phenomenal world and fused into a new combination, or two usually separate and isolated objects are either juxtaposed or metamorphose into each other. As Breton indicates, the ability to reach the unconscious consists essentially of the power to create metaphor: "it is the marvellous faculty of attaining two widely separate realities without departing from the realm of our experience; of bringing them together and drawing a spark from their contact."¹⁷ When the reader encounters such an image presented concretely in the poem and attempts to imagine it, he will be jarred at first by its seeming un-naturalness and his customary logical preconception of the relationships between objects and events in the everyday world will be destroyed. Once liberated from the purely conscious, empirical world, these previously isolated components of reality form a new whole which, revealing an essential, unsuspected relation between certain elements of reality, stirs his unconscious and provides him with an experience of that unifying, subliminal region. In this way, the Surrealists emphasize the essence of metaphor, unification, in their work through the disparateness of the elements being united. Significantly, the metaphoric implies that the marvelous, the mystical, is present in this world, and has been unavailable only because man has limited his perception of phenomenal reality. This poetic is to be distinguished from that of the Symbolists, whose mysticism sought a transcendent realm, separate from the phenomenal world, to which its symbols beckoned.¹⁸

When joining the apparently dissimilar, Surrealist poets often base the metaphorical union upon the coincidental similarity of visual properties. Paul Eluard's "je descends dans mon miroir / Comme un mort dans sa tombe ouverte,"¹⁹ for instance, relies upon the similarity of the actual depth of a grave and the visual depth of a rectangular mirror. Benjamin Péret's "un petit lampion froid / doré comme un oeuf sur le plat"²⁰ depends upon the visual resemblance of an egg yolk in the middle of its white to a lamp and the glow that surrounds it. In these images, one object metamorphoses into the other in the reader's imagination because of the coincidental similarity of visual form.

The metaphor of coincidental visual similarity, in fact, may very well be the archetypal Surrealist image. A visual relationship defies the assumed course of nature by dislocating reality and joining together ordinarily disparate objects. Yet a coincidental similarity has no basis in deductive logic, providing a nonlogical means of uniting otherwise disparate experience. The metaphor of coincidental visual similarity will thus be both startling and unifying, the two characteristics of unconscious experience for the Surrealists, as it reveals a new relationship between objects in reality. Significantly, Breton often depicts coincidental visual similarities in his metaphors: he wishes to achieve both the shock of incongruity and a sense of relationship at the same time. For instance, in the metaphor "Ma femme à la chevelure de feu de bois,"²¹ the reader pictures a head of hair as a fire. Again, in the metaphor "peupliers / Dont les premières feuilles perdues beurrent les roses morceaux de pain de l'air,"²² the reader notices the visual similarity that is being implied between random pats of butter on a slice of bread and falling leaves in the air. He feels the incongruence of the elements at the same time that he experiences unification. For Breton, these unexpected visual superpositions achieve absolute metaphor, "the spontaneous, extralucid, insolent rapport which establishes itself under certain conditions between one thing and another,"²³ the synthesis of the unconscious and the real world. Breton implies that the physical transformation that takes place in the reader's mind is made possible by the visual: "I demand that he who still refuses, for instance, to see a horse galloping on a tomato should be looked on as a cretin."²⁴

Breton's emphasis on visual metaphor may account for why Surrealism could be both a literary and an artistic movement with no change of aesthetic principles. Surrealist painting often portrays metaphors of coincidental visual similarity by superimposing objects in the painted environment on the basis of their shape or configuration. Max Ernst's The Elephant of Celebes (1921), for instance, transforms the inanimate into the animate by depicting a piece of mechanical equipment so that it suggests an elephant. The foreground is dominated by a round dark green tank resting on the ground upon two stubby columns that look like an elephant's fat legs. A flexible tube protruding from the front of the tank in a semicircle suggests a trunk. In Renö Magritte's The Red Model (1935), the inanimate metamorphoses into the human again through visual resemblance. The upper half of a pair of shoes is laces and leather, the bottom half the flesh and toes of the foot that usually wears them. Salvador Dali's Mae West (1934-36) merges the face of the movie star with a drawing room. Her hair is simultaneously the drapery of the entry; her chin and neck are portrayed as the steps into the room; her lips are converted into a sofa; her nose is located where the fireplace should be and has a clock on top of it; and her eyes are blended with paintings inside of gold frames hung on the wall.

III

What the Surrealists sought through metaphor as the marvelous, an immanent rather than transcendent mysticism, Pound terms "delightful psychic experience"²⁵ during that phase of his development between 1910 and 1912 when he was preoccupied with medieval romance. Pound was always to insist on mysticism's material, and thus external, empirical, basis in order to emphasize its origin in reality itself: "it is a spiritual chemistry, and modern science and modern mysticism are both set to confirm it."²⁶ Likewise, Breton would come to posit a similar confluence to iterate that the Surreal occurs in the phenomenal world: "recent discoveries in physics have shown that the opposition between idealism and materialism is one of pure form."²⁷ Just as the Surrealists will associate the process of metaphor with the transmutational doctrine of alchemy in its uniting of the psychic and the material world,²⁸ so does Pound: in order to understand Cavalcanti's use of virtù "one must have in mind the connotations alchemical, astrological, metaphysical, which Swedenborg would have called correspondences." On the basis of alchemy Pound asserts, in turn, that a romantic-erotic love can provide the impetus for the fusion of the internal and external, the spiritual and physical:

The equations of alchemy were apt to be written as women's names and the women so named endowed with the magical powers of the compounds. La virtù is the potency, the efficient property of a substance or person. Thus modern science shows us radium with a noble virtue of energy. Each thing or person was held to send forth magnetisms of certain effect; in Sonnet XXXV, the image of his [Cavalcanti's] lady has these powers.²⁹

The Surrealists also will believe in a cult of love that would function as a source of insight into and union with the universe. As Alquié explains,

love (read passion-love) immediately takes first place in Surrealist preoccupations. In it are found once more all the prodigies of the Universe, all the powers of consciousness, all the agitation of feeling. It effects the supreme synthesis of subjective and objective.… It is from love that the surrealists expect the great revelation.…30

Pound finds the origin of alchemy in the everpresent capacity of primitive man for this essential metaphoric mystical experience that unifies the individual and the cosmos, the expression of which is subsequently attenuated in myth: "Greek myth arose when someone having passed through delightful psychic experience tried to communicate it to others."³¹ As Pound elaborates elsewhere, "the undeniable tradition of metamorphosis teaches us that things do not always remain the same. They become other things by swift and unanalysable process.… The first myths arose when a man walked into sheer 'nonsense,' that is to say, when some very vivid and undeniable adventure befell him … ; perceiving that no one could understand what he meant when he said that he 'turned into a tree' he made a myth."³² Breton will assert the same link between primitive mentality, metamorphosis, and immanent mysticism; there exists, he observes, "profound affinities between surrealism and 'primitive' thought. Both envision the abolition of the hegemony of the conscious and the everyday, leading to the conquest of revelatory emotion."³³

The medieval cult of erotico-mysticism that Pound explored during this romance period particularly through Cavalcanti held that celestial light would pass from God through the lady to her lover. Even her visual image alone would be sufficient for this insight into the truth of the cosmos to occur, but the heat generated by sexual intercourse was thought to be in essence the energy of light, of divine illumination. At the beginning of the 1930s Pound identified the origin of this love cult to be a specific primitive ritual, the rite of Eleusis, during which he believed that a priest and priestess engaged in sexual Pound believed intercourse that resulted in a celestial revelation.³⁴ Pound believed that Cavalcanti's erotico-mysticism was based on Robert Grosseteste's theory of light, an idea, as Pound understood it, with both metaphysical and scientific implications. The passage from Etienne Gilson's Philosophie du Moyen Age that Pound quotes in "Cavalcanti" as an explanation of Grosseteste's theory implies a correlation between the light that is the basis of material forms and the mystical light of divine illumination that provides insight into the nature of the universe.³⁵ In 1938 Pound draws a telling correspondence:

Grosseteste on Light may or may not be scientific but at least his mind gives us a structure. He throws onto our spectrum a beauty comparable to a work by Max Ernst. The mind making forms can verbally transmit them when the mental voltage is high enough. It is not absolutely necessary that the imagination be registered either by sound or on painted canvas.³⁶

Thus, Pound came to associate the Surreal with the immanent mysticism of troubadour and Tuscan poetry through which he interpreted his own intensest psychological experiences, and for the expression of which he was in the process of seeking an adequate poetic technique. Furthermore, he came to associate a particular style of painting, Ernst's Surrealism, with the kind of poetry that he wished to write, at least at the time that he was preoccupied with medieval romance.

Although Pound does not specify which Ernst paintings he has in mind, those painted just before and while both men were in Paris between 1922 and 1924,³⁷ like The Elephant of Celebes, display properties of visual metaphor, of metamorphosis: for instance, in Woman, Old Man, and Flower II (1923), the dominant foreground figure is composed of a nude human being from the waist down and a human neck, but the torso is a leather and metal vest with transparent panels and the head is a fan-piece of the same materials; Ubu Imperator (1924) consists of a spinning top of wood with human hands and holes signifying eyes and mouth. Even the works in the Surrealist number of The Little Review that Pound certainly did see, though they are not paintings but collages (altered engravings), depict transformations and incongruent juxtapositions.³⁸

Aristotle's definition of poetic genius as the ability to create metaphor had been with Pound since The Spirit of Romance, and the doctrine of luminous detail was simply a uniting of metaphoric technique with the theory of physical-psychic light as found in Cavalcanti and Grosseteste. Luminous details result in metaphoric knowledge: "certain facts give one a sudden insight into circumjacent conditions," that is, into relations between objects, "sequence," "law,"³⁹ that are not visible to one in an ordinary psychological state. The immanent mystical state must be one of clarity in order to see the new arrangement of reality dictated by the insight: "the ecstacy is not a whirl or madness of the senses, but a glow arising from the exact nature of the perception."⁴⁰ At the same time, however, Pound, like the Surrealists, advises that this clear perception of relations involves a dislocation of our ordinary experience of the phenomenal world: of Aristotle's remark on metaphor Pound explains that "by 'apt use,' I should say it were well to understand, a swiftness, almost a violence, and certainly a vividness," and definitely "not elaboration or complication."⁴¹ Pound's instructions for attaining this ability to perceive clearly in order for the metaphoric immanent mystical to occur is precisely what the Surrealists would specify for attainment of the surreal vision: "the function of an art is to strengthen the perceptive faculties and free them from encumbrance, such encumbrances, for instance, as set moods, set ideas, conventions; from the results of experience which is common but unnecessary, experience induced by the stupidity of the experiencer and not by the inevitable laws of nature" that will be revealed through the mystical or surreal experience. Thus, "poetry is identified with the other arts in this main purpose, that is, of liberation."⁴²

IV

By the time that Pound codified his Imagist movement in mid-1912, he had begun to think of his immanent mysticism—his "radiant world where one thought cuts through another with lean edge, a world of moving energies"⁴³—not only in terms of the medieval love cult and the modern physics of light waves, magnetism, electricity, and atomic radiation,⁴⁴ but also in terms of modern psychology: the poet's "work remains the permanent basis of psychology and metaphysics";⁴⁵ "he is the advance guard of the psychologist on the watch for new emotions, new vibrations sensible to faculties as yet ill understood."⁴⁶ Bernard Hart's Observation that his psychology " is the analogue of that underlying all the great conceptual constructions of physical science—the atomic theory, the wave theory of light, the law of gravity, and the modern theory of mendelian heredity"⁴⁷ may have helped Pound to see its relevance to his developing poetic. Above all, Hart's description of the function of the unconscious reinforced for Pound the importance of the metaphoric in the poetic process as he began to perceive that the unconscious mind played a central role in his immanent mystical experiences, and thus in the creation of the poetic figure that would communicate them.

Pound did employ a nonliterary concept in order to clarify his poetic theory when he came to supply a definition of the Image, and the discipline of thought from which that concept came betrays the creative origin and affective function of this kind of poetic figure: "an 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. I use the term 'complex' rather in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart, though we might not agree absolutely in our application."⁴⁸ Pound's recourse to a contemporary psychologist to explain the origin and function of the Image already suggests the surreal nature of his poetic, for Hart was a neopsychoanalyst: his was a dynamic psychology, based upon motivation, and a depth psychology, postulating the unconscious as a functioning region of the mind. In 1910 Hart characterizes "in our own terminology" that fundamental tenet of psychoanalytic psychology that he chooses to adopt:

The unconscious (unbewusstsein) is regarded as a sea of unconscious ideas and emotions, upon whose surface plays the phenomenal consciousness of which we are personally aware. These unconscious ideas are agglomerated into groups with accompanying affects, the systems thus formed being termed "complexes." These complexes are regarded as possessing both potential and kinetic energy, and thus are capable of influencing the flow of phenomenal consciousness according to certain definite laws.⁴⁹

Thus, Hart was not, strictly speaking, an orthodox Freudian, but in 1912 saw himself as presenting a "systematic"⁵⁰ exposition of psychoanalysis with what he felt were appropriate changes of emphasis in certain aspects of the theory, such as diminishing the significance of the sexual instinct in complex formation, and with certain modifications based on other schools of depth psychology, as with his definition of complex, which he adopted from Jung.

Complexes for Hart, then, are not a symptom of a pathological psyche resulting from the repression of normal or perverted sexuality, but rather constitute the operating mechanisms of the ordinary healthy mind. Hart finds an appropriate analogy for the complex in the physical sciences: "complexes, then, are causes which determine the behaviour of the conscious stream, and the action which they exert upon consciousness may be regarded as the psychological analogue of the conception of 'force' in physics."⁵¹ As Hart explains elsewhere,

Strictly speaking, it can never itself become a fact of experience, a portion of phenomenal consciousness.

Certain ideas, affects, and conative tendencies belonging to the complex may become facts of experience, we may become aware that we possess the complex—but the complex as a whole and as a directing force can never be actually experienced.⁵²

Pound appears to have Hart's analogy of unconscious impulses as forces in mind when he explains, in relation to Imagism, that an artist "can, within limits, not only record but create. At least he can move as a force; he can produce 'order-giving vibrations'; by which one may mean merely, he can departmentalise such part of the life-force as flows through him."⁵³

Neither Hart nor Freud, however, had in 1912 read an Imagist poem or seen a Surrealist painting. Both deny the possibility of representing a complex through the content of sensory experience, a stipulation that probably accounts for Pound's suspicion that Hart would not entirely agree with the "application" of the concept to a work of art, despite Pound's use of the term in its "technical" sense. As Hart observes, "the lack of a perceptual equivalent to many of Freud's conceptions is very striking when we peruse such a work as the Traumdeutung." Yet in Hart's very denial of the possibility lies the key to the surreal: "here the individual dream image is conceived as being constellated by a large number of unconscious complexes—as a result of the combination and interaction of these complexes the single image emerges into consciousness" (my emphasis). So, in turn, does the quotation from Freud that Hart offers for support: "how can one picture to oneself the psychical condition during sleep? Do all the dream thoughts (subsequently elicited by analysis) actually exist together, or after one another, or do they constitute different contemporaneous streams finally coalescing"⁵⁴ (my emphasis). We must remember that the engagement of a work of art takes place in the mind; thus we must, above all, focus our attention on the effect of the poem or painting rather than on its literal, concrete state on the paper or canvas. Once a poet realizes that, according to Hart, "a single idea or image in consciousness may be conditioned (constellated) by a multiplicity of unconscious complexes" (my emphasis), then all he has to do is produce a work of art that does not "picture," but rather reproduces psychologically in the reader "what a mass of simultaneous unconscious ideas may be like"⁵⁵ (my emphasis), exactly Hart's definition of a complex. Pound believed that such a poem capturing the momentary eruption of an unconscious impulse was possible: "energy, or emotion, expresses itself in form.… When an energy or emotion 'presents an image,' this may find adequate expression in words";56 hence, the Image.

For Pound, therefore, the Image is a metaphor, and its effect is surreal: "it is the presentation of such a 'complex' instantaneously which gives the sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of a great work of art."⁵⁷ The effect of "sudden liberation" occurs when objects are no longer discrete entities bounded by time and space, but rather coalesce. In essence, an Image gives the reader a sense of unity by dislocating phenomenal reality, just like a Surreal image. In Pound's own words, "Imagisme" is "absolute metaphor."⁵⁸ Pound's definition of the one-Image poem actually specifies a surreal fusion of two disparate objects: "the 'one image poem' is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another." Significantly, Pound's justification for creating these Images is the same as the purpose Breton gave for the Surreal metaphor: both theoreticians wish to depict the union of unconscious and conscious, of the mystical and the real. As Pound observes, "in a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective."⁵⁹ The terms of Pound's explanation conform exactly to Breton's account of the Surreal image: "we have attempted to present interior reality and exterior reality as two elements in the process of unification, of finally becoming one,"⁶⁰ approaching the "point where the distinction between subjective and objective ceases to be necessary or useful."⁶¹

Technically, Pound, like Breton through Reverdy, prefers juxtaposition as the appropriate verbal form for the metaphoric experience the poet wishes to convey.⁶² Like simile, pure metaphor (employing copula), and verbal, adjectival, adverbial, and prepositional metaphor, juxta-position is also a metaphoric figure. Metaphoric action is initiated linguistically, but the superposition of elements occurs psychologically in the mind, where the event of reading actually takes place. Thus, in terms of Hart's psychology, when two concrete objects are juxtaposed by a poem, the psychic energy or force of the complex is transferred from one mental image to another in the writer's mind when the poem is created and in the reader's when it is read. All metaphors expressed in Indo-European languages must occur cerebrally: they do not exist on the printed page. Only in certain Chinese ideograms does superposition of two verbal elements occur, an attribute which initially attracted Pound to them.

Juxtaposition is, in fact, an ideal verbal method of presenting a metaphor depicting the visual similarity of ordinarily incongruent objects. Each element is presented independently, and the reader is not directed by the logic of the syntax to imagine any definite, nonvisual aspect of the objects, such as the specific activity of a verbal metaphor, or the specific property of an adjectival metaphor. Consequently, the reader is given a chance to encounter the first object by itself and unmodified—in its full integrity as an object—and thus tends to read it as a complete visual image. When he encounters the second object, also separate and whole, he is inclined to superimpose its visual image onto the previous visual image, and a metaphoric fusion occurs based on visual similarity that implies a relationship more profound than one arrived at by deductive logic. With verbal or adjectival metaphors, on the other hand, the reader may be able to visualize the noun, but he has no chance to visualize, alone and in its entirety, the object implied by the verb or adjective. Thus he tends to conceive of the relationship between the two elements in terms other than, or in addition to, visual properties, such as the laws of logic or the customary course of nature, when he attempts to imagine the noun performing the activity of the verb or displaying the property of the adjective.

