Wallace Martin

[In the following essay, Martin locates sources of lmagist aesthetics in theories of philosophy and psychology that were current in the early twentieth century.]

SOURCE: "The Sources of the Imagist Aesthetic," in PMLA, Vol. 84, No. 2, March, 1970, pp. 196-204.

When subjected to scholarly scrutiny, literary revolutions usually prove less novel than they appear to be. We now know that the twentieth-century reaction against Romanticism was largely based on Romantic principles, and a number of writers have argued that Aestheticism, Symbolism, Imagism, and Surrealism are essentially extensions of the literary revolution that began in the eighteenth century. At the same time, these movements do embody distinctive features that cannot be explained by reference to their literary tradition. For an understanding of innovation in aesthetic theory, we often must turn to intellectual history. The influence of Schopenhauer and Hartmann on Symbolism, and that of Bergson and Freud on Surrealism, did not determine the character of these movements. But knowledge of such influences helps us understand the origin and process of literary change, as well as the historical process of which literature is a part.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the aesthetic tenets of Imagism were based upon philosophic and psychological theories of the early twentieth century, and that as a result Imagism did constitute a significant departure from the Romantic tradition. The origins of the Imagist aesthetic have been discussed for five decades and the conclusion that Imagism is a lineal descendent of Symbolism has seldom been questioned. Starting from this historical view of the relationship between the two movements, critics have argued that neither the theory nor the practice of the Imagist poets is inherently different from that of the Symbolists. An examination of the evidence on which these conclusions are based must precede discussion of alternative sources for the aesthetic of Hulme and Pound.

The Imagists themselves were proud to acknowledge their indebtedness to Symbolism, as witnessed by their frequent citation of Rémy de Gourmont's statement that "les imagistes anglais procèdent évidemment des symbolistes français."¹ Pound's capsule history of the genealogy of the image, recorded in a letter to René Taupin dated May 1928, corroborates Gourmont's view: "L'idée de l'image doit 'quelque chose' aux symbolistes français via T. E. Hulme, via Yeat[s] 2 Considerable scholarly effort has been expended in attempts to substantiate this assertion. In L'Influence du symbolisme français sur la poésie américaine, Taupin examined the relationship between Symbolism and Imagism in detail. He found that the influence of Symbolism on Hulme and Pound was less apparent (and hence presumably less direct) than it was on the minor Imagists. Pursuing Herbert Read's suggestion that Hulme derived many of his ideas from Gourmont, Taupin concluded that Le Problème du style was the primary source of Hulme's aesthetic; if further evidence of Hulme's indebtedness to Symbolism was needed, it was provided, Taupin said, by Hulme's assertion that his theories were partially vitiated by his preoccupation with the theory and practice of modern art, '"et en particulier du symbolisme'."³ The influence of the Symbolists on Pound, in Taupin's view, was probably mediated by Hulme. The partisan quarrel regarding Pound's indebtedness to Hulme, which began in 1915, need not detain us here, since it flourished only while untrammeled by scholarship. N. Christoph de Nagy has recently discovered that Pound read Gourmont before writing the Imagist manifesto; hence insofar as Hulme reiterated Gourmont, Pound may have been doing the same thing independently.⁴

Following the publication of Taupin's book in 1929, a curious divergence developed between scholarly and critical treatments of the relationship between Symbolism and Imagism. Stanley K. Coffman, whose Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry is the best scholarly study of the problem, concluded that there was less evidence of a close relationship between the two movements than Taupin had suggested. Frank Kermode and Graham Hough, on the other hand, transporting the problem from the realm of scholarship to that of aesthetic theory, imply that the relationship was closer than any earlier writer had suggested it was. The thesis of Hough's Image and Experience is that "we shall find the roots of English Imagist poetry in the French Symbolist area, the area that is bounded by Mallarmé and Rimbaud."⁵ Frank Kermode concludes that "Hulme hands over to the English tradition a modernized, but essentially traditional, aesthetic of Symbolism," and that "Pound's own aesthetic is not fundamentally different from Hulme's, though he is quite right to insist that it was available to him without Hulme's mediation."⁶ An analysis of their position will show that it is untenable. Pound's conception of the image is quite different from Hulme's; and neither is historically derived from or theoretically similar to the aesthetic of the Symbolists.