The archetypal Imagist poem is, according to Pound, "In a Station of the Metro":

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:—.
Petals, on a wet, black bough.63

This poem is actually a surrealistic metaphor delivered in two lines by means of juxtaposition: a number of faces standing out from the dark business suits and shadows of a dimly lit subway station metamorphose into petals gleaming with rain on a dark tree limb on the basis of the coincidental visual similarity of their teardrop outlines and the bright contrast with their surroundings. The word "apparition" itself suggests a mental event based on a congruity of visual image, and as we read, we understand: the appearance of these faces looks the same as (becomes) petals. The two objects to be visually superimposed are each contained within a single line of poetry, entirely separated from one another, so that their metamorphosis in the reader's mind can be sudden and complete. No overt syntactic structure joins the two lines, eliminating any possible suggestion of logical connection or subordination. The reader can only assume that apposition is implied, a relationship of equality, identity. His only recourse is to visualize, and he is subsequently shocked by the fusion of disparate objects that suggests a heretofore unsuspected relation in the world.⁶⁴

Similarly, H.D.'s "Oread," which Pound once cited as the definitive Imagist poem,⁶⁵ relies upon verbal metaphor to achieve its surreal visual transformation. The waves of the ocean and the wind-swept pine trees of a forest are completely fused when verbs usually describing turbulent water are applied to the forest. Snow-capped peaks of trees merge with white-capped ocean waves:

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.

By imagining his beloved as literally occupying his body, Eluard achieves a similar fusion of different objects in "L'Amoureuse." Words that refer to her simultaneously refer to him: "Elle a toujours les yeux ouverts / Et ne me laisse pas dormir" (7-8).⁶⁶

Not surprisingly, Pound's explanation of the aesthetic quality of a visual metaphor describes the effect of these poems, and of Surrealist painting. Pound observes of the statement, "the pine tree in mist upon the far hill looks like a fragment of Japanese armour," that "the beauty, in so far as it is a beauty of form, is a result of 'planes in relation.' The tree and the armour are beautiful because their diverse planes overlie in a certain manner."⁶⁷ This visual superposition of objects forms the basis of much Surrealist art, and of much of Pound's verse from the Imagist period. Pound's images are often actually quite similar to those found in both Surrealist poetry and painting. To consider "A Girl," for example, the first stanza consists of a surreal transformation in process, a girl metamorphosing into a tree. These lines portray that inclination to identify with one's surroundings characteristic of the unifying childhood imagination:

The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown into my breast—
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.

(1-5)

By the second stanza, the metamorphosis has already been completed:

Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind about them.
A child—so high—you are,
And all this is folly to the world.

(6-10)⁶⁸

The transformation depicted in Pound's poem, according to which a child thinks that she is both a girl and a tree at the same time, is similar to the metamorphoses portrayed in two Surrealist works of art. Magritte's painting Discovery (1927) is a half-length portrait of a nude young woman who is at once flesh and wood: her left cheek, arm, and thigh, and her right shoulder, breast, and hip are a light brown wood grain, while the rest of her body is in tan flesh tones. Eluard's poem "L'Amoureuse," in which the beloved merges with the body and consciousness of the poet, depicts the process of transformation in a way similar to Pound's first stanza. Each successive line presents another part of the body becoming the woman:

Elle est debout sur mes paupières
Et ses cheveux sont dans les miens,
Elle a la forme de mes mains,
Elle a la couleur de mes yeux,
Elle s'engloutit dans mon ombre
Comme une pierre sur le ceil.

(1-6)⁶⁹

Again, in a passage from "Dance Figure," a series of surreal transformations based upon visual similarity occur:

Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark;
Thy face as a river with lights.

White as an almond are thy shoulders;
As new almonds stripped from the husk.

(10-17)⁷⁰

In the first image, Pound juxtaposes a woman's pale, bare shoulder and a white, husked almond, and, in the second, the naked arm under her clothing and the raw wood of a branch without its bark. In either case the two objects are related by a coincidental similarity in shape and color: shoulders and almonds are oval, and arms and branches are long, thin, cylindrical, and crooked, bending at the elbow or joint. Breton's metaphors "Ma femme aux hanches de nacelle" (44) and "Ma femme aux fesses de dos de cygne" (49) from "L'Union libre"⁷¹ are similarly based upon the coincidental visual resemblance between a hip and a skiff, or a buttock and a swan's back, enabling a surreal transformation to occur.

Thus, although Imagism is notorious for promulgating a spare style employing concrete language and avoiding the abstract, the Image was never to function as a purely objective recording of reality. As Pound exhorts, "don't be descriptive; remember that a painter can describe a landscape much better than you can."⁷² Why then does Pound demand verse that is "harder and saner," eschewing "rhetorical din" and "painted adjectives"?⁷³ Pound solves the conundrum immediately after advising against the descriptive. He proceeds to offer a metaphor of Shakespeare's as the proto-Imagist alternative and draws a telling distinction: "when Shakespeare talks of the 'Dawn in russet mantle clad' he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents"74 (my emphasis). The same distinction is implicit in two of the three original Imagist principles: "1 . Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective" and "2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation"75 (my emphasis), as well as in Pound's definition: "an Image is that which presents . . ." (my emphasis). For Pound, to describe is simply to record the phenomenal world as it is experienced consciously and rationally by the mind; to present an Image concretely, to treat the "thing" directly, on the other hand, is to offer to the reader the metaphoric transformation of reality with no unnecessary language that would obstruct its effectiveness to instill a surreal shock, a mystical revelation, in the reader.

In turn, Pound's dictum to present directly, to engage only in the concrete and avoid abstractions, covertly demands the creation of visual Images. Pound speaks of the metaphoric as "that part of your poetry which strikes upon the imaginative eye of the reader."⁷⁶ Pound's preference for the visual originates philosophically, of course, in the medieval cult of mystical love associated with Cavalcanti. The visual as an artistic strategy to stir the unconscious is, however, as important to Imagism itself as it is to Surrealism. Granting that the unconscious functions to unify fragments of our conscious, rational experience, that is, metaphorically, visual metaphor is desired because the comparison will be registered by the reader initially in a nonrational way. If a juxtaposition is employed, the lack of overt syntactic structure will further forestall the logical analysis of the imagery. Simple denotative description is preferred to one charged with emotional or intellectual connotations so that both objects will be registered as concretely as possible, rather than abstractly, just as Dali, for instance, employs a hyperreal style for his Surreal paintings, avoiding the rhetoric of turbulent brushstroke or flamboyant, unnatural color. Thus, the reader is instantaneously shocked by the unexpected unity of a visual superposition, only to analyze rationally and construct a meaning upon subsequent readings.

This unique way that an Imagist or Surrealist work of art functions actually parallels the ordinary course of our mental activity according to Hart's analysis of the human psyche. Hart is particularly insistent upon "the unconscious origin of beliefs and actions," in fact, of most of our ideas and feelings, as opposed to "the subsequent process of rationalization to which they are subjected." As he proceeds to explain,

The prevalence of "rationalisation" is responsible for the erroneous belief that reason, taken in the sense of logical deduction from given premises, plays the dominating role in the formation of human thought and conduct. In most cases the thought or action makes its appearance without any such antecedent process, moulded by the various complexes resulting from our instinct and experience. The "reason" is evolved subsequently, to satisfy our craving for rationality.⁷⁷

Being metaphoric in nature, the Imagist or Surreal poem simply replaces the complex, the unconscious force, as the origin of the mental event being encountered by the mind. Rationalization, the "meaning of the poem," only occurs after the initial subliminal shock, when the conscious, rational mind, presented with an unconscious, and thus unnatural and illogical, visual image, is momentarily paralyzed. Only after the reader recovers from the initial unconscious shock of enlightenment does he proceed to analyze rationally, seeking the abstract in the concrete in order to formulate a thematic statement. For Pound and the Surrealists, however, the concrete embodiment of the mystical insight as an image in the poem would be its most truthful form of expression.⁷⁸

V

The relationship between Imagism and Surrealism can help to bring into focus the subtle, complex evolution of the Image into the Ideogram, Pound's final definition of the poetic figure that would govern the composition of The Cantos. Pound distinguishes between the two in the same essay mat he associates Imagism and Surrealism, "D'Artagnan Twenty Years After": "from dead thesis, metaphor is distinct. Any diesis is dead in itself. Life comes in metaphor and metaphor starts TOWARD ideogram."⁷⁹ The catalyst for the Image's metamorphosis into the Ideogram was Pound's encounter with the notebooks of the Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa,⁸⁰ presented to Pound by Fenollosa's widow for editing in late 1913.⁸¹ Perhaps by the close of 1914,⁸² and certainly by the beginning of 1915, Pound began to view the Image in terms of the Chinese ideogram, precipitating a gradual theoretical shift: "it is quite true that we have sought the force of Chinese ideographs without knowing it.83

An Imagist theory defined through Hart's psychology easily accommodated the doctrines of Pound's Vorticist stage during 1914. The movement inherent in the image as a Vortex, "a radiant node or cluster … from which, through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing"⁸⁴ is the movement of psychic energy or force generated by the complex. Certain changes of emphasis, however, are already perceptible. The immanent mysticism from the medieval-romance period that found a psychological definition through Hart in terms of the unconscious is still present, but the rational is now given a greater role in its operation and the use to which it is put. What had been called a mystical light is now referred to as both "spontaneity" and "intuition" in terms of "their function in art": "I passed my last exam, in mathematics on sheer intuition. I saw where the line had to go, as clearly as I ever saw an image, or felt caelestem intus vigorem." This increased emphasis on the rational is coupled with a more pronounced preoccupation with the operations of the external world. Whereas for the Imagist the poetic figure liberated one from the limits of space and time because of its metaphoric dislocation of the phenomenal world, now for the Vorticist the poetic figure, as an analogue to the equation of analytical geometry governing the circle, is liberating because of the universality of its law: "it is the circle free of space and time limits. It is universal, existing in perfection, in freedom from space and time."⁸⁵

With Fenollosa the change of emphasis is complete; Fenollosa's continual assertion of the presence of energy in nature, in the external world, shifted Pound's focus away from Hart's internal energy of the mind. The Ideo-gram at that point became a more ambitious figure than the Image. A change in the specificity and complexity of relations to be depicted, of subject matter to be treated, necessitated a shift in the degree to which the various components of the mind would participate in the generation of the poetic figure. In order to seek truths in the more practical everyday fabric of life—political, social, economic—the conscious and rational would have to play a greater role than the unconscious in image formation. This broadening of the expressive content of what Pound conceived as the fundamental poetic figure coincided with, and was perhaps inspired by, the codification in his mind of the social role of the poet.⁸⁶

To be sure, the Ideogram is still to remain a result of mystical, or intuitive, insight, a combination of the unconscious and the conscious, the emotional and the rational, and not a product of pure reason. Pound not only objects to the scholastic logic castigated by Fenollosa,⁸⁷ but also to inductive reasoning, the more commonly held notion of scientific cognition: just as Pound had contrasted "imperfect inductions" with "luminous details,"⁸⁸ so in his final Ideogrammatic phase he will observe that "an idea is only an imperfect induction from fact,"⁸⁹ Thus in structure the Ideogram remains metaphoric, based upon an analogical operation of the mind that would perceive "identity of structure,"⁹⁰ as Fenollosa characterizes the goal of metaphor, among apparent anomalies. The ordinary course of the phenomenal world would still have to be dislocated in order to discover these affinities, just as the grammar of language reflecting the customary course of reality would have to be violated through juxtaposition if the metaphoric insight is to be expressed. As Fenollosa observes that "nature herself has no grammar,"⁹¹ so Pound notes that "in a city the visual impressions succeed each other, overlap, overcross, they are 'cinematographic,' but they are not a linear sequence. They are often a flood of nouns without verbal relations"; "we no longer think or need to think in terms of monolinear logic, the sentence structure, subject, predicate, object, etc."⁹² The subject matter that the Ideogram must treat has, however, become more specific and more complex than that of the Image. Previously Pound cautioned simply against the use of "abstractions" in the creation of the poetic figure, for the concrete, the "natural object," is always "adequate." He was referring to a general feeling, "peace." Now Pound tellingly specifies the abstractions that are not to appear directly in the poem: the poet is not to use an image "to back up some creed or some system of ethics or economics."⁹³

The "Affirmations" essays appearing at the beginning of 1915 are transitional pieces in which we see the Image gradually becoming the Ideogram. Realizing this himself, Pound advises, in "Affirmations—As for Imagisme," that "I cannot guarantee that my thoughts about it [Imagism] will remain absolutely stationary." He proceeds to define "two sorts" of Image; firstly,

It can arise within the mind. It is then "subjective." External causes play upon the mind, perhaps; if so, they are drawn into the mind, fused, transmitted, and emerge in an Image unlike themselves. Secondly, the Image can be objective. Emotion seizing upon some external scene or action carries it intact to the mind; and that vortex purges it of all save the essential or dominant or dramatic qualities, and it emerges like the external original.

Pound makes clear that the function of neither of these two kinds of "Image" is mimetic representation: "in either case the Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy. If it does not fulfill these specifications, it is not what I mean by an Image. It may be a sketch, a vignette, a criticism, an epigram," or an instance of "impressionism,"⁹⁴ Pound's term for description.

At first glance, Pound's distinction between the two psychological origins of the Image, triggered by either subjective mental processes or objective sense perception, seems as if it might be paralleling Hart's distinction between the two kinds of "stimulus" activating a "complex": "whenever one or more of the ideas belonging to a complex is roused to activity, either by some external event, or by processes of association occurring in the mind itself."⁹⁵ Pound's account of the origin of the first kind of "Image," however, entails both of these stimuli, for "external causes" are said to set off the train of association that results in their eventually being "fused" according to the complex that they stirred. Thus, the second kind of "Image," although conceived of as a metaphor, is not really an Image, but an Ideogram. The metaphoric action now takes place on a more rational, conscious level, as the mind deals more directly with the phenomenal world, for the resulting poetic figure, metaphysically considered, is "like the external original." Instead of a simple object, the more historically or motivationally complicated "external scene or action" is now said to initiate creativity. The poetic process still involves the unconscious mind, the source, as Hart contends, of social and ethical values, but now to a lesser degree than the conscious rational mind that can process more complex or more conceptual data and recognize universal laws. A complex in its conscious state will strip the scene or action to its essential features, producing none other than a reflection of that very governing universal that the mind had originally sensed to be present in the scene or action from the beginning. Thus, the "vortex" that "purges" and "fuses" is no longer simply the unconscious that amalgamates. The relations that are discovered will be more ideational in character, although they still result from the metaphoric perception of the external world and are expressed through the juxtaposition of the concrete.⁹⁶

Pound has now made possible The Cantos, a poem that can analogically treat rich and complicated, yet specific and detailed, subject matter. Interestingly, Pound greatly admired Aragon's "The Red Front," despite its Communist orientation, a Surrealist poem that deals concretely and specifically with contemporary politics and economics.⁹⁷ But Aragon's poem, though characteristic of Surrealist verse in its method of juxtaposing the seemingly incongruent, is atypical in its specificity. Thus Pound parts company with the Surrealists in seeking relations that are less mysterious, more clearly defined and readily applicable to the phenomenal world. Such a preference originally moved Pound from a more unconscious Imagist poetic to the more conscious and intellectual Ideo-grammatic. We can understand, then, why Pound feels constrained in "Affirmations—Vorticism" to distinguish between automatic painting and Vorticist art. He once again calls upon the image of the rose in magnetized iron filings as an example of the kind of pattern-forming energy behind nature that a poet is to express.⁹⁸ Whereas the Imagist was simply to express the "life-force" within him through its form-giving capacity, now, however, a broader, more varied subject-matter is implicitly recommended when Pound observes that "there are, of course, various sorts or various subdivisions of energy," which he proceeds to distinguish for the first time: "these forces may be the love of God,' the 'life-force,' emotions, passions, what you will." Automatic painting simply expressed "exclusive organic" energy, "a state of cell memory, a vegetable or visceral energy," whereas the Vorticist wishes to express "his complex consciousness," "instinct and intellect together." The cause of automatic painting's unsatisfactoriness, according to Pound, reveals his new Ideogrammatic poetic: "the softness and the ultimate failure of interest in automatic painting are caused by a complete lack of conscious intellect."⁹⁹ For Pound, as for the Surrealists, automatism only gives access to the unconscious; once the subliminal reaches consciousness, it must be utilized through an integration into the real world, for Pound more directly and more specifically than for the Surrealists.

NOTES

¹Selected Prose, 1909-1965, ed. William Cookson (New Directions, 1973), p. 452.

²Selected Prose, p. 456.

³ Patricia Hutchins characterizes Pound's London residence in Ezra Pound's Kensington: An Exploration, 1885-1913 (Henry Regnery, 1965). Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 52, notes that the Rebel Art Centre was located at 38 Great Ormond Street, near Queen Square. See also

⁴Selected Prose, p. 453. Significantly, Pound mistakes the date of the Rebel Art Centre here, placing it in his Imagist phase, when it opened in March 1914, and closed by June of the same year (Meyers, 52-54). Pound conceived the existence of the Imagist school some time between April and August of 1912, according to Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound, 2nd ed. (Avon, 1974), p. 162.

⁵Selected Prose, p. 457.

⁶Selected Prose, p. 452. See also, and

⁷Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 20. Reverdy's statement first appeared in Nord-Sud (March 1918).

⁸Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, ed. Harriet Zinnes (New Directions, 1980), p. 165. Pound discusses the relationship between Cavalcanti and Avicenna in "Cavalcanti" (1910-1931), Literary Essays, pp. 149-200 passim. The Swedenborg quotation appears again in Guide to Kulchur (1938), 2nd ed. (New Directions, 1952), p. 73.

⁹ "Rising Sign" (1947), What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont (Monad Press, 1978), p. 282.

¹⁰Visual Arts, p. 166.

¹¹ "Rising Sign," What is Surrealism?, pp. 282-83.

¹² Commentary on Pound frequently subsumes the Image under the Ideogram, and as a result, a critical consensus still does not exist regarding what for Pound was the linguistic structure of the Image, its psychological origin in the writer, and its intended effect upon the reader. Walter Sutton, "The Literary Image and the Reader: A Consideration of the Theory of Spatial Form," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XVI (September 1957), believes that the call for both the objective and the metaphoric simply "points to a source of confusion in Pound's own theory" (13), while John T. Gage, In the Arresting Eye: The Rhetoric of Imagism (Louisiana State University Press, 1981), having noted "the condition of simultaneity which the imagists desire," concludes that "by metaphor the imagists did not mean metaphor," but rather "a literal statement of reality" (58, 111, 162).