It is ironic that efforts to discredit the intentional fallacy have not resulted in more skepticism with respect to the statements of creative writers concerning literary history. Thus Gourmont's remark about the historical continuity of Symbolism and Imagism has not been discussed in relation to Gourmont's conception of Symbolism;⁷ thus the meanings of symbolisme for Hulme and Pound, dependent upon the use of that word by French authors and critics between 1900 and 1912, have not been investigated; and thus the evidence that Pound had no knowledge of what the term meant to its proponents has been unduly neglected. "Symbole??" wrote Pound in the letter of 1928 quoted above, "Je n'ai jamais lu 'les idées des symbolistes' sur ce sujet."⁸ Corroboration is provided by an article he wrote in 1914: "One can be grossly 'symbolic,' for example, by using the term 'cross' to mean 'trial.' The symbolist's symbols have a fixed value, like numbers in arithmetic, like 1, 2, and 7.… Moreover, one does not want to be called a symbolist, because symbolism has usually been associated with mushy technique."⁹ This passage can hardly be explained as an imperfect account of something mat Hulme told Pound; it is based either on misinformation or no information at all. Citing this passage, Donald Davie justifiably concludes that critics go astray in attempting to relate Pound to the Symbolist tradition.¹⁰

The problem of Hulme's knowledge of Symbolism has been complicated by excessive conjecture resulting from a lack of information. Pound's placement of Hulme as a link in the chain of Symbolist influence, quoted above, is vitiated by his own ignorance of that movement; and the quotation from Hulme in which, according to Taupin, he acknowledges his debt to the Symbolists, is in fact a remark that Hulme made concerning French aesthetics, not his own."¹¹ Hulme never refers to Mallarmé or his theories; nowhere does he mention Gourmont, the generally accepted "source" of his aesthetic. As Coffman notes, absence of such reference is curious, since Hulme "was not usually reticent about such matters" {Imagism, p. 83). The most important evidence concerning what Hulme knew about Symbolism is contained in his review of Tancrède de Visan's L'Attitude du lyrisme contemporain.

In this review, which has escaped the attention of his critics, Hulme says that he was introduced to contemporary French poetry by André Beaunier's La Poésie nouvelle (Paris, 1902), which he read in 1905 or 1906.¹² Hulme's conception of Symbolism was based upon these two books and was therefore quite different from Symbolism as conceived today.

In La Poésie nouvelle, Beaunier identifies Rimbaud, Laforgue, Jammes, Merrill, Fort, and Elskamp as Symbolists and defines the symbol as "une image que l'on peut employer pour la représentation d'une idée" (p. 45). This is not the symbol of Mallarmé, nor is it the symbol of Symbolism as generally understood today. But the symbol is of secondary importance in Beaunier's discussion of Symbolism. Two-thirds of his introduction is devoted to versification, in particular free verse, which at that time was considered the major contribution of the Symbolists to poetic theory.¹³ The definition of Symbolism in Visan's L'Attitude du lyrisme contemporain (1911) likewise involves reference to l'image and discusses Symbolism as if it were a contemporaneous movement. Reference to l'image in both of the definitions of Symbolism read by Hulme was in a sense anomalous, for the word was of little theoretical significance either to Mallarmé (who emphasized l'idée) or to most of the poets discussed by Beaunier and Visan. Symbolism, as Hulme understood it, was what scholars today refer to as Post-Symbolism. Since its most significant innovation, according to many French critics, was free verse, it is understandable that he and his contemporaries turned to French poetry for information about the theory and practice of versification, rather than for a new aesthetic.

If Pound and Hulme did not derive the aesthetic of the image from the Symbolists, they must have either discovered it elsewhere or invented it through an unmediated act of imagination. The latter hypothesis is unlikely, in view of the wealth of sources available to mem. In the late nineteenth century, l'image was an important theoretical term in the empiricist-associationist tradition of French psychology. Bergson, in Matière et mémoire (1896), redefined image in terms of an organicist theory of psychology. Pound's conception of the image was based upon the former tradition, Hulme's (after 1908) upon the latter. French critics and aestheticians also made use of the psychological conception of the image, but Hulme and Pound were not directly indebted to them in the formulation of the Imagist aesthetic. Gourmont derived his theory of the image from a French psychologist whose works were also read by Hulme, and such similarities as exist in the writings of Hulme and Gourmont result from their indebtedness to the same sources. Evidence to support these conclusions is provided by a consideration of the importance of l'image in French psychology and philosophy.

A meeting of the Société Française de la Philosophie in 1908 was devoted to discussion of l'image as part of the society's project to publish a philosophical dictionary. The resultant definition provides a history of the word in French philosophy and a survey of its contemporaneous applications. The primary meanings recorded were: "A. Reproduction, soit concréte, soit mentale, de ce qui a été perçu par la vue.… B. Répétition mentale, généralement affaiblie, d'une sensation (ou plus exactement d'une perception) précédemment éprouvée.… C. On a souvent étendu le mot image á toute présentation ou représentation sensible."¹⁴ Meanings "B" and "C" were rare before 1870; in the following decade their use became so common and indiscriminate that in 1882 the French philosopher Renouvier was moved to say: "Si j'avais à voter sur cette question de terminologie dans un congrès de philosophes (dont je ne demande pas la réunion), je voudrais exclure ici le mot image."¹⁵

In extending the use of image to describe a variety of mental phenomena, French psychology reflected a trend evident in other countries. British and German psychologists (and philosophers—there was no clear demarcation between the disciplines) were using comparable terms loosely; when their works were translated into French, precise terminological equivalence was not always possible. In the dictionary published by the Société Française de la Philosophie, "Bild" and "Vorstellung" are given as German equivalents of image, and the only English equivalent listed is "image." In practice, however, image was employed to render such varied English words as "impression," "picture," "recept," and "portrait"; and in one French work on psychology that was translated into English and read by Hulme, the "impressions," "recepts," and "portraits" of English psychologists returned to their native language as "images."¹⁶ Of these terminological mutations, the most significant involves the word "impression," a central term in British empiricism. Translated into French as image and retranslated into English as "image," the "impression" of Locke and Hume, retaining its associationist implications, left unmistakable traces of its influence in the aesthetic of Hulme and Pound.

During a century and a half that witnessed the transformation of most sciences, Hume's theory of psychology was generally accepted by academic psychologists with only minor modifications. Hippolyte Taine's De l'intelligence (1870), in France considered a standard work on psychology for at least three decades, testifies to the persistence of Hume's theory. Taine begins his book with a discussion of signs (language and other forms of symbolism) which, as the concrete manifestations of thought, are the basis of the psychologist's analysis of ideas. Book I concludes with the statement that "since our ideas may be reduced to images, their laws may be reduced to laws of images; images then are what we must study."¹⁷ The second book is devoted to an explanation of how signs originate in images; the third treats the origin of images in sensations. Comparison of Taine's theory with Part I, Section I, of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature reveals no significant differences (Taine's image has precisely the meaning of Hume's impression). Ideas are less vivid and precise than images, since the details of particular images are lost when superimposed to form ideas. Even the simplest ideas possess some ambiguity; thus they give rise to confusions that can be eliminated only by reducing them to their constituent images. To summarize the relationship between impression/image and idea, as discussed by Hume and Taine, in the words of T. E. Hulme: "Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images. Language is only a more or less feeble way of doing this."¹⁸