Laszlo K. Gefin, Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method (University of Texas Press, 1982), minimizes the role of the visual in the Image, drawing a distinction between the physical properties of language transcription with the cerebral functioning of language proper:" 'superposition' is physically impossible in writing; only juxtaposition is available to the poet." Although he admits that "superposition can come about in the mind of the reader," Gefin at the same time denies the possibility of visual metaphor, observing of "In a Station of the Metro" that "the poem is not a metaphor" (9, 11, 12). Gage, having posited that a comparison in poetry is experienced "cognitively" rather than through "visualization," proceeds to offer a visual, physical example—a picture of the vase-faces optical illusion from Gestalt psychology, which the viewer can only see as one or the other at a time—as proof in itself that a metaphor superimposing objects visually cannot be experienced by the reader, rather than considering the psychological cognitive effect of the visual metaphor upon the reader (60-61). Yet, Anne Cluysenaar, Aspects of Literary Stylistics: A Discussion of Dominant Structures in Verse and Prose (St. Martin's Press, 1976), with regard to the same Gestalt optical illusion, had previously noted mat the simultaneity is nevertheless experienced "in the perceptual mind's eye" (59-61).

¹³ Previous considerations of the relationship between Hart's version of the unconscious and Imagist theory have not been entirely satisfactory. J. B. Harmer, Victory in Limbo: Imagism 1908-1917 (St. Martin's Press, 1975), summarily dismisses the psychological description with which Pound accompanies his linguistic prescriptions for the Image: "how far he understood Hart is questionable" (165). Hugh Witemeyer, The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms of Renewal 1908-1920 (University of California Press, 1969), decides that Pound's "reference to Hart is little more than a pseudoscientific smokescreen" (33). Wallace Martin, "Freud and Imagism," Notes and Queries, N.S. VIII (December 1961), 470-71, attempts to trace Pound's remarks to Freud when Hart repeatedly stated mat he employed the term "complex" according to Jung's usage. See Hart's "The Relation of Complex and Sentiment," British Journal of Psychology, XIII (1922), 142; Psychopathology, Its Development and Its Place in Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), p. 102; and The Psychology of Insanity, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), p. 78. Also assuming that Hart "used the term 'complex' in an orthodox Freudian sense," Witemeyer wrongly implies that for Hart the presence of a complex would automatically "lead to irrational behavior" since his "chief concern is with obsessive and insane actions that may be caused by the complex" (33). As Hart explains in his chapter "Complexes," however, "the ascertaining of the causes determining the flow of our consciousness is the ultimate aim of psychology. We shall expect, of course, that the laws discovered will be identical in the sane and insane" (The Psychology of Insanity, 1st ed. [1912], pp. 60-61).

More fruitful is Martin A. Kayman, "A Context for Hart's 'Complex': A Contribution to a Study of Pound and Science," Paideuma, XII (Fall/Winter, 1983), 23-35. While Kayman offers a "scientific," that is, psychological, parapsychological, and occult, context for Pound's use of the term "complex," this study will focus extensively on Hart's thought and the use Pound made of it in the formulation of Imagist theory and practice.

¹⁴ The relationship between Surrealism and Imagism, or Pound in general, has not been explored in any detail. Paul Ray, The Surrealist Movement in England (Cornell University Press, 1971), asserts that Imagism, with its emphasis on the image "replacing statement and description," simply prepared the ground for the later Surrealist group in England that avowed ties with the original French movement. Imagism is erroneously said to be "reinforced by Freud's analysis of dream-imagery and the doctrines of French symbolism" (262). Andrew Clearfield, "Pound, Paris, and Dada," Paideuma, VII (1978), 113-40, claims that Pound "never took much interest in or had much sympathy for the new movement, Surrealism," and that "of Breton he says nothing" (124-25). Yet Breton's Nadja (1928) is mentioned in an approving context in "Cavalcanti," Literary Essays, pp. 194-95. In fact, by 1921, when Pound moved to Paris to stay until 1924 (Stock, 311-36), the so-called French Dadaists were already displaying Surrealist tendencies in theory and practice before the movement was officially codified with the first "Manifesto" of 1924. Gefin is astute to observe in passing that the principles governing ideogrammatic poetry are also operative in the collage compositions of Max Ernst (xvii).

¹⁵ See "Second Manifesto of Surrealism" (1930), p. 123, and "Surrealist Situation of the Object" (1935), pp. 258-60, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, and "Situation of Sur-realism Between the Two Wars" (1943), What is Surrealism?, p. 246. The combined use of Freud and Hegel in Surrealist theory is discussed by Ferdinand Alquié, The Philosophy of Surrealism, trans. Bernard Waldrop (University of Michigan Press, 1965), pp. 34, 71, 110; Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, 2nd ed. (Dutton, 1970), pp. 125, 131-32, 137-38; and Michel Carrouges, Andrö Breton and the Basic Concepts of Sur-realism, trans. Maura Prendergast (University of Alabama Press, 1974), passim.

¹⁶ Alquié, pp. 33-34, 84, 98. See also

¹⁷ "Max Ernst" (1920), What is Surrealism?, p. 8.

¹⁸ For the difference between Surrealism and Symbolism see Anna Balakian, "Metaphor and Metamorphosis in Andrö Breton's Poetics," French Studies, XIX (1965), 34-35; and Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination, 1880-1900, trans. Derek Coltman (University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 256-64.

¹⁹ From "Mourir," quoted by Mary Ann Caws, The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism: Aragon, Breton, Tzara, Eluard, and Desnos (Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 161.

²⁰ From "Au Bout du monde," quoted by Balakian, Surrealism, p. 156.

²¹ From "L'Union libre," Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares / Jeunes cerisiers garantis les lièvres, trans. Elouard Roditi (1946; University of Michigan Press, 1969), n.p.

²² From "L'Air de l'eau," Young Cherry Trees, n.p.

²³ "Rising Sign," What is Surrealism?, p. 280.

²⁴ "Exhibition X … Y … " (1929), What is Surrealism?, p. 43.

²⁵ "Psychology and Troubadours" (1912), The Spirit of Romance, p. 92. Witemeyer provides an extended discussion of this concept (23-43).

²⁶ "Introduction" (1910) to Cavalcanti poems, Ezra Pound: Translations, ed. Hugh Kenner, 2nd ed. (New Directions, 1963), p. 18.

²⁷ Quoted by Inez Hedges, Languages of Revolt: Dada and Surrealist Literature and Film (Duke University Press, 1983), p. 4.

²⁸ See Carrouges, pp. 48-66, and Hedges, pp. 3-33.

²⁹ "Introduction" to Cavalcanti, Translations, p. 18.

³⁰ Alquié, pp. 84-85. Both Aragon, the Surrealist with whom Pound was most friendly during his Paris years, and Breton in Nadja, which Pound read, and in other writings, were vehement on the surreal efficacy of love, as well as Eluard and others.

³¹ "Psychology and Troubadours," The Spirit of Romance, p. 92.

³² "Arnold Dolmetsch" (1915), Literary Essays, p. 431. See also For Allen Upward's contribution to Pound's thought on myth, see Donald Davie, Ezra Pound (Penguin, 1975), pp. 63-72 et passim; Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos (Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 91-102; and Richard Godden, "Icons, Etymologies, Origins and Monkey Puzzles in the Languages of Upward and Fenollosa," in Ian F. A. Bell, ed., Ezra Pound: Tactics for Reading (Barnes and Noble, 1982), pp. 221-44, who asserts, further, a confluence between the thought of Upward and Fenollosa.

³³ "Interview with Renö Balance" (1945), What is Surrealism?, p. 256.

³⁴ Peter Makin, Provence and Pound (University of California Press, 1978), pp. 244-47; Leon Surette, A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound's Cantos (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 67-80. See "Psychology and Troubadours," The Spirit of Romance, pp. 92-100, and "Terra Italica" (1931-32), Selected Prose, pp. 55-56.

³⁵ "Cavalcanti," Literary Essays, p. 160. See Stuart Y. McDougal, Ezra Pound and the Troubadour Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 75.

³⁶Guide to Kulchur, p. 77.

³⁷ During 1921 Breton organized Ernst's first one-man exhibition in Paris, consisting of collages, at the Gallerie Au Sans Pareil, which Pound may have seen on one of his trips to France. Ernst moved to Paris in 1922. See Diane Waldman, Max Ernst: A Retrospective (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1975), p. 253.

³⁸The Little Review, IX:4 (Autumn/Winter, 1923-24), pp. 9, 12, 13, 14.

³⁹ "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris" (1911-12), Selected Prose, p. 22.

⁴⁰ "Psychology and Troubadours," The Spirit of Romance, p. 91.

⁴¹ "The Serious Artist," Literary Essays, p. 52.

⁴² "The Wisdom of Poetry" (1912), Selected Prose, p. 360.

⁴³ "Cavalcanti," Literary Essays, p. 154.

⁴⁴ For the scientific background of Pound's poetic and its correspondence with his mystical theory, see lan F. A. Bell, Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra Pound (London: Methuen, 1981); and Martin A. Kayman, "A Model for Pound's Use of 'Science,'" Ezra Pound: Tactics for Reading, pp. 79-102.

⁴⁵ "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris," Selected Prose, p. 23.

⁴⁶ "The Wisdom of Poetry," Selected Prose, p. 361.

⁴⁷ "The Conception of the Subconscious," in Hugo Münsterberg, et. al., Subconscious Phenomena (Richard G. Badger, 1910), p. 131.

⁴⁸ "A Few Don'ts," Poetry, I (March 1913), 200-06; Literary Essays, p. 4.

⁴⁹ "The Conception of the Subconscious," Subconscious Phenomena, pp. 129-30. Years later in his "Introduction to the Fourth Edition" of The Psychology of Insanity, Hart advises that in his work "Freud's topographical differentiation of the mind into conscious, preconscious, and unconscious regions has not been adopted. The existence of unconscious processes has been assumed as a conception necessary for the adequate explanation of the phenomena of consciousness, but these processes are regarded from a functional rather than a topographical standpoint, and they have not the precise and peculiar character which Freud ascribes to his 'Unconscious'" (14-15). Yet, Hart is misconstruing the topographical as the static, for Freud's unconscious is unquestionably composed of dynamic impulses, and conversely, Hart is diminishing the topographical aspect of his own complexes, which remain in the mind in a latent state when not actively influencing consciousness.

⁵⁰Psychology of Insanity, 1st ed., p. v.

⁵¹The Psychology of Insanity, p. 62.

⁵² "The Conception of the Subconscious," Subconscious Phenomena, p. 133.

⁵³ "Affirmations—As For Imagisme" (28 January 1915), Selected Prose, p. 376.

⁵⁴ "The Conception of the Subconscious," Subconscious Phenomena, pp. 134-35.

⁵⁵ "The Conception of the Subconscious," Subconscious Phenomena, pp. 130, 136.

⁵⁶ "Affirmations—As for Imagisme," Selected Prose, p. 376.

⁵⁷ "A Few Don'ts," Literary Essays, p. 4.

⁵⁸ "Vorticism," Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 85.

⁵⁹ "Vorticism," Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 89.

⁶⁰ "What is Surrealism?" (1934), What is Surrealism?, p. 116.

⁶¹ "The Automatic Message" (1933), What is Surrealism?, p. 109.

⁶² In addition to Gefin, pp. xi-xviii, on juxtaposition as a modern artistic technique, see Roger Shattuck, "The Mode of Juxtaposition," in Mary Ann Caws, ed., About French Poetry from Dada to "Tel Quel": Text and Theory (Wayne State University Press, 1974), pp. 19-22.

⁶³ "Vorticism," Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 89.

⁶⁴ The haiku that inspired this one-Image poem also consists of a metaphor based on a coincidental visual similarity:

The fallen blossom flies back to its branch:
A butterfly.

The petals of the flower fluttering through the air to settle on a branch resemble a butterfly in both shape and color, as well as behavior. This resemblance suggests the verbal metaphor of the first line, and then the complete transformation effected by the second. However, the visual superposition of two natural objects in the haiku follows the Oriental sense of the unity and harmony of nature. Such an image is more shocking to the modern Western mind, which has less faith in such a unity. Also, Pound's poem is more disturbing, and more unifying, because the human is being transformed into the natural. See "Vorticism," Gaudier-Brzeska, pp. 88-89. Earl Miner studies the relationship between the haiku and Pound's Image in The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton University Press, 1958), Chapter V.

⁶⁵ "Vortex. Pound.," Blast, No. 1 (20 June 1914) p. 154: "the primary pigment of poetry is the Image.… In painting Kandinski, Picasso. In poetry this by, 'H. D.'" "Oread" originally appeared in The Egoist in 1914 and was reprinted in Collected Poems (Boni and Liveright, 1925).

⁶⁶Uninterrupted Poetry: Selected Writings, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New Directions, 1975), p. 4.

⁶⁷Gaudier-Brzeska (1916), Gaudier-Brzeska, pp. 120-21.

⁶⁸Ripostes (1912); Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems, 2nd ed. (New Directions, 1949), p. 62.

⁶⁹Uninterrupted Poetry, p. 4.

⁷⁰Poetry, 2 (April 1913); Personae, p. 91.

⁷¹Young Cherry Trees, n.p.

⁷² "A Few Don'ts," Literary Essays, p. 6.

⁷³ "Prolegomena," Poetry Review, 1:2 (February 1912), 72-76; Literary Essays, p. 12.

⁷⁴ "A Few Don'ts," Literary Essays, p. 6.

⁷⁵ "A Retrospect," Literary Essays, p. 3. These principles originally appeared in F. S. Flint, "Imagisme," Poetry, I (January 1913), 198-200.

⁷⁶ "A Few Don'ts," Literary Essays, p. 7.

⁷⁷The Psychology of Insanity, 1st ed., pp. 65, 66-67.

⁷⁸ Despite Gage's analytical confusions, his own sensitive, accurate accounts of his experience of the Imagist verse that he discusses support this account of the affective dynamics of the Image. Regarding short Imagist poems, he notes the "poet's suppression of explicit comparison, rendering the two terms of the comparison inter-changeable" (66). Likewise, he observes that the "effect" of the lack of syntactical connection in John Gould Fletcher's "The Skaters" is to "render the subject of the comparison momentarily ambiguous, … creating an equilibrium between the parts of the comparison, … allowing the reader momentarily to view either swallows or skaters in terms of the other" (64). Regarding longer Imagist poems, he admits that "the temporal activity of reading may be manipulated in such a way as to give the reader the illusion of instantaneity" (107), "giving the reader the sensation that his attention has been 'arrested,' as if by a visual scene" (107-08), the stanzas of the poem experienced "as if they had been simultaneous" (111). Similarly, just before he denies the label "metaphor" to "In a Station of the Metro," Gefin observes that "the second line is the 'inward' 'natural picture,' coalescing for an instant with the superimposed external image, so that 'faces in the crowd' and 'petals on a wet black bough' are one" (12).

⁷⁹Selected Prose, p. 453.

⁸⁰ Herbert N. Schneidau, Ezra Pound: The Image and the Real (Louisiana State University Press, 1969), pp. 56-73, sees this event as decisive.

⁸¹ Stock, pp. 201-02.

⁸² In "Vorticism" Pound says, "Ibycus and Lui Ch'e presented the 'Image'" (Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 83).

⁸³ "Imagisme and England: A Vindication and an Anthology," T.P.'s Weekly, XXV (20 February 1915), 185. Pound began, in fact, to perceive the Image in retrospect as if it had been defined as the Ideogram all along: "the ideogrammatic method did not wait for Fenollosa's treatise to become current in book form. We didn't wait to know of Fenollosa's existence" (Selected Prose, p. 453).

⁸⁴ "Vorticism," Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 92.

⁸⁵ "Vorticism," Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 91.

⁸⁶ See "Allen Upward Serious," Selected Prose, pp. 407-12.

⁸⁷ Fenollosa, pp. 25-27.

⁸⁸ "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris," Selected Prose, p. 23.

⁸⁹ "Translators of Greek: Early Translators of Homer; Translation of Aeschylus" (1919), Literary Essays, p. 267.

⁹⁰ Fenollosa, p. 22.

⁹¹ Fenollosa, p. 16.

⁹² Review of Jean Cocteau, Poesies 1917-1920, Dial, LXX (January 1921), 110; "Epstein, Belgion and Meaning" Visual Arts, p. 166. Herbert Schneidau, "Wisdom Past Metaphor: Another View of Pound, Fenollosa, and Objective Verse," Paideuma, V (1976), 15-29, has suggested that the Ideogram is essentially metonymic rather than metaphoric, following Roman Jakobson's distinction between the two modes. The difficulty with this distinction is that, as Paul Ricoeur points out in The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 174-87, Jakobson may be oversimplifying the metaphoric process itself. Randa Dubnick, "Visible Poetry: Metaphor and Metonymy in the Paintings of Renö Magritte," Contemporary Literature, XXI (1980), 407-19, finds both modes present in Magritte's Surrealist work.

⁹³ "A Few Don'ts," Literary Essays, p. 5; "Vorticism," Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 86.

⁹⁴ "Affirmations—As for Imagisme," Selected Prose, pp. 374-75. N. Christoph de Nagy, Ezra Pound's Poetics and Literary Tradition: The Critical Decade (Bern: A. Franke Verlag, 1966), pp. 77-80, offers this passage, incorrectly I believe, as a definition of the original Image.

⁹⁵The Psychology of Insanity, 1st ed., p. 63.

⁹⁶ As Christine Brooke-Rose, A ZBC of Ezra Pound (University of California Press, 1971), observes of the ideogrammatic method, "it is the juxtaposition that creates the idea, by metaphoric replacement" (114). Schneidau's analysis of the Image applies more aptly to the Ideogram: "Imagism's merging of essentiality and definiteness, of conceptual and perceptual images, is in fact the determinative form of the particular containing the universal" (The Image and the Real, 97). Hugh Kenner's discussion of the Ideogram in The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), pp. 76-105, is incisive.

⁹⁷ Pound asked E. E. Cummings if he could include Cummings' translation of Aragon's poem in an upcoming anthology in a letter of 6 April 1933, Selected Letters, 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (Harcourt Brace, 1950), p. 244. The translation is extant in E. E. Cummings, Complete Poems, 1910-1962, 2nd ed., ed. George James. Firmage (London: Granada, 1981), II. 881-97.

⁹⁸ See "Cavalcanti," Literary Essays, p. 154.

⁹⁹ "Affirmations—Vorticism" (14 January 1915), Visual Arts, pp. 7-8.

Warren Ramsey

[In the following essay, Ramsey discusses such qualities as immediacy and precise imagery in an examination of common traits shared by Imagist poetry and the works of nineteenth-century literary Symbolists.]

SOURCE: "Uses of the Visible: American Imagism, French Symbolism," in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. IV, Nos. 1-2, 1967, pp. 177-91.

The actual landscape with its actual horns
Of butcher and baker blowing, as if to hear,
Hear hard, gets at an essential integrity.