Like T. E. Hulme, Taine associates the clear recollection of images with the "precise, intense, colored representations attained by the imaginations of great artists." Hulme's debt to the psychological tradition represented by Taine is quite obvious: Hulme refers to Taine's writings on psychology, and two of his "notes" employ examples also used by Taine. Taine says that in the process of reducing images to ideas, we gradually strip away visual elements until nothing is left but a word. "This word so reduced is not however a lifeless symbol, without traces of signification; it is more like the trunk of a tree, stripped of its leaves and branches."¹⁹ In the "Notes on Language and Style," Hulme wrote: "Regard each word as a picture, then a succession of pictures. Only the dead skeleton remains. We cut the leaves off. When the tree becomes a mast, the leaves become unnecessary" (FS, p. 83).²⁰ Hulme uses another example to describe the process: "Picture gallery (a) recognition of names, (b) progress to recognition of characteristics" (FS, p. 89). In the first chapter of his book, Taine employs a similar analogy. In an art gallery arranged by schools, he says, after we have spent an hour or two looking at pictures, we sit down and reflect on what we have seen. Many qualities come to mind as images are mentally evoked; if we attempt to define certain of these qualities, we will disengage words appropriate to them. This, in essence, is how images are combined to form an abstract characteristic symbolized by a word.

Although the argument that Hulme read Taine's De l'intelligence is largely inferential, there is indisputable evidence that he read the works of Théodule Ribot, a French psychologist and philosopher who was, like Taine, a product of the empiricist tradition.²¹ Ribot is scarcely known today; in the history of ideas, however, he deserves to be remembered as one of the most influential writers of his time. Schopenhauer's "Idée" was absorbed into the aesthetic of Symbolism either directly or mediately through Ribot's La Philosophie de Schopenhauer;²² Gourmont's Le Problème du style is essentially an elaboration of two books by Ribot, as even those sympathetic to Gourmont are willing to admit;²³ and in coining the word "dissociation," which Gourmont transmitted to Eliot, Ribot's influence extended into English literary history.

Ribot introduced the concept of dissociation in L'Evolution des idées générales (Paris, 1897), which elaborates the psychological theory upon which his later study of the creative imagination is based. While his account of the process through which images become ideas is essentially the same as that presented by Taine, he posits a motor base for all mental activity and makes use of the experimental data provided by the German psychologist Wundt to refine the simplistic hypotheses of the associationist tradition. Sensations are selectively registered as images. Similar images are united to form a generic image, and abstraction occurs when the manifold features of the generic image are dissociated from it, leaving one abstract characteristic. This process presupposes and may be succeeded by association (a term, he says, that other psychologists have used incorrectly), whereby characteristics are generalized through synthesis and fusion.

This thesis is supported by experimental evidence showing how inferior forms of abstraction, manifested in animals and children, have evolved through primitive societies to the highly developed conceptual systems of civilized man. Animals, which display the lowest form of recognizable mental activity, think by means of a "logique des images," based on generic images; as T. E. Hulme later put it, "animals are in the same state that men were before symbolic language was invented."²⁴ Their mental state is not so undesirable as it might seem; however, since increasing degrees of abstraction lead ultimately toward impoverished simplifications. The problem is posed clearly in Ribot's summary of his argument: "Nous avons vu l'abstraction, à mesure qu'elle monte et s'affermit, se séparer de plus en plus nettement de l'image et finalement, au moment du symbolisme pur, la séparation devient un antagonisme. C'est que, au fond, il y a entre les deux, dès le début, opposition de nature et de procédé. L'idéal de l'image est une complexité toujours croissante, l'idéal de l'abstraction est un simplification toujours croissante: parce que l'une se former par addition et l'autre par soustraction" (EIG, p. 151).²⁵ Insofar as abstraction results in simplification of the rich imagistic complexity of experience, Hulme's statement that "we must judge the world from the status of animals, leaving out 'truth,' etc." is understandable.²⁶

Ribot does not consider thinking in general ideas superior to modes of thought employing images. Men can be classified psychologically as imaginative or abstract thinkers. The former, which include novelists, poets, and painters, think imagistically and "rêvent une œuvre organique, vivante, donc complexe," whereas the latter (scientists and philosophers, for example) seek simple, abstract solutions and find complex, concrete realities distasteful. "Donc, au fond, l'antagonisme de l'image et de l'idée, c'est celui du tout et de la partie" (EIG, p. 151). In this recrudescence of a doctrine originating in British empiricism—the doctrine that immediate impressions or images are closer to reality and therefore more distinct, more reliable than ideas—early twentieth-century writers found a scientific sanction for an aesthetic of the image.