—Wallace Stevens

What were the common qualities, if any, of literary symbolism of the later nineteenth century and Imagism—meaning by the latter an idea of a contemporary rightness in English verse that began to come clear around T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, and Ezra Pound about 1910? The question is not easy to answer. If one begins with Flint's recollection, "We were very much influenced by modern French symbolist poetry,"¹ that was shortly before Pound's first appearance at the Poets' Club. Among members of the original "School of Images," loosely grouped since 1908, only Flint and Hulme wrote verse that would now be described as Imagist. Pound was to become familiar with recent French poetry only while he was enunciating the principles of Imagisme and discovering illustrative examples in the writings of Hulme and others. In the modern French poetry which he came to like, sharpness of contour was the rule. But he liked little or nothing that can be called symbolist—if we mean by that an idea of rightness which prevailed around Mallarme about 1885 and for a while thereafter. The same might be said of Amy Lowell. Qualities common to Imagism and symbolism are not to be sought along the usual lines of appreciation and influence.

"Pound and Eliot had dipped, selectively," writes Henry May, "into the reservoir of recent French poetry. Believers in direct, concrete statement, they were not symbolists. They were not concerned with the paradoxes of Baudelaire or the difficult nuances of Mallarmö and Verlaine. What they found in France was novelty and daring, precise new images, Corbiére's irony, Remy de Gourmont's insistence on sensation and dislike of theory. The French, Pound tirelessly insisted, could teach us to be craftsmen and not moralists."²

Flint may or may not have been concerned with the "paradoxes" of Baudelaire, but certain poems from Les Fleurs du mal are hardly disguised by the English cast he gave them in works more or less his own. The "difficult nuances" of Mallarmö and Verlaine are so dissimilar that little purpose is served by mentioning them together, or by pointing to the "novelty and daring" of writers in a tradition essentially far more conservative than the English one—writers whose sense of rhetoric contributed largely to the growth of, particularly, Wallace Stevens. And the chief contribution of one of the nimblest of theorists, Remy de Gourmont—the verse and prose tales that bemused Aldington and Pound being so strangely forgotten now—was his method of dissociating ideas too readily associated.

Apart from these objections, however, the obstinate truth remains that the Imagists were in fact "believers in direct, concrete statement." Thus Renö Taupin, in his L'Influence du symbolisme français sur la poösie amöricaine (de 1910 à 1920), could indicate relatively few resemblances between Imagism and symbolism, though he could suggest parallels between Imagists and Parnassians, who also strove for precision and sought to correct certain Romantic excesses by looking to Gautier and L'Art pour l'Art. More recently, William Pratt has written: "If 'Imagisme is not symbolism,' as Pound insisted, it is a direct descendant: given the different native traditions and the different historical moments, the 'Image' and the 'Symbol' are at their best aesthetic equivalents, the difference being, as Taupin admirably stated it, 'a difference only of precision.'"³ But this difference is crucial; and Taupin had made it clear that in his judgment the less precise image of the symbolist poem differs from that of the imagiste work in its power to yield before an immaterial reality of which it is the sign.⁴

"In their interest in the clearly delineated object," says Don Geiger, "some of the [Imagists'] verse seemed to be sealed in a hard varnish. Many of their poems tended to be pictorial and non-dramatic in character, a kind of imaginative reporting of objects, so that for a time it appeared that they had made a compact to split the world of poetic possibilities with another famous school, the Symbolist poets—with Imagists caring little about how they or anyone else might feel about a carefully described outer world and the Symbolists caring little about describing an outer world which they felt so intensely."⁵

The present study begins with a glance at such main principles as may be discernible in a divided world of poetic possibilities. It will then proceed to the question of immediacy—not a particularly symbolist term, perhaps, but one that will serve to indicate a desideratum of certain poets writing early in the twentieth century, and to poems in which this quality was sought.

As formulated by Pound, Flint, Aldington, and Amy Lowell, the Imagist programme was explicit with regard to three objectives. These were "direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective," rigorous economy in use of words, and composition "in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome." To these principles Aldington added good literary counsel of a cheerful but somewhat general nature, and Pound his now celebrated definition of the image as "that which presents an intellectual or emotional complex in an instant of time." Flint, who had participated in "the Imagist movement" from the beginning and whose knowledge of French poetry remains impressive to this day, was singularly unpretentious in his comments, which include his two-page "History of Imagism." There were four cardinal principles of 'Imagisme' as he stated them. The fourth was "the 'doctrine of the Image'—not for publication."⁶

Prefacing her anthology, Some Imagist Poets, in 1915, Amy Lowell enlarged on the first of the above points. The Imagist, she believed, must endeavor "to use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word." Though "Amygism" was shortly to become a term by which writers could disavow whatever might have been over-rigid in their own theory and practice, only Amy Lowell, among professed Imagists, hinted at a helpful distinction between universals and particulars. "To present an image … " reads her fourth point. "We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poets should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities. … " And she states as a fifth and kindred aim: "To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite."

Finally, Miss Lowell recommended concision, as earlier statements of Imagist purpose had done: " … Most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry."

"Concentration"—"no superfluous word"—"as few adjectives as possible"—the theme is persistent. Hardly less so is that of composition with new freedom of phrase. As Pound and Flint had urged poets to avoid metronomic regularity, so Miss Lowell advised them "to create new rhythms—as the expression of new moods—and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. We do not insist upon 'free-verse' as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as a principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea."

At this distance, no aspect of the Imagist writers is more arresting than the contrast between their pronouncements on style and the organization of language, consisting largely of admonishments, of negatives, and positions of their undeveloped aesthetics. Flint had his intimation, and then said no more, of "a form of expression, like the Japanese, in which an image is the resonant heart of an exquisite moment." Along with his "Don'ts" Pound had said that "it is the presentation of such a complex [intellectual or emotional in an instant of time] which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of great works of art." Like a Proustian moment privilögiö, in the elucidation of which Proust used language very similar to Flint's, the moment of awareness perpetuated in a fine Imagist poem illuminated the author's work as a whole. Hedged about by the negatives of the Imagist poetics, it was an aesthetic affirmation.

French symbolist theory, either as crystallized around Mallarmö or renewed by Albert Thibaudet's reading of Mallarmö and the writers of La Phalange at approximately the time of imagisme, could offer nothing as elegantly prescriptive as the latter movement's "Don'ts." It is, however, possible to point out certain characteristics of symbolist poetry of which Flint and Aldington must have been thoroughly aware. There was, for example, the symbolist passion for order. Nourished by nineteenth-century Hellenism as well as by long tradition, it gave intensity to the search for realities beyond the immediate ones. The symbol was no longer that cipher in the pre-conceived hieroglyph which it had been even for Diderot and for Goethe. It was, instead, embodied in the tautly organized reflexive work: the thing discovered as well as the agent of discovery. There is no better appreciation of the new kind of symbolic order, always precarious and secured afresh by each separate poem, than Wallace Stevens' lines from "The Idea of Order at Key West":

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

The order in question here is imposed upon, rather than revealed within, the objective world. And the order is of a classicist kind. Almost entirely concerned with questions of style though the Imagists were, their conclusions regarding the beauties of omission, the virtues of concentration, are essentially the same as those which Mallarmö and Stefan George had rediscovered before them, in old grammars and rhetorics, if any book was needed, rather than in old grimoires.

Apropos of that peculiar energy of conviction which the Imagists brought to their search for order, their rejection of what they termed Romantic, it is well to remember that Hulme was an admirer of Georges Sorel as well as of Bergson. Human nature is something to which violence must be done. And the late nineteenth-century poets, those who had sought to make le dandysme heroic, a way of life, would not have been surprised by this point of view. As long as that "discipline" or "ascesis" of which Hulme and Eliot speak often did not paralyze the form-making impulse, it was a means of combatting "Romantic vagueness" and discovering beauty in the smallest of small dry things. Suppose, however, that an Imagist ideal of control should, in the mind of a young poet from the "dark occidental continent" (as a writer for the London Egoist called North America) become confused with a latent Puritanism fundamentally intolerant of any aesthetic expression at all? Then that parsimony in use of adjectives, presentation inste ad of representation, Doric simplicity—negative virtues successfully recommended by Aldington to young poets of temperament sufficiently like his own, could turn to flatness, slightly perverse and self-defeating. Recent French verse could suggest means of ellipsis and emphasis to some. To others, especially to Stevens, it suggested just the opposite, the art of language in its richness and variety, sustained and natural styles owing something to sound pedagogical negatives like those of imagisme but never defined or exhausted by them.

And what of a common concern with music on the part of Imagists and symbolists? When Pound urged composition "in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome," this was to jostle the sovereignty of the iambic pentameter, to invite greater freedom of foot and line. He was advocating vers libörö and vers libre, thinking of French poets who had practiced both, and preparing the way for a great many free verse poems in American magazines. Whitman came back sharpened through Laforguian lenses; the best of American free verse was to owe directly or indirectly to French examples or at least to have been tested by them—to be the work of poets who were deliberately setting out to do something else. In either case, the primary unity was that of the line, of no set length, the secondary unity that of the group of lines, marked off from other groups. A free-verse poem, with its apparent waverings, might be the more faithful to fluctuations of attention, and even to "certain rhythms of life and breathing more central to man than his inmost sentiments, since they are the living law, variable with each individual, of his depression and his exaltation, his regrets and his hopes."⁷ For the effort of the vers-libristes had not only been roughly parallel to that of the Impressionist painters, whom they admired. It had also sought to free an inner music, as Bergson understood that term. From such inner music rises the image, more revealing than the abstract product of dialectical or conceptual thought. And music thus understood and much neglected by the Imagists, even by Hulme, the translator of Bergson, is in the immediate background of the movement.

Pound's predilection for musical scores, settings, even composition (including jazz composition) is reasonably well known. Many of his briefer pieces, delicately transparent as they are, and at just the time when imagiste theory was calling for greater density of concrete detail, might have been written with some tentative musical setting in mind. They are words for music perhaps. In this direction lies "the initiative yielded to the Word," as Thibaudet was rediscovering it in Mallarmö at this time—a freeing of language toward forms less encumbered by discourse which had characterized the nineteenth century and accelerated toward the end. Like those defenders of pure poetry who derived from symbolism, Pound makes more explicit claims for the music of verse than did Mallarmö. It was rather the principal taks of the symbolist, at a time when Wagner's presence was somewhat overpowering, to keep clear the border-line between two arts.

If, like Max Jacob's poèmes-phrases8 some of the more rigorously Imagist poems are lacking in inner music, the fact is not to be attributed to their brevity. Take, for example, John Gould Fletcher's

It is evening, and the earth
Wraps her shoulders in an old blue shawl.

This miniature yet complete poem can be appreciated without attention to the fact that it has exactly seventeen syllables, or that it ends in one of those spondees which the Japanese haiku does not require but which Imagist adapters of the form usually did. Fletcher's little poem is neither taut nor angular, neither too short nor too long, be-cause exactly proportionate to the poetic action it presents, and it possesses its own kind of music for the same reason.

Perhaps, as in the case of Jacob's brief poems, the trouble with certain Imagist efforts is simply that two kinds of imagery cannot be dominant at once. Writers who had learned that the visual image is the most effective way of bringing a work, particularly a short work, alive, could not attach equal importance to the more hidden forms of imagery. Except in a few of Mallarmés transitional poems, reconciliation of Parnassian and symbolist modes is rare.

Judith Gautier's Le Livre de jade had been well read; the Goncourts had aroused fresh interest in things Oriental; painters and poets alike had seen some of their most secret hopes realized in Japanese prints. An idea of Oriental art had been formative in turn-of-the-century Paris as in the London of 1908-12. Certain of Mallarmés poems, and some of the Imagists', are composed with a deft minimum of strokes, reminiscent of a Japanese drawing. And another underlying assumption shared by Imagists and symbolists was that of negation as a force. One can turn to Stevens almost as readily as to Mallarmö for examples of the poetry of "pure absence":

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine trees crusted with snow,

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
And spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow;
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and nothing that is.

—"The Snow Man"

The last line, like another of Stevens', "Bring down from nowhere nothing's wax-like blooms" ("Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue"), was in all likelihood influenced by Mallarmé's use of the word rien, which gives to the term some of its etymologically positive meaning. In a more general yet unmistakable way, Stevens' use of imagery of whiteness owes to Mallarmé's. And there is a similar willingness to dispense with the leverage of the subject in Mallarmé's "Eventails" and in Stevens' "Infanta Marina":

And thus she roamed
In the roamings of her fan
Partaking of the sea
And of the evening,
And they flowed around
And uttered their subsiding sound.

The slight gesture is allowed to stand for the universal rhythm.

An essentially classicist desire for interlocking, monad-like forms; a checking of inner dynamism by containing rhythms finding their equivalents in lines of varying length; an appreciation of music as another art presenting, like poetry, a more inclusive action than a picture can—these characteristics are shared in varying degree by symbolists and Imagists.

Coming to the question of precision (understood here as the quality lent to a work by its particulars), we must start with the fact that, characteristically, Mallarmö abstracts details from a given arrangement of objects. An early draft can be fairly direct:

Toujours plus souriant au dösastre plus beau,
Soupirs de sang, or meurtrier, pamoison, fête!
Une millième fois avec ardeur s'apprête
Mon solitaire amour à vaincre le tombeau.

Quoi! de tout ce coucher pas même un cher
lambeau
Ne reste.…

In the revised form of the above, an ablative absolute thrusts more of the implied action into the poem's already long foreground, concentrating the remainder:

Victorieusement fui le suicide beau
Tison de gloire, sang par öcume, or, tempête!
O rire si là-bas une pourpre s'apprête
A ne tendre royal que mon absent tombeau

Quoi! de tout cet öclat pas même le lambeau
S'attarde.…

Lines 2-4 have lost adjectives and gained vivid substantives. But any vestiges of a Romantic sunset piece are lost with the word coucher of the earlier line 5. The more or less direct representation of the first draft has been replaced by a symbolism of general decline and fall.

From the definitive form of Mallarmé's poem to William Carlos Williams' "El Hombre," the distance is little short of interplanetary:

It's a strange courage
You give me, ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise
Toward which you lend no part!

This poem presents a set of objects from which particulars have not been abstracted; perhaps even, in keeping with the early vision of what an Imagist poem might be, the heart of a moment privilögiö. The feeling expressed is of a stoical kind, but the poet remains close to it and to his poem.

After quoting the above lines as his theme, Wallace Stevens continues:

I

Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze,
That reflects neither my face nor any inner part
Of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.

II

Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses
You in its own light.
Be not chimera of morning,
Half-man, half-star.
Be not an intelligence,
Like a widow's bird
Or an old horse.

—"Nuances on a Theme by Williams"

This is lean, precise, shunning abstractions. Reconciliation of subject with object, a main tendency of poetic expression ever since the later eighteenth century, affirmed by Baudelaire's theory of correspondences and refined by symbolist theory and practice, is expressly repudiated. Though subject and object are in fact associated by negative statement, "Nuances" does nothing to diminish the distance between symbolist and Imagist modes. The American poet cherishes the particularities of a set of objects; the French poet suppresses them.

Earlier in this article it was noted that certain recognizably classicist traits are common to symbolist and Imagist verse. One classicist principle, however, could hardly have been shared by an Imagist fully cognizant of Hulme's definition of art as passionate desire for accuracy, by one who had felt the impact of this conception in his own creative process. This was the classical view that aesthetic verisimilitude involved fidelity to an inner model as well as to an external object. The other and more "modern" kind of verisimilitude, which holds the artist responsible for particularizing details of an external object, is not to be sought in Mallarmé's major poems. Inheritor of a sense of the poet's task sometimes very classical indeed, Mallarmö worked toward an essential rather than an existent object. Only in certain poems incidental to his main effort can his conception of the true-seeming be compared to the Imagists'.

"We introduce into human beings the Perfection that properly belongs only to the divine," wrote Hulme, "and thus confuse both human and divine things by not clearly separating them."⁹ Many would try to avoid such confusion. Since about 1910, most poetic practice has tended to show how complex, how disparate and imperfect are the data somehow reconciled in the moment of insight. Mallarmö spoke admiringly of what might be called the "impure poetry" of his time, of poetic styles which have been regarded as models since. But he himself introduced perfection into human beings, and has been chided for "angelism" in words almost identical to Hulme's.

With all the vigor of a new-found conviction that aesthetic ideas are born with flesh upon their bones, Hulme searched the past for examples of the precision he urged.

Of the many lines in Keats's "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil," he singled out one for approval:

And she forgot the blue above the trees.

Why, Hulme wondered, did the poet put 'blue above the trees' and not 'sky'? 'Sky' is just as attractive an expression. Simply for the reason, that he instinctively felt that the word 'sky' would not convey over the actual vividness of the feeling he wanted to express. The choice of the right detail, the blue above the trees, forces the vividness on you. … "¹⁰

Mallarmö and his abstraction toward analogue and arche-type stand apart. French criticism and aesthetics had helped to formulate the new notion of verisimilitude, and had acknowledged the life-giving power of the right detail. Such details turn up even in long-maligned poetry of the eighteenth century. And Sainte-Beuve read the Lake Poets with an attention that he did not give to epistles and satires of the classical periods. He caught a tone new for his time and place, and the vibrations were to be far-reaching:

Je ne suis pas de ceux pour qui les causeries,
Au coin du feu, l'hiver, ont de grandes douceurs;
Car j'ai pour tous voisins d'intröpides chasseurs,
Rêvant de chiens dressös, de meutes aguerries,

Et des fermiers causant jachères et prairies,
Et le juge de paix avec ses vieilles soeurs,
Deux revêches beautös parlant de ravisseurs,
Portraits comme on en voit sur les tapisseries.…

—"Sonnet, Imitö de Wordsworth"

Why was it that Sainte-Beuve, attempting much less here than in some other poems, such as "Les Rayons jaunes" and "Ma Muse," actually accomplished more? No answer is likely to be complete. With reference to some other poems as well, one may be hazarded.

The most versatile of French critics argued effectively in favor of precision, for bocage vert instead of bocage romantique, for lac bleu radier than lac mölancolique, and even for particular shades of green or blue. "… Il semble par trop aisö et par trop simple de dire que les feuilles sont vertes et les flots bleus. En cela peut-être les adversaires du pittoresque se trompent. Les feuilles, en effet, ne sont pas toujours vertes, les flots ne sont pas toujours bleus; ou plutôt il n'y a dans la nature, à parler rigoureusement, ni vert, ni bleu, ni rouge proprement dit; les couleurs naturelles des choses sont des couleurs sans nom; mais, selon la disposition d'âme du spectateur, selon la saison de l'annöe, l'heure du jour, le jeu de la lumière, ces couleurs ondulent à l'infini, et permettent au poète et au peintre d'inventer ainsi à l'infini, tout en paraissant copier."" Such anticipation of Impressionist theory illuminates the only way in which such a "passionate desire for accuracy"¹² as Hulme's can become a viable aesthetic position. The artist can conceivably be content with accuracy as he reacts to swiftly changing appearances, like the water-colorist—whether painter or poet—of 1880, on the eve of the symbolist revelation.

Only so can the artist avoid du beau vert, du beau bleu, colors too much like those of la belle nature of a neo-classical world-view, wherein nature can have only a counter-existence because not freshly apprehended.

Pursuit of verisimilitude-as-accuracy had continued with glances at George Crabbe ("Cities and towns, the various haunts of men / Require the pencil; they defy the pen"), with further lessons from the Lake Poets. The difficulties and dangers of the search were amply justified by Baudelaire's Tableaux parisiens. The representational but far from static poetry of 1880 is explained in great part by this conception of what constitutes aesthetic likeness. Rilke, in whose early writings a struggle between a rather brutal naturalism and a somewhat diaphanous immaterialism was waged, learned partly from Rodin to give necessary density to his thing-poems. Malte, and the generation for which he stood, learned to see.

More than one literary movement was buoyed up by new understanding of the rôle of the active imagination and of the visual image as evidence of the creative imagination. An emphasis on visual imagery in several literary traditions led to poems of marked concentration and immediacy, turning, many of them, around a single visual image. Despite some degeneration into self-parody, inevitable in a body of verse that wavered between artificial concision and splendid freedom of form, some of the best poets writing in English were submitted to an Imagist tempering. Certain guiding principles found expression in Imagist theory. Others, more important, relating to the nature of the image, were expressed sketchily or not at all—and required no further elucidation because sensed by the creatively inclined.

Hulme is least satisfying, and other Anglo-American Imagists with him, in his failure to give due place to the non-imitative arts, to music and architecture. Time and again, he insists on the slipperiness of the non-mimetic. "Readers of poetry," he says, characteristically, "may attach more importance to the other things, but this is the quality the poets recognize among each other. If one wants to fix it down then one can describe it as a kind of instinctive feeling which is conveyed over to one, that the poet is describing something which is actually present to him, which he realises visually at first hand."¹³ This is not good enough as far as it goes, because it goes too far and sets the perspective for well-known depreciation of Milton. It is stimulating atelier criticism, however, speaking in a plain blunt no-nonsense way to a generation. Valéry's Eupalinos, seeing in the temple he had built the mathematical image of a physical reality, went much deeper. But many young writers learned from Hulme, directly or indirectly, to face objects without flinching.

If a petite voie of real interest to modern writers can be traced from eighteenth-century passages to whole twentieth-century poems, what characteristic is most likely to pass unnoticed along this way? Taking as a first example Sainte-Beuve's adaptation, quoted above, there is no lack of the small dry things in which, Hulme and the Imagists believed, beauty must be discovered.¹⁴ Substantives are vivid, and for the time and place, unexpected. Adjectives are few and telling. A genre scene is poetically presented, rather than prosaically represented. Very much a part of the effect, too, are the singing alexandrines, touching with a kind of candid lyricism a complex of images which most of Sainte-Beuve's contemporary readers, used to rarer Romantic altitudes, found unpoetic. Then, of course, there is "tapisseries," suddenly transforming homely objects and circumstances.

Thöophile Gautier, seeking to delineate the character and bustling movement of a Flemish market-town, bringing in snatches of conversation along with the conversational tone—writing, in short, very much the kind of verse Sainte-Beuve had in mind and possibly thinking of Joseph Delorme as he did so—also relied ultimately on the refracting power of a work of graphic art:

Sur le bord d'un canal profond dont les eaux
vertes
Dorment, de nönuphars et de bateaux couvertes,
Avec ses toits aigus, ses immenses greniers,
Les tours au front d'ardoise où nichent les
cigognes,
Les cabarets bruyants qui regorgent d'ivrognes,
Est un vieux bourg flamand tel que le peint
Teniers.…

—"Albertus"

Though something of greater consequence occurs in Tableaux parisiens, that section of his book which Baudelaire had not meant to write at first, which took possession of him and became the most interesting section of Les Fleurs du mal, the poetic means are similar. Not quite submerged by the genre detail of Baudelaire's poem are its plaster deities:

Je n'ai pas oubliö, voisine de la ville,
Notre blanche maison, petite mais tranquille;
Sa Pomone de plôtre et sa vieille Vönus
Dans un bosquet chétif cachant leurs membres
nus.…

More or less hidden, too, is the timelessness of the imagery in Baudelaire's as in Sainte-Beuve's poem: an imagery of works and days, domestic or pastoral, dealing with pasture or plowland, farmers and village notables. The quiet beginning and equally quiet end of Baudelaire's poem enclose universals.

A number of poems and groups of poems deserve consideration here, among them a whole series composed by Mallarmö as legends for a set of pictures by the realistic painter Raffaelli. Like its companion-pieces, "Le Savetier" deals with the dismay of the idealist faced by the world of appearances. For lavender-vendor, road-mender, garlic-and-onion seller, for workingman's spouse, glazier, newsboy, and haberdasher, Mallarmö sketches not another picture but a definitive trait, a gesture. The jottings are as impromptu as the same poet's letters in verse, and more revealing of a scene, an epoch, and an author than his symbolist poems. To notice only the lines about the cobbler:

Hors de la poix rien à faire,
Le lys naît blanc, comme odeur
Simplement je le pröfère
A ce bon raccommodeur.

Il va de cuir à ma paire
Adjoindre plus que je n'eus
Jamais, cela dösespère
Un besoin de talons nus.

Son marteau qui ne dövie
Fixe de clous gouailleurs
Sur la semelle l'envie
Tourjours conduisant ailleurs.

Il recröerait des souliers,
O pieds! si vous le vouliez!

Away from the cobbler's wax, the poet comments sadly, there isn't much doing. The lily is born white, and it only so happens that he prefers it to this excellent cobbler. Bent on half-soling the poet's shoes, the fellow will make them more of the earth earthy than ever before, and the relentless hammer never misses. This is picturesque poetry with a difference: like an Imagist poem, it isolates a single moment, a single revealing gesture, in this case the unswerving hammer upraised above the mocking nails.

Francis Jammes, who said, "Le poète arrive àunâge où quand must be il lui dit: le ciel suffit,"¹⁵ must be neglected here. For reasons that should neglected be here. rather For reasons obvious after this much discussion of imagiste aims and ideas, he was not thus passed over by Pound. But the aspect of Jammes's work which drew Pound's best superlatives, the small town "Spoon-Rivered," as he said, in Existences, is not the one of most interest today. It is, rather, "la vie des choses," the way in which objects either homely or exotic are allowed to carry with them their suggestions of a unique, rather than an individual and private symbolism, as was the case before about 1885.

Another poet relevant to the Imagist effort must be hurried over. The persona in Les Poösies et le Journal Intime de A. O. Barnabooth has the effect of setting Valery Larbaud's verse at about the same distance from its author as the one in Sainte-Beuve's La Vie, poösies et pensöes de Joseph Delorme. There would be other reasons, too, for drawing a parallel between the exponent of the Lake Poets and the particular sponsor of James Joyce—two students of things English whose verse is a prolongation of acute critical faculties. No doubt Barnabooth, with his vision of someone rattling long in a cab, someone who hums for his own benefit

Au long de Brompton Road, Marylebone ou Holborn
Et regarde en songeant à la littörature
Les hauts monuments noirs dans l'air öpais et jaune

was more of a poet than Delorme. His verse-postcards from various points of interest (the best of them from London, however) are bright and clear or properly murky. But the question here is not that of relative merit but rather of a kind of verse.

Hulme's notebooks can bring us close to the center of the Imagist prise de conscience. In them we find, for one thing, signs of sympathy with that Flemish vision of primary reality which, ever since the seventeenth century, has fascinated those whose thoughts have strayed toward a kind of art that would remain close to life:

Town sky-line

On a summer day, in Town,
Where chimneys fret the cumuli,
Flora passing in disdain
Lifts her flounced blue gown, the sky.
So see I, her white cloud petticoat,
Clear Valenciennes, meshed by twisted cowls,
Rent by tall chimneys, torn lace, frayed and
fissured,
Slowly died along the scented way.

Meticulously rendered detail, something not unlike that well-known mirror of realistic fiction borne along the path, the whole suddenly touched by mention of a goddess (even a Roman one!)—surely Hulme must have remembered, as he trudged into Flanders, Baudelaire's "Je n'ai pas oubliö.… " A very different kind of feeling is in question in the following:

As a fowl in the tall grass lies
Beneath the terror of the hawk,
The tressed white light crept
Whispering with hand on mouth mysterious
Hunting the leaping shadows in straight streets
By the white houses of old Flemish towns.

The use of slowing monosyllables in the final line is somewhat less powerful man in line 3. Perhaps it is the fact that a single word is not a monosyllable, and this word having associations reaching far beyond the primary reality which gives the fine grave beauty to this line.

Then there are the fragments along the way toward one of the best known of Hulme's distinguished handful of poems:

Here stand I on the pavement hard
From love's warm paradise debarred.

Oh God, narrow the sky,
The old star-eaten blanket,
Till it fold me round in warmth.

Down the long desolate streets of stars

No blanket is the sky to keep warm the little stars

Somewhere the gods (the blanket-makers in the
prairie of cold)
Sleep in their blankets.
["Religion is the expansive lie of temporary
warmth."]16

The poem using something from all these fragments illustrates many of the qualities and some of limitations of Imagist verse:

The Embankment

(The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold,
bitter night)

Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth's the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

The subtitle is merely descriptive. The first two lines are highly contrived. Despite the change from "pavement hard" to "hard pavement," for which Pound claimed responsibility, the opening of the poem tends to confirm one's suspicion that Hulme's anti-"Romanticism" was no simple unequivocal sentiment. And the Imagist has his usual difficulty in passing from the crisp haiku-like record of a moment of insight to the more sustained work: the earlier past of "The Embankment" only serves to prepare, more or less artificially, the last three lines. These, however, invite comparison, if not with symbolist poetry, at least with that poesie sans mensonge which Rimbaud desired so ardently. It allows the glimpse of beauty or suggestion of grandeur in combination with that commonplace detail which seems to be necessary to satisfy our modern sense of what is plausible, real.

To that unobtrusive revelation of universals beneath particulars which had characterized a modern epistolary genre for almost a century, the Imagists added their conviction, shared by contemporary poets of other traditions, that the images of things, clear and immediate on the limits of consciousness, stand revealed in the only possible light. To those who, like Malte, have learned to see, they give up their secret: that strict minimum of traits, that inner reality subject to time, without which something would not have been what for a moment it was. What Imagist verse lacked in mystery, in shadow and relief, it sometimes made up in poignancy, because of the fragility of its forms, the inevitable narrowness of the limits within which a vision can remain entirely sharp and clear.

NOTES

¹ In "A History of Imagism," The Egoist, II (May 1, 1915), 71.

²The End of American Innocence (New York, 1960), p. 273.

³The Imagist Poem, edited and with an introduction by William Pratt (New York, 1963), p. 35.

⁴ Renö Taupin, "L'Tmagisme et le réel," in his L'Influence du symbolisme français sur la poösie amöricaine (de 1910 à 1920) (Paris, 1929), pp. 104-106.

⁵ "Imagism; the New Poetry Forty Years After," Prairie Schooner, XXX, No. 2 (Summer 1956), 139-40.

⁶ Ezra Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste" was published in Poetry for March 1913; it was included in "A Retrospect," Pavannes and Divisions (New York, 1918), pp. 95-111 ; and in "A Stray Document," Make It New (London, 1934), pp. 335-41. F. S. Flint's essay, "Imagisme," was published in Poetry, March 1913; his "A History of Imagism," in The Egoist (1915), has been mentioned above. See also and

⁷ " … certains rythmes de vie et de respiration qui sont plus intörieurs à l'homme que ses sentiments les plus intörieurs, ötant la loi vivante, variable avec chaque personne, de sa döpression et de son exaltation, de ses regrets et de ses espörances." Bergson, Le Rire.

⁸ For a discussion of Jacob's haiku-like poems and their possible debt to Imagist verse, see S. J. Collier, "Max Jacob's Le Cornet à dös: A Critical Analysis," French Studies, XI, No. 2 (April 1957), 164.

⁹ Quoted by Glenn Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry (Stanford, 1931), p. 14.

¹⁰ "Bergson's Theory of Art," Speculations, ed. Herbert Read, 2nd ed. (London, reprinted 1954), pp. 163-64.

¹¹ Sainte-Beuve, Poösies complètes (Paris, 1840), pp. 137-38.

¹² "You could define art, then, as a passionate desire for accuracy, and the essentially aesthetic emotion as the excitement which is generated by direct communication. Ordinary language communicates nothing of the individuality and freshness of things." "Bergson's Theory of Art," Speculations, pp. 162-163.

¹³Ibid., p. 167. Again: "Now any tendency towards counter language of this kind has to be carefully avoided by poetry. It always endeavors, on the contrary, to arrest you and to make you continuously see a physical thing." Ibid., p. 166.

¹⁴ "It is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things." "Romanticism and Classicism," Speculations, p. 131. "I prophesy that a period of dry, hard, classical verse is coming." Ibid., p. 133.

¹⁵ In the preface to his Premier Livre des quatrains. Quoted by Taupin, op. cit., p. 104.

¹⁶ Fragments published in Further Speculations, ed. Sam Hynes (Minneapolis, 1955), pp. 216-217.

James Naremore

[In the following essay, Naremore discusses the influence of contemporary French poetry on the poetics of Imagism, emphasizing particularly the role of the English critic F. S. Flint in informing English writers of recent developments in French literature.]

SOURCE: "The Imagists and the French 'Generation of 1900'," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 11, No. 3, Summer, 1970, pp. 354-74.

In the August 1912 issue of The Poetry Review, F. S. Flint wrote a lengthy essay entitled "Contemporary French Poetry." The essay—monograph might be a better term for it, since it occupies virtually the entire issue—is an encyclopedic review of modern French poetry, with copious quotations and an account of the rapid proliferation of new French "schools," including Neo-Mallarmisme, the Abbey Group, Unanimisme, Futurisme, L'Impulsion-isme, Les Paroxystes, Les Fantasistes, etc. Scattered among the writings of the Imagist poets, and in the histories of the Imagist movement as well, one can find testimony to the considerable importance of Flint's project. Ezra Pound, for example, wrote that it was something "everybody had to get; it was the first large article on contemporary stuff; and Renö Taupin has called it "the most informed and important [discussion of new French poetry] in England."¹

The essay had an immediate effect on Pound, who appears at that time to have known relatively little about French poetry.² His memory of the article is inaccurate in some details, but he is quite clear about his reaction: "In the spring or early summer of 1912," he writes, he, Aldington, and H.D. "thought we had as much right to a group name, at least as much right, as a number of French 'schools' proclaimed by Mr. Flint in the August number of Harold Monro's magazine for 1911."³ Pound is wrong about the year of Flint's essay and about the magazine where it appeared. His reference to "spring or early summer" may be wrong, too; he could not have responded when he says he did unless he had read the survey prior to publication (something which was quite possible). In any case, Pound credits the review of new French poetry with at least one important result: it prompted him to announce a new school, the Imagistes, complete with a French title.

In the years that followed the appearance of Flint's essay, the Imagist interest in contemporary French verse was obvious, and it has been well documented. Pound, Aldington, Amy Lowell, and Fletcher all made references to new French poetry. In 1913, Pound began his series of articles, "The Approach to Paris," in The New Age, where he praised not only Rimbaud and Gourmont, but also the younger poets like Romains and Vildrac; he also suggested to Harriet Monroe that she establish a permanent column in Poetry devoted to French verse. At times he was caustic toward those who knew nothing of the French moderns. "There is no culture that is not at least bilingual," he wrote. "Yet in 1912 or 1913 we find an American editor who writes of Henri de Rögnier and M. Remy de Gourmont as 'these young men.'… He has no desire to add to his presumably superabundant knowledge."⁴ In The Egoist between 1914 and 1915 virtually everyone talked about French poetry; a number of young French poets were published in the magazine, and Nicholas Beauduin discussed new work from France. Meanwhile Aldington wrote about French poetry for The Little Review, and the prefaces to the Imagist anthologies contained references to younger men like Vildrac, Duhamel, and Spire. Through all this, Flint continued to be the best informed exponent of the French, writing "The French Chronicle" for Poetry and Drama, where he reviewed poets like Andrö Salmon and Apollinaire, and commented again on the futurist movement. In 1919, he wrote a comprehensive survey of recent French verse for The Chapbook, a survey rather like his earlier Poetry Review article, but this time devoted to postwar poetry.

All this is more or less a matter of record. But in spite of the obvious interest the Imagists had in new French poetry, very little has been said about the influence this poetry might have had on Imagist practice. Everybody knows that several of the Imagists were Francophiles, but until recently the French influence on Imagist poetics has been explained largely in terms of French symbolism. I say "until recently" because the latest historian of the Imagist movement, Stanley Coffman, persuasively argues that the importance of the symbolists to Imagism has been exaggerated.⁵

There remains, however, very little in the histories to indicate what, if anything, the Imagists might have absorbed from the poets who were roughly their contemporaries, the post-symbolist, neo-symbolist generation in France, the "generation of 1900," as Flint called them in his essay. The importance of Flint's and later Pound's discussions of modern French poetry has not yet been examined in detail. M. Taupin has documented the relationship between the Imagists and the symbolists, but on the subject of the younger French poets he has only a few remarks. He says at one point that movements like futurism and Unanimisme had a "real but very vague, imprecise and paradoxical influence" on the Imagists; the French and the English were both seeking to rid poetry of sentimentality, he notes, and in their mutual desire to attack the abuse of adjectives and abstractions, they were no doubt in sympathy.⁶ Of Flint's Poetry Review survey, he says that it gave the English a sense of "clear intentions which are affirmed in the manner of manifestos," and of the "souci de la technique."⁷ He indicates as well that such essays by Flint had much to do with the popularity of the vers libre in England, but he does not make the relevance of the younger poets much more precise. Flint himself once commented, "The Imagists admitted that they were contemporaries of the Post-Impressionists and the Futurists, but they had nothing in common with these schools."⁸ The critics who have discussed Imagism have generally taken such remarks at something near to face value, so that we hear much about French symbolsim, haiku, and the eclecticism of Pound, but almost nothing about the generation of 1900 in France and their importance.

In a way, this lack of commentary on the younger French poets is understandable. One major Imagist poet, H.D., spoke relatively little about modern French experiments, even when a knowledge of them was most in vogue, and she arrived at her manner before she learned about the French. Few of the Imagists wrote about French poetry as well as Pound, and none of them with as much knowledge and care as Flint. But Flint and Pound were both important as aestheticians for the movement, and they both did enough proselytizing for the French to enable us to talk about a possible modern French influence.