In his Essai sur l'imagination cröatrice (1900; English edition, 1906), Ribot devotes his attention exclusively to the image, implying that ideas are of little consequence in the creative process. Earlier discussions of the imagination erred, he argues, in not distinguishing between its passive and active states. The former is "the purely representative faculty"; the latter is "the faculty of creating by means of the intermediation of images" (ECI, p. 8).²⁷ In cases of vivid, active imagination, "the motor element of the image"—that element which incites one toward action—"tends to cause it to lose its purely 'inner' character, to objectify it, to externalize it, to project it outside ourselves" in some form of creation (FCI, p. 5). Having based his view of the imaginative faculty on a mechanistic hypothesis, Ribot never evokes this hypothesis for the purposes of causal explanation in the succeeding discussion. Like many of his contemporaries, Ribot proves his psychological orthodoxy with a genuflection toward mechanistic materialism; but it is important to remember that the most rigorously materialistic psychologists could themselves offer nothing more than such a gesture as evidence that thought and imagination were the result of incipient motor actions (an assumption that survives in the early writings of I. A. Richards). Ribot was an orthodox and respected psychologist. If, in the following discussion, aspects of his theory seem "romantic" or "anti-rational," as does the Imagist theory to some critics, then one must in all justice apply these terms to a major segment of early twentieth-century science, as well as to literary theory.

Two of the three sections of Ribot's book are relevant to the Imagist aesthetic: the first, which deals with the intellectual, emotional, unconscious, and integrating principles of the creative imagination; and the last, which treats the main types of imagination. Intellectually, images are combined through "objective" or "subjective" causality. In subjective association, "the revived image of a face, a monument, a landscape, an occurrence, is, most often, only partial. It depends on various conditions that revive the essential part and drop minor details, and this 'essential' which survives dissociation depends on subjective causes" (ECI, p. 20). There is an apposite passage in Pound's description of one type of image: "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" ("AI," p. 349).²⁸ The emotional element is even more important to creation than the intellectual, according to Ribot, since it leads to the fusion of disparate images with similar emotive stimuli. More important, it is the very source of creation: "In order that a creative act occur, there is required, first, a need; then, that it arouse a combination of images; and lastly, that it objectify and realize itself in an appropriate form" (ECI, pp. 43-44). The emotional element leads us to realize that "every image is comparable to a force" (p. 62); as Pound said, "emotional force gives the image" ("AI," p. 349). The unconscious factor adds to the creative process an element of unpredictability. All of these elements distinguished for analytic purposes should not, however, be allowed to obscure the fact that creation is fundamentally a synthesizing process: "The ideal is a construction of images that should become a reality" (ECI, p. 80).

In the last section of the book, Ribot distinguishes between two types of artistic imagination, the plastic and the diffluent, in a passage that may have influenced Pound's discussions of symbolism. "By 'plastic imagination' I understand that which has for its special characters clearness and precision of form; more explicitly those forms whose materials are clear images (whatever be their nature) … giving the impression of reality.… The plastic imagination could be summed up in the expression, clearness in complexity" (ECI, p. 184; pp. 192- 193). This is of course the type of imagination displayed in the visual arts; in poetry, it is exemplified in the works of the Parnassians and particularly in Gautier (whom Ribot quotes). The diffluent imagination, on the other hand, "consists of vaguely-outlined, indistinct images that are evoked and joined according to the least rigorous modes of association," usually as a result of an interior emotional state ("the romantic turn of mind") unable to objectify itself. "The images of this class have an 'impressionist' mark.… They act less through a direct influence than by evoking, suggesting, whispering.… We may justly call them crepuscular or twilight ideas."²⁹

Ribot illustrates the diffluent imagination in literature through a discussion of Symbolism:

This form of art despises the clear and exact representation of the outer world: it erases it by a sort of music that aspires to express the changing and fleeting inwardness of the human soul.… It makes use of a natural or artificial lack of precision: everything floats as in a dream, men as well as things, often without mark in time and space.… The word is the sign par excellence. As, according to the symbolists, it should give us emotions rather than representations, it is necessary that it lose, partially, its intellectual function and undergo a new adaption.