In point of fact, if one reviews the contemporary French poets Flint and later Pound introduced in the little magazines during the Imagist years, one can find the evidence for such an influence. Certainly the young French poets were not the sole inspiration for Imagism; the seeds of the English movement and many of its characteristic styles were there before there was widespread interest in new French poetry. But if they did not find in France a pantheon or a revelation, the Imagists discovered a literary scene which they felt was vital, alive to experimentation, and worth emulating. It may be true that as a "school" the Imagists had relatively little in common with the manifestos of Unanimisme or futurism or any of the other French movements, just as they had little in common with the stated aims of the symbolists. One has only to look at Pound's letters or the Imagist anthologies to see that the Imagists did not have so terribly much in common even with one another. Nevertheless the connection between the work of Arcos, Romains, Duhamel, Vildrac, Ghéon, Apollinaire, Marinetti, and others, and the work of several of the Imagists, is often quite noticeable, enough so for us to talk about influences or sometimes rapports between the French and the English during the first two decades of the century. In some cases, the relationship seems much more direct, the influence more tangible, than that between the Imagists and the French symbolists.

The younger generation of French poets, like the Imagists after them, elaborated some of the suggestions offered by the symbolists. Generally, they saw themselves as a development from symbolism rather than as a reaction against it. They charged symbolism with certain unfortunate mannerisms and extravagances, but many of them also clearly acknowledged a debt to the symbolists. For the younger French poets, and for Flint at least among the English, the "heritage" of symbolism was twofold: it had left behind the notion of free verse, and it had experimented with "the exquisite juxtaposition of images."¹⁹ Flint regarded the older generation—Laforgue, the older Regnier, Viele-Griffin, Verhaeren, Fort, Claudel, and Jammes—as men who had "retested the capabilities of language."¹⁰ He praised them because they sought to "strip poetry of rhetoric"; because they used "images" to evoke "intuitions" (his Bergsonian explanation of symbolist poetry may show a debt to Hulme, though the French themselves had been using Bergson this way); and because they began experimentation with a "new manner," the vers libre. Their aim had been to break the tyranny of the alexandrine, to subordinate rhyme to "the general music of the verse," and to make rhyme give way to assonance "where the music demanded it."¹¹

The symbolists had been the first theorists of a new technique; the generation of 1900, who were Flint's subject in the Poetry Review survey, had revived the method and passionately advocated it. As Pound once pointed out, the Imagists owed to the symbolists "comme le pain doit quelque chose au vanneur de blö";¹² the technical experiments of the younger French poets, on the other hand, were a more immediate source of education for the English and Americans. Vildrac and Duhamel, for example, had suggested that rhyme be abandoned entirely, except perhaps for an occasional charming or witty adornment. And the younger generation as a whole advocated experimentation; they wanted not a form, but "a free spirit, capable of finding expression in an infinite variety of forms."¹³ The cult of sincerity, of organic form, was being exhorted with a new intensity.

As this might suggest, the younger French poets were important to Imagist versification. Pound, for example, repeatedly emphasized the economy of the new French poetry: "I, personally, happen to be tired of verses which are left full of blank spaces for interchangeable adjectives. In the more or less related systems of versification which have been adopted by Romains, Chennevière, Vildrac, Duhamel, and their friends, I do not find such an excessive allowance of blank spaces, and this seems to me a healthy tendency."¹⁴ Beyond this general value, however, the French moderns had more specific contributions to make. Nearly all the poets Flint writes of in the 1912 Poetry Review article advocate some sort of verse experimentation, so that the essay becomes a virtual survey of ideas about free verse. Flint's own interest in the subject may come from Robert De Souza, whose book, Du Rythme en Français, had just been published. In any case, one can make a good argument that Flint's discussion of the new French poets in 1912 was a major source of encouragement for vers libre in England. Symons, Henley, Ford, and the members of the "School of Images" had all made experiments with free verse, but before the period 1912 to 1917, as both Aldington and T. S. Eliot have testified, it was almost impossible to speak of vers libre outside France. During that time, however, the term, along with Flint's "cadence," became a part of everyone's literary baggage.

Of the younger French poets who influenced the Imagists' practice, or who had close affinities with it, mention has often been made of Charles Vildrac and Georges Duhamel and their book, Notes sur la technique poötique, which Flint and Pound seem both to have read with great interest. Before discussing the Notes, however, I want to mention one poet who has received no attention at all from the historians: he is Henri Ghéon, whose idea of the "analytical strophe" Flint wrote about at length. Taupin has contended that Ghéon appears in Flint's survey of 1912 almost by way of contrast with Vildrac and Duhamel, and that his theories had little effect. But while Flint does point out some of the objections of De Souza and others to Ghéon's method, the treatment he himself gives is more sympathetic; and whether Ghéon became a direct influence or not, his versification is strikingly like what we can find in a number of Imagist poems.

Ghéon was a leading experimenter with the "new manner." In a speech that Flint once translated for Poetry and Drama, Ghéon had said: "for a poem to exist, it will never suffice for it to have a harmony of sentiments, of images and of ideas; harmony is as though void, if before all there is no harmony of sounds. The most intimate poem is something sonorous. Even hushed, it speaks to the ear before speaking to the mind."¹⁵ Ghéon's concern with the rhythms and sounds of poetry led him to advocate that the term "verse" be done away with altogether, to be replaced by the "rhythmic unit," or hemistich, which would contribute to the basic unit of composition, the strophe. As Flint summarizes the theory, "the rhythmic units… though each is given a line to itself, only count by their groupings, proportions, and reciprocal relations in the strophe-organism uniting them."¹⁶ Here, as Flint quoted it, is an example from Ghon' s practice:

Saine ivresse quotidienne
si connue
que le coeur ne s'en d'éfie point
jour après jour
je l'aurais bue
comme sans amour
—et mon coeur est plein:
plus d'autre soif
plus d'autre faim
quand le vent passe!17

This style, with its repetitions and carefully modulated phrases that vary in length, is the characteristic manner in the short early poems of Aldington and H.D., arrived at by reading Greek poetry, and before they had any knowledge of Ghéon. It is little wonder that Pound, reading this, decided he was entitled to found a school of his own. Here, cited by Flint for instructive comparison, is a more extreme instance of Ghéon's method:

C'est Alger
ou tout germe
ou tout fleure
ou tout fleurit
murit:
voici
toutes les graines
tous les fruits
d'ici
d'ailleurs
semez!
cueillez!18

Not all of Ghéon's poems took this form, and Ghéon was not the only poet of the period who designed his work by piling up successive short rhythmic units of irregular length. But Ghéon theorized that this manner was ideal, and it became, for a time, identified with him. De Souza, Vildrac, and Duhamel had objected that "analytical strophe" was as inadequate a term as vers libre, that the natural tendency to pronounce successive groups of rhythmic feet in a single breath ought to be an indication of something called a verse, and that some ideas are not suited to the shortening of the breath that they felt Ghéon's form caused. Duhamel and Vildrac were condescending; they remarked: "cela doit rester une technique d'exception."¹⁹ Flint, however, had a more positive reaction. Speaking of the poem above, he observed: "if you discount a slight staccato effect, which is either involuntarily felt by the reader or forced on the poet by his form, you will find that these lines have a very cunning rhydim."²⁰

The Imagists never adopted the term "analytical strophe," but on the whole they were less cautious than Duhamel and Vildrac about ordering the poem as a column of rather short units. As I have said, Aldington and H.D. came upon a similar manner before they knew modern French literature, and they were quite probably an influence on Lowell, Fletcher, and Williams. In any case, a large number of Imagist poems use a form like the one Ghéon had recommended. Consider, for example, the way Amy Lowell imitates the waves in "Venus Transiens":

Tell me,
Was Venus more beautiful
Than you are,
When she topped
The crinkled waves,
Drifting shoreward
On her plaited shell?21

In terms of his emphasis on the strophe as the basic unit of composition, as opposed to the verse, Ghéon was closer in spirit to many Imagist poems than were Vildrac and Duhamel. However, because the Imagists had already made a few experiments in this manner before they came upon Ghéon, his work may represent nothing more than a striking affinity with their practice. The Notes of Vildrac and Duhamel, on the other hand, were a clearly acknowledged influence.

Flint described the Duhamel-Vildrac theories in the Poetry Review essay, and allusions to them appear in the later public and private statements of both Pound and Flint, and in the prefaces to the Imagist anthologies. Duhamel and Vildrac had recommended a verse that was partly free and partly controlled by some rhythmic pattern; they argued that in most of the good verse by their contemporaries, the strophe was held in order by what they called a "rhythmic constant." In this technique, each verse contains a fixed number of syllables plus a variable part of the line. These lines by Duhamel, for example, are said to have a four-syllable constant, which I have capitalized:

PENSEZ-VOUS PAS a ce tison dont la course
CINGLE LE NOIR d'un long regret qui ne veut
pas perir?

AH! DEVINEZ comment je règne ou je demeure
ET QUE JE VIS entre ici et la, longuement.22

Actually, the first eight syllables in each of these lines form a regular unit, and one can feel the pressure of the alexandrine behind the verses. There is the sense that a traditional form is there but that it is being subtly departed from. Such an effect is perhaps analogous to T. S. Eliot's notions that free verse cannot really be free, and to his experiments in the early poems like "Prufrock," where there is the pressure of blank verse behind the apparently irregular form.

Duhamel and Vildrac described several other means of imposing a sense of design on the poem, including one technique that the historians of Imagism seem to have overlooked: the öquilibre rythmique, in which a certain mathematical relationship could be established between the hemistiches. For example, these lines by Andrö Salmon:

Cette rose / à ton corsage,
Cette fleur rouge / à ton col entr' ouvert…23

I have marked off the hemistiches so that the relationship can be seen clearly: the first is related to the second in the same way as the third is related to the fourth; the first is related to the third in the same way as the second is related to the fourth; and so on, through all the possible combinations.

Richard Aldington claimed to have used the rhythmic constant, and though his measure is not as regular as the one described in the Notes, the habit that he and the other Imagists made of repeating words or phrases at the opening of each verse has the effect of a constant. Likewise, Pound never copied directly the effects Duhamel and Vildrac had described, but he does at times seem to have learned a lesson from them. Take this passage from "Dance Figure," for example:

I have not found thee in the tents,
In the broken darkness.
I have not found thee at the well-head
Among the women with pitchers.24

These lines are not, strictly speaking, öquilibre rythmique, but the principle is the same. Thus the relation of the first line to the second is the same as the relation of the third to the fourth, and so on.

In general, what Pound and the other Imagists seem to have adopted from Duhamel and Vildrac was not so much their specific applications of metric—obviously French and English are different languages with different metrical traditions and different problems for the poet—as their aim, which was to attack rhyme and make the verse conform to the meaning of the poet while still retaining some sense of form. Duhamel and Vildrac were also important to the Imagists because of their effective attack on "dishonesty." Vildrac especially seems to have interested Pound by his ability to write clearly and without affectation. In "The Approach to Paris," Pound wrote, "Those who are interested in ritual and… invocation may have been interested in M. de Gourmont's litanies, those who are interested in a certain purging of the poetic idiom may be interested in the work of such men as Vildrac."²⁵ Some of the best known proclamations of the Imagists are in fact drawn from the Notes. I do not think that anyone has ever noticed that Flint's famous description of Imagist verse, "in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome,"²⁶ later repeated by Pound in Pavannes and Divisions, is an echo of a remark by Duhamel and Vildrac: "nous pouvons chanter sans metronome."²⁷ Indeed, Flint's term, "cadence," probably also comes from the Notes, where it is used quite often.

Marinetti and the futurists also offered suggestions that the Imagists found attractive, although the relationship between futurism and Imagism is in many ways a tenuous one. The Imagists did not seek to reject the past, and they avoided the eccentricities that were associated with Marinetti and his followers. On the whole, their attitude toward futurism was ambivalent. Flint was one of the first to discuss the futurists, in the 1912 Poetry Review essay, and the next year he somewhat reluctantly talked about futurism in "The French Chronicle" for Poetry and Drama. In 1912 he could write: "Read the futuristic programme again, and then ask yourself whether English poetry, too, has not need of the greater part of it."²⁸ But the part of the program the Imagists felt the need of, at least where versification was concerned, was not much more than what they found in a number of young French poets who were not futurists.

There was rather little specific contribution by the futurists to Imagist versification, which never became "words at liberty." In 1913 Flint seemed intrigued by Marinetti's attack on the "typographical harmony of the page, which is contrary to the flux and reflux of the language,"²⁹ but in succeeding years neither he nor any of the inner circle of Imagists carried on this attack, unless one considers vers libre itself an instance. Not until E. E. Cummings, so far as I can tell, does a poet in English make any concentrated and effective attack on traditional typography. There were, however, some suggestions by Marinetti that had greater effect. "What is the use," Flint wrote in Poetry and Drama, "of logical syntax in poetry? Why should we have so absolute a respect for the integrity of words?" Pondering the futurist manifesto, Flint saw that poetry might become "a series of emotional ejaculations, cunningly modulated, and coloured by a swift play of subtle and far-reaching analogies."³⁰ Certainly many of the Imagist experiments in later years correspond roughly to this description. Parts of J. G. Fletcher's "London Excursion," and a number of Amy Lowell's poems in Pictures of a Floating World (1919), poems like "Dolphins in Blue Water" or "Motor Lights on a Hill Road," are not much more than verbs, participles, images, and analogies in a very loose syntactical arrangement. In general, however, the futurists do not seem to have done much more than reinforce certain convictions about versification that the Imagists obtained from many sources, including their own innovations. Coffman, I think, quite accurately sums up the relationship between futurism and Imagism: "Both rigidly restricted the use of the adjective.… Both proclaimed the need of the modern poet for a free form of verse. Both condemned rhetoric. Both (the Futurist more aggressively than the Imagist) asserted the importance of complete freedom for the play of images and analogies. Futurism's vigor and energy … and its concentration on its own times had an undeniable appeal to the Imagism of the early years."³¹

Coffman's last sentence serves to remind us that if the younger poets in France had an effect on Imagist versification, they also had an influence on the choice of subject. Generally speaking, before 1912 the English poets had no obvious modernity of subject matter. In this regard, a group of French poets, including Andrö Spire, Renö Arcos, Jules Romains, and the Italian Marinetti, had a significant effect in the way they were able to deal poetically with the atmosphere of contemporary life. Flint, for example, wrote with what now seems an almost naive admiration of Spire's ability to create poetry out of mundane affairs: "He wanders through the cities watching men and women at work; he is not afraid to write of a servant dusting and the gritty loathsomeness to her of the dust."³² And in 1913 Pound wrote that he could not see about him "any young man whose work is as refreshing as Romains'." On Un âtre en Marche, he made these comments: "The author has achieved a form which fully conveys the sense of modern life. He is able to mention any familiar thing … without its seeming incongruous, and the result is undeniably poetic."³³

A year before Pound's remarks were written, Flint had quoted Romains' poetry at great length in The Poetry Review, with this description of it: "M. Romains is a great creator of images. He is the epic poet of modern life.… What other poet would dare … to celebrate with fervor the underground railway (Deux Poèmes)?… Imagine a man who wanders through a large town, brooding over the everchanging spectacle … alternately exalted and depressed, but always rendering his vision and his sensations by words that reproduce exactly what he has seen, except that it has become intensified and serried in passing through his imagination."³⁴ The last sentence would be a fairly good description of a number of later Imagist poems. The work of Aldington is a case in point. His earliest poems, "Choricos," "To a Greek Marble," "Argyria," "Stele," "Lesbia," have an unorthodox versification, but their subject matter is classicism; the settings, the images, the entire paraphernalia of the poems are designed to suggest the ambiance of Greek antiquity. The languorous vowel sounds and the use of color and decor in a poem like "Choricos" are very like the early Tennyson. But most of the poems Aldington wrote after Flint and Pound had discussed the French moderns are quite different. Compare "Cinema Exit," for example, or "In the Tube":

A row of advertisements,
A row of windows,
Set in brown woodwork pitted with brass nails,
A row of hard faces,
Immobile,
In the swaying train,
Rush across the flickering background of
fluted dingy tunnel;
A row of eyes,
Eyes of greed, of pitiful blankness, of
plethoric complacency,
Immobile,
Gaze, stare at one point,
At my eyes.35

I have already discussed this style of versification in regard to Henri Ghéon; notice the repetitions and the way the line lengths are determined by the speaker's voice, by what he wants to emphasize. This style, however, was with Aldington from the start. What is new here is the series of images of the modern city, of man in relation to the crowd and the machine. One cannot argue that the poem was directly influenced by Romains or any other poet, but there is good reason to believe that Aldington had drawn the lessons of the French moderns. He has none of the acceptance of the city that we feel in Romains or Apollinaire, but he does give us vivid images of the city; and he renders "his vision and his sensations by words that reproduce exactly what he has seen, except that it has become intensified and serried in passing through his … imagination."

Flint also began to show around 1912 an interest in urban visions, and in poems like "The Beggar" and "Eau-Forte" he made conscious use of ugliness. His poems of this sort are often very like Aldington's; Flint's "Tube," for instance, is virtually the same poem as Aldington's "In the Tube." He was more and more preoccupied with the relationship of the sensitive individual to the crowd, and in this respect his work approximates the description Pound gave to the poetry of Vildrac: "the Nietzschean, preunanimist type," he called it, in which the poet "tries to impress his personality on the crowd and is disillusioned."³⁶ The closest Flint comes to the crowd-spirit is in these lines:

All I meet are shabby, all go one way,
Drawn by the same magnet, urged by the
same demon.
We are the respectable; and behind us,
though we do not see him,
Driving us with his goad, is hunger—the
first law of our land…

For him we shove each other at the tramcars,
Crowd elbow to elbow in the tubes, through
which we are hurled.
Packed and swaying.

But the problem described here is more personal than social. "Hunger" is the necessity that makes a poet hold a job, that forces him to join a crowd of which he wants no part:

To-morrow I shall spend the best hours
of my day
Pent up with people who do not speak the
language I seek,
And who would not understand it if it were
found.37

Pound was perhaps the least influenced by the subject matter and social philosophy of the French schools, in spite of his great admiration for Romains. After 1912, his versification is sometimes reminiscent of the French, and once he had read Duhamel and others he was prompted to make a "pact" with Walt Whitman. (Ghéon had wanted to call the Unanimistes "Whitmanistes.") But the poems of Ripostes and after do not show any special interest in the city; the reference to "a million people surly with traffic" in "N. Y." is about as close as Pound comes to the subject. By contrast, J. G. Fletcher, who perhaps next to Flint knew the French poets better than any of the Imagists, made use of both the Unanimistes and futurists. His "America, 1915," for example, sounds a good deal like both Whitman and the French: "Immense machines are clamoring, rattling, battling, wheeling, screaming, heaving, weaving.… Between the cities, over plain and bill, reel double paths of shining steel, where screaming locomotives pass like black shuttles … strong black bird machines [bear] men on their backs. Purring autos squawk and squeal, and spray and flutter, pale flashes through the rack."³⁸ The weight and frequency of verbals, the attempt to endow mechanical objects with animal characteristics, the celebration of autos, trains, and airplanes—all this can be found in French experimentation around 1912.

"London Excursion" is a far more successful example of Fletcher's poetry, and it shows the French influence even more strikingly. The poem describes a man going into London by bus, spending the day walking the streets, and returning home at night. Here are the impressions of the protagonist as he stands at a bus stop:

Black shapes bending
Taxicabs crush in the crowd.

The tops are each a shining square
Shuttles that steadily press through woolly
fabric.

Drooping blossom,
Gas standards over
Spray out jingling tumult
Of white-hot rays.

Monotonous domes of bowler-hats
Vibrate in the heat.
Silently, easily we sway through braying
traffic,
Down the crowded street.
The tumult crouches over us,
Or suddenly drifts to one side.39

A contemporary reviewer noted, "If 'London Excursion' follows any lead, it is the lead of the new schools of poetry and painting in France."⁴⁰ The poem is indeed redolent of French experiment. The syntax and imagery, as I have already indicated, have something in common with the uses Flint had suggested might be made of futurism. To see just how French the poem is, compare it with Apollinaire's "Zone," written in 1912:

Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts
bêle ce matin

J'ai vu ce matin une jolie rue dont j'ai
oublié le nom
Neuve et propre du soleil elle était le
clairon
Les directeurs les ouvriers et les belles
sténo-dactylographes
Du lundi matin au samedi soir quatre fois
par jour y passent
Le matin par trois fois la sirène y gémit
Une cloche rageuse y aboie vers midi

Maintenant tu marches dans Paris tout seul
parmi la foule
Des troupeaux d'autobus mugissants près de
toi roulent.41

I do not know if Fletcher had "Zone" in mind when he wrote "London Excursion." Certainly the two poems are different in several ways, but they also have some marked similarities: both have protagonists who are walking the streets of large cities, both have a time span of a single day, both have an unusual syntax and a very free play of images and analogies. Even details in me poems are alike: Fletcher's "braying traffic" is strikingly reminiscent of "le troupeau des ponts bêle" or of me "troupeaux d'autobus mugissants près de toi roulent" in Apollinaire. Whether Fletcher used "Zone" or not (he had, by me way, read Apollinaire), the comparison should indicate how real was me influence of the French moderns on his poetry.

This discussion of Fletcher's poem leads to the subject of what influence contemporary French poets may have had on the quality of the image itself. In this case, the doctrine of the English poets seems to have been sufficiently codified during the discussions of the earlier "School of Images" and through Pound's intense devotion to a Parnassian clarity. In this respect, however, we should note that while Pound said little about the images of the new French poets, he made clarity of language one of their distinguishing virtues: "There would seem to be a certain agreement between the styles of Romains, Duhamel, Vildrac, Jouve, Arcos, … and a few others, though Romains may have been the prime mover for their sort of clarification of the speech."⁴² And even if the notion of the primacy of the image did not come from the generation of 1900, the Imagists did sometimes find in their contemporaries a use of the image to which they could respond with approval. Reference to the image and praise of effective imagery occur everywhere in Flint's Poetry Review survey. He praises, for example, me "illumination of vivid imagery" in Paul Castiaux:

Au ras dunes,
Classiquement importune
A ce soir parfumé d'essences recueillies
La pleine lune
Caresse d'inutile ivoire le ciel vert.43

But these particular lines smack too much of the symbolistes to have earned Pound's approval. In fact, he largely passes over the younger poets' use of images and reserves most of his praise in that respect for Gautier's Emaux et Camöes, for the "presentative method" of Laurent de Tailhade, and for Francis Jammes. One contemporary French poet who could produce Pound's hard, clear image was Jean de Bosschère. Neither Flint nor Pound mentions his work in the 1912-13 period, but Flint wrote a translation of The Closed Door in 1917, and Bosschère himself wrote an appreciation of Pound in The Egoist. May Sinclair, who introduced Flint's translation, described Bosschère's images as having "Sharpness, precision, purity, the cold clearness of crystal."⁴⁴ Bosschère, however, is hardly an influence; his work in this vein comes a bit late, and he, like the other French poets who were praised for their images, seems only to have produced the kind of effects the Imagists were already creating and arguing for.

The question of influences on the concept of the image is a difficult one in any case, since it is by no means clear that the Imagists had the same notion of what the image was. Flint and Pound, for example, had very different ideas in this respect. The difference is indicated in May Sinclair's translation of Bosschère, where she points out that there is a marked difference between Bosschère's poetry and Flint's; it is also shown in Pound's remark that Flint "and Ford and one or two others shd. by careful cataloging have been in another group, but in those far days there weren't enough non-symmetricals to have each a farm to themselves."⁴⁵ Pound had wanted to emphasize a radical difference between the Imagists and the French symbolists, but Flint felt no such compulsion. Pound's comment on "permanent metaphor," a metaphor that corresponds exactly to the poetic emotion and that "is, as I understand it, 'symbolism' in its profounder sense,"⁴⁶ is as close as he comes to acknowleding any arrière-plan for the image. Flint, and perhaps Hulme before him, was more impressed by the symbolists and Bergson. As a result, he was more inclined to use terms like "symbol" and "image" interchangeably. Here, for example, is his explanation of the poetic image, which, he says, the younger French poets inherited from the previous generation:

A symbol is a sign used in place of reality, as in algebra; but the symbolist poet attempts to give you an intuition of the reality itself, and of the forces, vague to us, behind it, by a series of images which the imagination seizes and brings together in its effort to insert itself and express that reality, and to evoke at the same time the infinity of which it is the culminating point in the present.⁴⁷

I have emphasized some of the words here to indicate the relationship between symbolism, Henri Bergson, and the poetic image. One of the more striking things about this passage, at least if we contrast it with Pound's ideas, is that it contends "image" is a better term for what the French symbolists were seeking than "symbol." Flint was, one notices, inclined to use the term "infinity" in relation to the image, but to explain the working of the image in the language of Bergson, with terms like "intuition" and "insert."

It was in part because of his interest in Bergson that Flint admired the modern French poet Renö Arcos. It is probably Bergson (whom Flint had helped T. E. Hulme translate), and perhaps Arcos as well, who is somewhere behind this poem by Flint:

O golden-red and tall chrysanthemums,
you are the graceful soul of the china vase
wherein you stand
amid your leaves.

O quiet room,
you are the symbol of my patient heart.

O flowers of flame, O tall chrysanthemums,
my love who comes
will wave wide ripples of disquiet there,
and a great tide of the eternal sea
will rise at her approach,
and surge to song.

O quiet room, O flame chrysanthemums,
images of my heart and its proud love,
you have no presage of the power that comes
to fill with anguish the essential calm.

O calm wrought face, O sphinx behind the door,
her hand is on the latch!48

One may notice the feeling of real duration mat is evoked by the overwrought atmosphere, the speaker's hypersensitivity to minutiae. Also, notice the way expressions like "soul," "symbol," and "images" are used interchangeably. The poem records an instance of what Arcos called "paroxysm," an especially intense variety of the pathetic fallacy in which, as Flint had described the effect in Arcos' poetry, the objects are infused with a "glowing sensation" that unifies and embodies the "scrap-metal of experience."⁴⁹

This, again, is not to say that Arcos was a direct influence, though he could well have been. Where the doctrine of the image is concerned, the French moderns and the Imagists often came upon the same effects separately, though sometimes by the same paths. The relationship between the new French poets and the Imagists in this respect can be described in most cases by Pound's remark on Rimbaud's "Tête de Faune": "I am not sure that we would notice the poem if we had not come, by our own route, to this precise desire."⁵⁰ While the Effort Libre was a very real influence on Imagist versification, and while the younger French poets helped to transform the subject matter of Imagist poetry, the French moderns might be said to have affirmed the doctrine of the image in their own ways, so that France and England and America sometimes seemed to be parts of the same school.

This paper began with a reference to F. S. Flint, and it is appropriate that it should end with him. For if Flint did not single-handedly account for the interest in modern French literature during the period, he was always the first and best informed exponent of that literature. His importance to his contemporaries in this regard is roughly like the importance of Arthur Symons to the generation before. I want to emphasize that importance because Flint is usually portrayed as a minor character in the Imagist movement. In America he is an especially obscure figure, even in comparison with Amy Lowell or J. G. Fletcher—this in spite of the fact that Robert Frost several times claimed that Flint was the originator of Imagism.⁵¹ In the histories, he is often characterized as T. E. Hulme's adjutant, as a latecomer to the movement, and as a man so in love with French literature that he was a less discriminating critic than Pound.⁵²

One can trace what may well be the source of the last of these notions. It is first voiced by Pound himself, in a letter to Renö Taupin: "Fort difference entre Flint: (tolörance pour tous les fautes et imböcillitös des poètes français.) Moi—très sévère—et intolérance."⁵³ Pound is talking about Flint's Poetry Review survey, but he is both inaccurate and somewhat unfair. That particular essay has a clearly defined descriptive intent. It aims to provide a complete landscape of modern French experimentation, and it constantly defers to that aim, even though it often expresses pleasure with some poets and dissatisfaction or disagreement with others. There are, in fact, relatively few poets about whom Flint does not express some intellectual or aesthetic reservations; and it is clear that he thinks poets like Nicolas Beauduin or Henri Martin-Barzun are minor compared to Arcos, Spire, Vildrac, Duhamel, and Romains. Flint was a gentler, more self-effacing personality than Pound; his temperament was not suited to the manifesto, and that may be why he has received comparatively little attention from the historians. But even though he had what Glenn Hughes calls a "tendency toward self-disparagement" and what Richard Aldington termed "an almost imbecile modesty,"⁵⁴ that does not mean he was undiscriminating. Flint, for example, did not overpraise Jules Romains, as Pound did. Nor did he dismiss Apollinaire's Alcools by saying that it was "a clever book," as Pound did. On the contrary, Flint's judgment of Apollinaire—"a curious, fantastic, keen, supple poet, expert in subtle and piercing notations"⁵⁵—is a good deal more acute than Pound's.

But all this is not so much intended to lower Pound's reputation as to raise Flint's. If he had done nothing more than write the Poetry Review survey, his importance to the Imagist movement would still be considerable. As a matter of fact, he did do more. As Pound himself once cryptically remarked, "Frankie is another study,"⁵⁶ a study that remains largely undone.

NOTES

¹ Letter to Harriet Monroe, The Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. D. D. Paige (New York, 1950), p. 35; René Taupin,

L'Influence du symbolisme français sur la poösie americaine (de 1910 à 1920) (Paris, 1929), p. 91; my translation of Taupin.

I am deeply grateful to Mrs. Cyrena N. Pondrom, from whom I received much helpful advice in the preparation of this article. Her examination of the transmission of post-symbolist French influence to English poetry, 1900-1920, The Road from Paris, is forthcoming.

² See, for example, N. Christoph de Nagy, The Poetry of Ezra Pound: The Pre-Imagist Stage (Bern, 1960); see also

³Pavannes and Divisions (New York, 1918), p. 95. Pound's remark on p. 96 should also be noted: "The first use of the word 'Imagiste' was in my note to T. E. Hulme's five poems, printed at the end of my 'Ripostes' in the autumn of 1912." In other words, Pound began using the word immediately after the appearance of Flint's essay.

⁴Ibid., p. 243.

⁵Imagism: A Chapter in the History of Modern Poetry (Norman, 1951), pp. 74-103.

⁶ Taupin, p. 119.

⁷Ibid., p. 91.

⁸ Quoted by Jacob Isaacs, The Background of Modern Poetry (New York, 1952), p. 35.

⁹ F. S. Flint, "Contemporary French Poetry," The Poetry Review (New York, 1952), p. 35.

¹⁰Ibid., p. 57.

¹¹Ibid., p. 360.

¹² Letter to Taupin, Letters, p. 218.

¹³ "Contemporary French Poetry," p. 361.

¹⁴ "The Approach to Paris," The New Age, XIII (September 25, 1913), pp. 632-633.

¹⁵Poetry and Drama, II (March 1914), 43.

¹⁶ "Contemporary French Poetry," p. 363.

¹⁷ Quoted by Flint, "Contemporary French Poetry," p. 363.

¹⁸Ibid.

¹⁹ Georges Duhamel and Charles Vildrac, Notes sur la technique poötique (Paris, 1925), p. 27.

²⁰ "Contemporary French Poetry," p. 364.

²¹The Poems of Amy Lowell (Boston, 1955), p. 210.

²² Duhamel and Vildrac, p. 13.

²³ Quoted by Duhamel and Vildrac, p. 23.

²⁴Ezra Pound: Selected Poems (London, 1928), p. 98.

²⁵ "The Approach to Paris," p. 632.

²⁶ "Imagisme," Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, I (March 1913), 199.

²⁷ Duhamel and Vildrac, p. 13.

²⁸ "Contemporary French Poetry," p. 411.

²⁹ "The French Chronicle," Poetry and Drama, I (September 1913), 360.

³⁰Ibid.

³¹ Coffman, pp. 196-197.

³² "Contemporary French Poetry," p. 367.

³³ "The Approach to Paris," The New Age, XIII (September 18, 1913), 608.

³⁴ "Contemporary French Poetry," p. 383.

³⁵The Poems of Richard Aldington (New York, 1934), p. 39.

³⁶ "The Approach to Paris" (September 25, 1913), p. 631.

³⁷Otherworld: Cadences (London, 1920), pp. 6-7.

³⁸The Little Review, II (May 1915), 23-25.

³⁹ As quoted in The Little Review, p. 31.

⁴⁰ George Lane, "Some Imagist Poets," The Little Review, II (May 1915), 31.

⁴¹Alcools (Garden City, N.Y., 1965), pp. 3-7.

⁴² "The Approach to Paris" (September 18, 1913), p. 607.

⁴³ Quoted by Flint, "Contemporary French Poetry," p. 378.

⁴⁴The Closed Door (London, 1917), p. 6.

⁴⁵ Letter to Glenn Hughes, Letters, p. 213.

⁴⁶ "Vorticism," Fortnightly Review, XCVI (September 1, 1914), 463.

⁴⁷ "Contemporary French Poetry," p. 357.

⁴⁸Cadences (London, 1915), p. 4.

⁴⁹ "Contemporary French Poetry," p. 385.

⁵⁰ "The Approach to Paris," The New Age, XIII (October 16, 1913), 726.

⁵¹ Jacob Isaacs, "Best Loved of American Poets," The Listener, April 1, 1954, pp. 565-566.

⁵² See Herbert Read, The True Voice of Feeling (New York, 1953), p. 105; Coffman, pp. 106-113; Taupin, p. 91.

⁵³ Letter to Taupin, Letters, p. 216.

⁵⁴ Glenn Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry (Stanford, 1931), p. 165.

⁵⁵ "Contemporary French Poetry," p. 362.

⁵⁶ Letter to Michael Roberts, Letters, p. 296.

Elaine Rusinko

[In the following essay, which was based on a paper presented at the National Conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Rusinko identifies similarities between Imagism and Russian Acmeism.]

SOURCE: "Russian Acmeism and Anglo-American Imagism," in Ulbandus Review, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring, 1978, pp. 37-49.

In his introduction to The Spirit of Romance, Ezra Pound described the history of literary criticism as "a vain struggle to find a terminology which will define something."¹ In inventing the term "Imagism," (if not the entire movement), Pound contributed to the frustration of subsequent literary critics and historians, who have vainly attempted to define this poetic school, which encompassed, at one time or another in the decade of its existence, the work of Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound himself, among others. Described, at the one extreme, as "the starting point of modern poetry" (T. S. Eliot), and at the other as "a few points in agreement on a small number of principles for a few weeks" (René Taupin),² the term "Imagism" continues to defy simple definition. In Russian literary history, Acmeism has suffered much the same fate. Associated with certain clichés, no simple definition has been able to describe the work of even the movement's three outstanding representatives, Gumilev, Akhmatova, and Mandelshtam, not to mention their numerous followers and imitators.³

What then is to be gained from juxtaposing these two amorphous terms and analyzing the comparison? Of course, both movements deserve attention if only because they directed the early talents of what were to become outstanding poets. However, they also occupy a crucial stage in the development of modern poetry, and perhaps the study of Imagism and Acmeism is more valuable for the insight it provides into the process of literary development, a process which, especially in the early years of the twentieth century, paid little attention to national boundaries. By now it is generally recognized that Russian Symbolism was a facet of a broader, international movement, but the international scope of the movement which succeeded Symbolism is not so well known.⁴ And because, within their respective literary histories, each movement has become encumbered by clichés and catch-words, perhaps the comparative approach may not be unprofitable.

However, this is not the introduction to an influence study. Though recent research has shown that Gumilev was, in fact, acquainted with certain British literary figures,⁵ and that Akhmatova's later poetry demonstrates a familiarity with Eliot's work,⁶ this occurred long after the creation of the principles of Acmeism, which are so similar to those expressed about the same time by the Imagists. Apparently neither group was aware of the other before about 1915.⁷ Rather, each group absorbed what was in the international poetic air and reacted independently along similar lines—thus providing a much more interesting problem for the literary historian than a case of direct influence. The question then becomes, what was in that international poetic atmosphere that prompted the simultaneous spontaneous generation of Acmeism and Imagism?

This question is an illustration of how the comparative method can illuminate some of the dark spots in Russian literary history. Traditionally, Acmeism has been seen as a reaction to Symbolism. This oversimplification has, for the most part, given way to a more subtle description of Acmeism, as a continuation and reform of Symbolism. This generalization, though accurate, has outlived its usefulness. The British example suggests another approach to the question of the sources of inspiration and origins of Acmeism. Gumilev, in his manifesto "Acmeism and the Heritage of Symbolism," acknowledges only the highest sort of influence—Shakespeare, Villon, Rabelais, Gautier.⁸ Though he pays homage elsewhere to Annensky and Bryusov, one gets the feeling that Gumilev was reluctant to lessen the originality of the new movement by acknowledging the influence of contemporaries. The Imagists were more candid about their models. In Pound's words, "The history of English poetic glory is a history of successful steals from the French."⁹ It now becomes clear that Acmeism also owes much to French poetry, not only to the heritage of French Symbolism as filtered through Bryusov's aesthetic brand of Symbolism, but directly as well.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, the older generation of French Symbolists had ceded their positions to a new generation of poets, and these were introducing reforms in the Symbolist tradition. This younger group of poets—Remy de Gourmont, Henri de Rögnier, Francis Jammes, Paul Claudel, Charles Vildrac and Georges Duhamel—objected to the excessive vagueness of their predecessors, and introduced a note of precision into their poetry. This was to be the decisive influence on both Acmeism and Imagism.¹⁰ Though Gumilev was certainly aware of the new developments in French poetry and probably even met some of the practitioners during his stay in Paris in 1907-1908, he acknowledges them as models only in 1917, in a recently discovered article in an English journal,11 where he singles out Jammes, Claudel, Vildrac, and Duhamel as models for Russian poets. To be sure, the 1912 Acmeist manifesto had expressed preference for Romanic light over Germanic mistiness, but nowhere is Gumilev as explicit as Pound about "going to school to the French" until after he has "singlehandedly invented," so to speak, Acmeism. No doubt a further exploration of this French influence would prove fruitful.