A principal process consists of employing usual words and changing their ordinary acceptation, or rather, associating them in such a way that they lose their precise meaning, and appear vague and mysterious. (pp. 202-203).

Pound, in his article on "Vorticism" (1914), says that the Symbolists "dealt in 'association'," that "they degraded the symbol to the status of a word." The latter statement is enigmatic, in that the symbol, in poetry, is of necessity a word. The interpretation suggested by the assumption that Pound was indebted to Ribot (one of the few writers of his time who attacked Symbolist procedures) is that the symbol was degraded to the status of a sign—a word lacking precise imagistic reference.

The possibility that Pound, like Hulme, was indebted specifically to Ribot is incidental to the argument regarding the relationship of Hulme and Pound to French psychological theory. Emphasis on the image was pervasive during this period. To cite only two instances: Hulme read works by jules de Gaultier and Gabriel Séailles.³⁰ The latter's Essai sur le génie dans l'art (1897) begins, as do Taine and Ribot, with the image as the fundamental element of mental processes and aesthetic creation, and then explains the creative process as one involving the organization of images. The application of the psychological theory of images to language as a medium of communication is discussed in Gaultier's Le Bovarysme. His thesis is that because of the attrition of the imagistic associations of words, most of them have lost their precise descriptive and denotative value, thus becoming mere "notions." In aesthetics and stylistics, the concept of the image was as pervasive as it was in psychology and philosophy. And during the first decade of the twentieth century, the distinction between image and idea was of increasing importance in French literary criticism, as witnessed by the definition of Symbolism cited earlier in this paper. L'idée was frequently identified with reductive abstractionism and lost the efficacy as an aesthetic term with which Mallarmé had invested it; l'image, having evolved from mental picture to the richest element of the psychic life, appeared with increasing frequency in discussions of poetry.³¹

Earlier writers have discussed the parallels between l'image as defined by Gourmont and the "image" of Hulme and Pound. In view of the lack of evidence that either Hulme or Pound read Le Problème du style during the period preceding or immediately following the latter's formulation of Imagism, and in view of Gourmont's reliance on Ribot (whom Hulme did read), there is no reason to assume that Gourmont influenced the aesthetic of the image.³² In the first flush of his enthusiasm for Gourmont (1913), Pound discussed his works in articles appearing in Poetry and The New Age. Neither article makes any reference to Le Problème du style or to Gourmont's discussion of the image in Esthétique de la langue française. Attempts to prove that it was Gourmont, rather than Ribot, who influenced the "image" of Hulme and Pound are likely to prove unsuccessful.

Hulme and Pound were heirs to the empiricist psychological tradition represented by Ribot; the significant differences in their conceptions of the image resulted from Hulme's interest in an organicist psychology in which the image was endowed with even greater importance. For Ribot and his predecessors, idea and image were both aspects of mental representation, as opposed to reality, in the mind-matter antithesis. For Bergson this antithesis and the resultant antinomy between Idealism and Realism were the crucial philosophic problems of the age. In the introduction to Matière et mémoire (1896), he appeals to that judicious arbiter of philosophic disputes, the man in the street, in order to show that Idealism and Realism are equally ludicrous. What then is the truth of the matter? At this point the man in the street begins to sound disquietingly like a Bergsonian in bourgeois disguise: "Such a mind would naturally believe that matter exists just as it is perceived; and, since it is perceived as an image, the mind would make of it, in itself, an image.… Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of 'images.' And by 'image' we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing—an existence placed half-way between the 'thing' and the 'representation.'"³³

In this view, images are not only logically prior to mental processes; they are the organic unity that obviates the analytic impasse inevitably resulting from Descartes's "ghost in the machine." The central importance of the image in Bergson's psychological theory is indicated by its prominence in Matière et mémoire, the four sections of which treat the selection of images, the recollection of images, the persistence or survival of images, and the delimitation and fixation of images respectively. As Lydie Adolphe has shown in La Dialectique des images chez Bergson, Bergson's concept of the image is one of the most important elements of his philosophy. For the image is the expressive embodiment of the intuition.