Despite the similarities of their origin, however, Acmeism and Imagism were not in exactly analogous starting positions. Much of the innovative groundwork already accomplished by the Symbolists in Russia—the modernization of poetic diction, experimentation with rhyme and meter—had to be done initially in England by Imagism. This accounts for the fact that Imagism is often considered the starting point of modern English poetry, whereas in Russian literary history, Acmeism is overshadowed by the more revolutionary accomplishments of both its predecessor, Symbolism, and its contemporary rival, Futurism. The Imagists were reacting against the conventionalism of the Victorian poetic tradition; the Acmeists, against the "abstractionism" of the Symbolists. The result, however, amounted to the same thing—a turn away from conventionality, banality, and vagueness to concreteness, freshness of language and perspective, and emphasis on technique. Both Acmeists and Imagists saw their purpose as therapeutic, to bring poetry out of the "blurry" nineteenth century into the "hardness" of the twentieth, to use Pound's terms.

However, considering the times and the prevalence of literary polemic, this common sense approach to technique seemed an insufficient basis for a literary school. It was necessary to have a movement complete with manifesto and ideology in order to substantiate the seriousness of the cause.¹² In fact, neither movement was as revolutionary as it liked to appear; among the modernists, both Acmeists and Imagists were traditionalists. However, a philosophy was necessary, and, in each case, the ideology proved to be the weak spot in their defenses. Gumilev's theoretical statements were deliberately provocative, and subsequent criticism of Acmeism was often aimed at the rather weak theory rather than at the poetry itself. Gumilev's counterpart as theoretician in the Imagist movement was T. E. Hulme. Hulme's writings, particularly his essay "Romanticism and Classicism,"¹³ reveal a cultural conservatism and classical orientation which is not unlike that expressed by Gumilev in his Acmeist manifesto.

Writing around 1912, Hulme predicted a "classical revival" in poetry, which was to refute the romantic confusion of poetry and religion. (He calls romanticism "spilt religion" [118]). His rather idiosyncratic definition of romanticism and classicism has caused some critical confusion, but, in fact, it provides a useful framework for the understanding of post-Symbolism—Russian, as well as English. The romantic, says Hulme, "must always be talking of the infinite," always "flying off into the circumambient gas," while in classical verse, the poet never forgets the finiteness of man, "he remembers always that he is mixed up with earth." (120) This recalls Gumilev's emphasis on the distinctness of the spheres of human experience, of poetry and religion, and his insistence that poetry concern itself with the real world, instead of mystical and spiritual matters.

In opposition to romanticism's "sloppiness," Hulme proposes what he calls a "dry and hard, properly classical poetry." (126) He explains what he means by this:

The essence of poetry to most people is that it must lead them to a beyond of some kind. Verse strictly confined to the earthly and the definite … might seem to them to be excellent writing, excellent craftsmanship, but not poetry. So much has romanticism debauched us, that, without some form of vagueness, we deny the highest. (127) … It is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things. (131)

Of course, Acmeism also represented a reconsideration of aesthetic values. Gumilev complains that mystical Symbolism, that strain in which Blok and Vyacheslav Ivanov persisted, ignored the true value and beauty of material objects in favor of what they represent of the other world. Acmeism, he said, insisted on the "specific gravity" of objects. Half a year earlier, Pound had used the same metaphor to describe the attitude of Imagism: "Poetry is in some odd way concerned with the specific gravity of things."¹⁴

Both Hulme and Gumilev had set up their programs primarily to counter the prevailing poetic ideology and, secondarily, to support their proposals for technical reform, which, perhaps, were not really in need of ideological support. In the Russian example, the aesthetic position advocated by Gumilev could not compete successfully on the same grounds with the more sophisticated mystical philosophy of the Symbolists, and Acmeism was hampered, rather than helped, by its pseudo-philosophical backing. In the Imagist movement, however, Hulme the philosopher early gave way to Pound the poet, and the emphasis shifted from abstract theory to questions of poetic technique. Nonetheless, when we isolate the aesthetic ideals of the Acmeist-Imagist ideology—an emphasis on the earthly, the beauty of "small dry things," hardness—we find that they correspond nicely to the technical principles demonstrated by the poetry itself. These principles were never clearly formulated by the Acmeists, but Pound provides a guide for the aspiring poet in his list of rules entitled "A Few Don'ts by an Imagist."¹⁵

Perhaps the most fundamental "don't" warns against effortless, inspired poetry and emphasizes the importance of craftsmanship and technique. "Don't imagine that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music." (202) Again, Gumilev uses the same metaphor: "One must study to write poems, just as long and as diligently as to play the piano. After all, it wouldn't occur to anyone to play the piano, not having studied it."¹⁶ Pound defined "technique" as "doing what one sets out to do, in the most efficient manner."¹⁷ Technique implies control, and good writing, says Pound, is writing that is perfectly controlled, where the writer says just what he means.

This emphasis on control, on technique, was sure to antagonize those poets who considered poetry a mystery, divinely inspired. Pound anticipated criticism: "It is not uncommon to hear practicing 'poets' speak of 'technique' as if it were a thing antipathetic to poetry,"¹⁸ and one is reminded of Hulme's prediction that the new "classicism" will not be recognized as poetry by those who have been "debauched" by romanticism. And this, in fact, is exactly how Acmeism and Imagism were received by their rivals. As late as 1921, for example, Blok objected to Gumilev's analytical article on poetic theory, "This is terrible. Up to now we have thought completely differently, … that for a poet, inspiration is necessary."¹⁹ In fact, neither Acmeism nor Imagism denied the poet the possibility of genuine inspiration; indeed, if one looks past the "classical" trappings, it is apparent that both movements rest upon certain underlying romantic principles. Hulme allowed inspiration to creep into his theory under the name of "fancy." Gumilev, despite his emphasis on teaching the craft of poetry, recognized that no amount of technical knowledge can make up for the spark of talent necessary to the genuine poet, and throughout his work, he insists on the privileged and superior nature of the poet. And Pound concludes his list of rules with a quotation from Vildrac and Duhamel's Notes sur la technique poètique: "Mais d'abord il faut être un poète." ("Don'ts," 206)

Why then this emphasis on technique, if in the end it all comes down to being a poet? In this apparent contradiction lies an important contribution of the post-Symbolists at the expense, perhaps, of ideological consistency. Both Acmeism and Imagism were concerned not only with producing great art, but with revitalizing tradition, and for this revitalization, a "back to basics" approach was required. "Through technique alone," said Pound, "has the art, as distinct from the work of the accidentally inspired genius, any chance for resurrection."²⁹ Similarly, Gumilev praised Vyacheslav Ivanov's "great distinctive individuality," but warned that for those who do not possess his genius, to follow him would be futile. He noted the gap between "this individual solitary development" of Ivanov and "that balance of all the capacities of the spirit" which is Acmeism. (IV, 315) Whereas Symbolism had "completed its circle of development and was in decline," according to Gumilev, Acmeism represented a foundation for future poetic development.²¹

In order to foster this development, and being dedicated to the proposition that poetry is a craft that can be learned, Acmeism and Imagism went about the business of teaching it. Both Pound and Gumilev demonstrate a pedagogical approach in their theoretical writings,²² and each was involved in actual studio work with aspiring poets.²³ Their approaches were similar. The first step in becoming a poet is to master the rules of the craft. Pound's "Don'ts" demand, "Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counterpoint and all the minutiae of his craft. No time is too great to give to these matters .… even if the artist seldom have need of them." (203) Gumilev advised his students, "When you have mastered all the rules and have done innumerable poetic exercises, then you will be able to discard them and write according to inspiration, regardless of everything. As Calderon said, then you can lock the rules in a box and throw the key into the sea." (Odoevtseva, 41)

The poetry of both Pound and Gumilev, the primary teachers in their respective schools, demonstrates that they practiced what they preached. They each experimented with difficult and unusual forms—ballades, ghazals, the Japanese haiku and tanka, the Malaysian pantoum. And Imagism became identified with the innovative form "free verse," vers libre, which Pound insisted was at least as difficult as the conventional forms. He quotes Eliot, "No vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job." (Literary Essays, 12)

Pound further advised the aspiring Imagist, in his inimitable, half-ironic manner, "Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it." ("Don'ts," 202) Pound readily acknowledged his own debt to the French Symbolists and the Provençal tradition of the troubadours. Gumilev's work also shows the effect of his study of troubadour poetry, as well as his debt to the French Parnassians. Other Acmeists and Imagists frankly pattern their verse after classical Greek models. In contrast to their Futurist rivals, Acmeists and Imagists were not revolutionaries; their only endeavor, as F. S. Flint put it, was "to write in accordance with the best tradition, as they found it in the best writers of all time,"²⁴ and Mandelshtam's definition of Acmeism ("toska po mirovoi kul'ture") applies as well to the Imagists.

Going beyond mere imitation of great artists, both Imagists and Acmeists practiced the craft of poetry by doing translations. Pound advised, "Translation is … good training, if you find that your original matter 'wobbles' when you try to rewrite it. The meaning of the poem to be translated can not "wobble'." ("Don'ts," 205) And Gumilev, in a theoretical article on translation, stressed the necessity of "expressing the spirit of the original through the form." (IV, 190) Both Pound and Gumilev did translations from Oriental poetry, Gumilev translated Coleridge and Gautier, Pound and the other Imagists put the Provençal poets and classical Greek poetry into English. The influence of this translation work is felt in their own poetry, where one finds numerous examples of poems whose form and imagery were inspired by the classics or by Oriental masters. The latter especially provided a model for the kind of primitivism, or fresh perspective, sought by the post-Symbolists.

Pound's well-known haiku-style poem "In a Station of the Metro" is as good an example as any of the result of Imagist craftsmanship:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.25

It illustrates Pound's concept of the "image,"—"that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."²⁶ Another formulation of this doctrine of the image became the first rule of Imagism, "direct treatment of the 'thing'." (Flint, 199) Richard Aldington explained, with tongue in cheek, precisely what this meant:

To convey emotion by presenting the object and circumstance of the emotion without comment. For example, we do not say, 'Oh how I admire that exquisite, that beautiful, that—25 more adjectives—woman' or 'o exquisite, o beautiful, o 25 more adjectives woman, you are cosmic, let us spoon for ever,' but we present that woman, we make an 'image' of her, we make the scene convey the emotion.²⁷

And he uses the stanza from H.D.'s poetry as illustration: "The hard sand breaks,/ And the grains of it/ Are clear as wine."

Pound was so struck by the clarity and intensity of H.D.'s poems that he later declared that he invented Imagism in order to publicize them. However, this style of simple and vivid imagery goes back to T. E. Hulme, who insisted that poetry must always be a "solid thing," and that "each word must be an image seen, not a counter."²⁸ Hulme's images created "solid things" from abstract and distant objects, revitalizing motifs which had grown stale in conventional poetic usage. He sees "the ruddy moon lean over a hedge/ Like a red-faced farmer," or "tangled in the tall mast's corded height" like a "child's balloon forgotten after play."²⁹ Very similar is what Gumilev noted as Mandelshtam's "first Acmeism image": "Net, ne luna a svetlyi tsiferblat/ siyaet mine. " ("No, not the moon, but a bright clock-face/ shines at me." IV, 364) In this sort of "solid imagery," the object is diminished in the interests of clarity, economy and simplicity. Gorodetsky called this device "reverse hyperbole," and claimed it as an Acmeist invention. (Timenchik, 28) Gumilev's poetry provides many examples: "the sunset like a cracked melon" (I, 249), or the "eye of the sun … like the heart of a pomegranate" (II, 79). And of course, Akhmatova's "concrete imagery" is too well known to require comment. This return to the "modesty" of the concrete image was a significant part of the revitalization of the art. As Pound put it,

It is not until poetry lives again 'close to the thing' that it will be a vital part of contemporary life. As long as the poet says not what he … means, but is content to say something ornate and approximate, just so long will serious people, intently alive, consider poetry as balderdash—a sort of embroidery for dilletantes and women.³⁰

The second Imagist rule, to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation, accounts for the terseness of much of Imagist, and similarly, Acmeist verse. Resembling Pound's haiku-style "Metro" poem is Gumilev's short poem, written in the style of the Oriental tanka:

Vot devushka s gazelimi glazami
Vykhodit zamuzh za amerikantsa—
Zachem Kolumb Ameriku otkryl?

The girl with eyes like a gazelle
Is marrying an American—
Why did Columbus discover America?

(II, 166)

Pound called this technique the "presentative method" as opposed to the "representational method" of Symbolism: "It means constatation of fact. It presents. It does not comment. The presentative method is equity. It fights for a sane valuation. It cannot bring fine things into ridicule. It will not pervert a thing from its true use by trying to ascribe to it alien uses."³¹ This formulation is strikingly similar to Mandelshtam's wonder at the law of identity, A = A,³² and his description of the chaos that reigned in Symbolism, where every pot and broom refused to accept its true earthly function and demanded a higher, absolute, symbolic significance.³³ Again this principle, essential to Acmeism and Imagism, can be traced to the French. Francis Jammes writes, "The poet arrives at an age where, when he says, the sky is blue, this expression is sufficient." (Quoted in Taupin, 104) With Acmeism and Imagism, not only the individual poet, but poetry as a whole reached this paradoxical stage of sophisticated primitivism.

The creative moment of modern poetry represented by Acmeism and Imagism foundered upon the destructive reality of war and revolution. The movements were short-lived, and their contributions to poetic theory and ideology were sparse and diffuse. However, if Acmeism and Imagism did not bring a new metaphysic or system of ideas to modern poetry, they did contribute to a renewed aesthetic taste, an attitude toward the nature and function of poetry, which has characterized the mainstream of modern poetry to the present day. As Mandelshtam noted, literary schools live not by ideas, but by tastes. ("On the Nature of the Word," 299) The taste for simplicity, clarity, economy, and craftsmanship is the heritage of Acmeism and Imagism, which is still alive in modern Russian and English poetry.³⁴

NOTES

¹ Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1952), p. 13.

² Quoted by W. C. Pratt in the introduction to The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Miniature (New York: Dutton, 1963), pp. 12, 14.

³ See "Toward a Definition of Acmeism," a supplementary issue of Russian Language Journal (Spring 1975).

⁴ The primary treatment of the international aspects of Russian Symbolism is Georgette Donchin's The Influence of French Symbolism on Russian Poetry (The Hague: Mouton, 1958). Renö Taupin's study, L'Influence du symbolisme français sur la poèsie amöricaine (Paris: Champion, 1929), deals with Anglo-American post-Symbolism in the international context. Russian Acmeism has not been treated as part of an international movement, except for Ryszard Przybylski's comparison of the ideas of Mandelshtam and T. E. Hulme, cited in N. S. Gumilev, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, ed. G. P. Strove and B. A. Filippov (Washington: Kamkin, 1962-1968), Vol. IV, p. 631.

⁵ See my article, "Gumilev in London: An Unknown Interview," Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 16 (Winter 1978).

⁶ V. N. Toporov, "K otzvukam zapadnoevropeiskoi poezii u Akhmatovoi." Slavic Poetics, ed. Roman Jakobson, et al. (The Hague: Mouton, 1973).

⁷ The first article on Imagism in a Russian journal seems to be Z. Vengerova's "Angliiskie futuristy," Strelets, No. 1 (1915), pp. 93-104.

⁸ N. S. Gumilev, "Nasledie simvolizma i akmeizm," Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, Vol. IV, pp. 171-176. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited in the text by volume and page number.

⁹The New Age, September 11, 1913, p. 577.

¹⁰ The French influence was introduced into England in 1911 by Ford Maddox Hueffer and F. S. Flint; in 1913, Pound wrote a series of articles for the British journal The New Age where he reviewed the merits of contemporary French poetry and held up the new generation of Symbolists as models. In Russia, it was a French poet and correspondent to the Symbolist journal Vesy, and later to Apollon, René Ghil, who introduced the new French poets.

¹¹ C. R. Bechhofer, "An Interview with Nicholas Gumileff," The New Age, June 28, 1918. Reprinted in Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 16 (Winter 1978).

¹² There is evidence that the Acmeist manifesto was prompted by the rivalry of the Futurists. (R. D. Timenchik, "Zametki ob akmeizme," Russian Literature, No. 7-8 [1974], p. 25.) Stanley Coffman, a scholar of Imagism, suggests that Pound recognized that his program might profit by being presented as a militant aesthetic movement similar to those which were attracting attention at the time. (Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry [Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Press, 1970], p. 138.)

¹³ Included in Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. by Herbert Read (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1924), pp. 113-140.

¹⁴Poetry Review, Vol. I, No. 3 (March 1912), p. 134.

¹⁵Poetry, Vol. I, No. 6 (March 1913), pp. 200-206.

¹⁶ Quoted in Irina Odoevtseva, Na beregakh Nevy (Washington: Kamkin, 1967), p. 41.

¹⁷ "The Serious Artist," in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954), p. 54.

¹⁸The New Age, January 25, 1912, p. 297.

¹⁹ "Bez bozhestva, bez vdokhnoveniya," Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1962), Vol. VI, p. 182.

²⁰The New Age, February 15, 1912, p. 370.

²¹ It is ironic, of course, that Acmeism, the movement, has been largely overshadowed by the "great distinctive individualities" of Akhmatova and Mandelshtam, a development which Gumilev, apparently, did not foresee.

²² Note, for example, the titles of their articles: Pound, "The ABC of Reading," "How to Read"; Gumilev, "Chitatel'."

²³ "Arts should be taught by artists, not sterile professors." Pound, quoted in Coffman, Imagism, p. 90.

²⁴ F.S. Flint, "Imagisme," Poetry, Vol. I, No. 6 (March 1913), p. 199.

²⁵ "In a Station of the Metro" appeared first in Poetry, Vol. 2, No. 1. (April 1913), and was subsequently included in the collection Lustra, and in Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1926), p. 109.

²⁶ The emphasis on images was to come up in a subsequent poetic movement in Russia, Imaginism, and had no exact parallel in Acmeism. In the case of the later movement, there is evidence of direct influence of the English group on the Russian poets, in the notes of a British foreign correspondent. (Times Literary Supplement, October 13, 1921, p. 661.) See also

²⁷ Richard Aldington, "Modern Poetry and the Imagists," The Egoist, Vol. 1, No. 11 (June 1914), p. 202.

²⁸Notes on Language and Style, ed. Herbert Read (1929; rpt. Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Press, 1970), p. 11.

²⁹ From "Above the dock" and "Autumn." The "Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme" is included as an appendix in Speculations, pp. 265-267.

³⁰The New Age, February 15, 1912, p. 370.

³¹The New Age, October 2, 1913, p. 662.

³² "Utro akmeizma," Sobranie sochinenii, ed. G. P. Struve and B. A. Filippov (Munich: Inter-Language Literary Associates, 1966), Vol. II, p. 366.

³³ "O prirode slova," Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. II, p. 297.

³⁴ A preliminary version of this article was presented at the National Conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Columbus, October 1978.