Images, for Bergson, are the medium of communication in poetry and embody the central insights of philosophy. In his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (a work which Hulme read in 1907), Bergson described poetic creation as follows: "D'où vient le charme de la poésie? Le poète est celui chez qui les sentiments se développent en images, et les images elles-mêmes en paroles, dociles au rythme, pour les traduire. En voyant repasser devant nos yeux ces images, nous éprouverons à notre tour le sentiment qui en était pour ainsi dire l'équivalent émotionnel."³⁴ The relationship between image and intuition is defined in Bergson's "Introduction à la métaphysique," a work which Hulme translated: "Many diverse images, borrowed from very different orders of things, may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized."³⁵ Hence poetry, which Hulme refers to as "a compromise for a language of intuition," is inevitably based on images.

"Bergson," says Hulme, "represents a reaction against the atomic and rational psychology of Taine and Spencer, against the idea that states of mind can be arrived at by the summation of more elementary states." The Parnassians, he says, like the psychologists of their time, "employed always clear and precise descriptions of external things"—a method advocated by Hulme in his preBergsonian writings—"and strove by combinations of such 'atoms of the beautiful' to manufacture a living beauty." But "life is a continuous and unanalyzable curve which cannot be seized clearly, but can only be felt as a kind of intuition. It can only be got at by a kind of central vision," the vision sought by the Post-Symbolists and philosophically articulated by Bergson.³⁶

Hulme was not the only critic to make use of Bergson's philosophy in discussing poetry. In L'Attitude du lyrisme contemporain (Paris, 1911), Tancrède de Visan attempted to relate Bergson's philosophy to the practices of contemporary French poets. Visan defined the poetry of his time as follows: "Le symbolisme ou attitude poétique contemporaine se sert d'images successives ou accumulöes pour extérioriser une intuition lyrique" (pp. 459-460). This definition was noted in Hulme's review of the book ("M. Visan would then define Symbolism as an attempt by means of successive and accumulated images to express and exteriorize such a central lyric intuition"); it was repeated by F. S. Flint in his renowned essay on "Contemporary French Poetry": "[Symbolism is] an attempt to evoke the subconscious element of life, to set vibrating the infinite within us, by the exquisite juxtaposition of images. Its philosophy, in fact … was the philosophy of intuitiveness: it has been formulated by Bergson."³⁷ Hulme and Flint seem to have accepted Visan's identification of Symbolism as a contemporaneous movement; they gave currency in England to a Bergsonian and "imagistic" conception of French poetry that was more a product of Visan's theorizing than of an inductive survey of French poetic practice.

There is no evidence that Bergson or Visan exercised any direct influence on Pound, whose rationalism led him to theorize about poetry in terms of an empiricist rather than an organicist psychology. His interest in the literary implications of psychological theory is most strikingly illustrated in his allusion to the Freudian "complex" in defining the image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."³⁸ His distinction between Imagism and Impressionism, and his discussion of the objective and subjective image, both of which are based on a subject-object dichotomy, parallel theoretical distinctions in the works of Ribot. Impressionism, Pound says, corresponds to the conception of man as a being toward whom "perception moves, as a plastic substance receiving impressions"; Imagism, a subclass of expressionism, comes about when man directs "a certain fluid force against substance … conceiving instead of merely reflecting and observing."³⁹ This distinction is essentially the same as that made by Ribot in his discussion of the passive and active imagination, referred to earlier in this paper.⁴⁰

In his most complete exposition of the aesthetic of Imagism, Pound says that the image may be either objective or subjective, depending upon whether it recreates a single experience or transforms and fuses elements of disparate experiences ("AI," p. 349); his distinction parallels Ribot's between the subjective and objective modes of imaginative association. Ribot assumes that the interaction of images in creation "rests on a physiological basis: the existence of several [electric] currents diffusing themselves through the brain and the possibility of receiving simultaneous excitations" (ECI, p. 62). Ribot's view suggests that the following quotation from Pound may be intended as physiological rather than metaphoric: "The best artist is the man whose machinery can stand the highest voltage. The better the machinery, the more precise, the stronger; the more exact will be the record of the voltage and of the various currents that have passed through it" ("AI," p. 350).

But the psychologistic emphasis in Pound's aesthetic has a significance beyond any correspondences to particular sources. His frequent use of scientific analogies in his early criticism, his partiality toward mechanistic explanations of mental phenomena,⁴¹ and his deduction of the types of poetry from psychological dispositions, together constitute an aspect of his thought deserving detailed investigation.

Pound's development as a poet is reflected in his critical writings but cannot be understood on the basis of those writings alone. His distinctions between Imagism and Symbolism as poetic theories should not be allowed to obscure the continuous evolution of poetic practice through which his early poetry (1908-12) is related to its symbolist antecedents. If one accepts Anna Balakian's persuasive argument that Verlaine, not Mallarmé, is the typical poet of "Symbolism," and that "symbolism" (uncapitalized) is the appropriate name for an international poetic movement characterized by "ambiguity of indirect communication, affiliation with music, and the 'decadent' spirit,"⁴² Pound's early poetry can be seen in its proper perspective. Through Arthur Symons, Dowson, and the early Yeats, Pound assimilated the symbolist conventions that pervade his pro-Ripostes volumes—probably without being In certain aware of the sources of these conventions.^43> In certain poems published in 1912 (notably "The Return," "Apparuit," and "Apñéá"), a quintessential symbolism, freed from decadent trappings and aestheticist overtones, seems at the same time to embody the basic precepts of Imagism, as enunciated nearly a year later.

Recognition of the stylistic continuity that links Pound's early poetry to symbolism contributes to an understanding of the historical significance of Imagism. If symbolism was part of a poetic milieu that early twentieth-century poets could absorb without being conscious of its origins, the Imagist manifesto can be seen as an attempt, on Pound's part, to become conscious of both theory and practice in order to separate himself from the mannerisms of his early poetry. The Imagist manifesto was primarily a statement of intent rather than analysis of an accomplishment; but because such statements reflect intentions and influence those of other poets, it is possible to discuss their importance as one of several forces shaping the development of poetry.

Any attempt to discover the sources of the "image" as discussed by Hulme and Pound leads from particular works to intellectual history. The appearance of an Imagist aesthetic, here considered as involving a psychology of creation and a philosophy of poetic communication, seems to follow naturally from an interest in contemporary philosophy and psychology. Undoubtedly Hulme and Pound, like the Symbolists, emphasize a mode of creation that eschews explicit conceptual content. In these circumstances, it is tempting, and even revealing, to treat Symbolism and Imagism as interrelated extensions of the Romantic tradition. However, so long as conceptual clarity is not conceived as the defining characteristic of poetic expression, one cannot absorb Imagism into the Romantic tradition without at the same time implicating considerable portions of Renaissance and even Classic poetics.

Once the fundamental distinctions between Symbolism and Imagism are recognized, endless discriminations follow. The broader issue involved in these discriminations is the extent to which, creatively and critically, Imagism, rather than transmitting an etiolated Romanticism, initiated a new movement toward objectification, toward "presentation" as an alternative to the elaborate stratagems whereby earlier writers accommodated to the irremediable disjunction of subject and object.

The early writings of Hulme and Pound show that they were seeking not objects to correlate with their emotional states, but a means of presenting objects that in some sense embodied emotion. The empiricist tradition and even the organicism of Bergson could not entirely eliminate the separation of subject and object. But by hypothesizing a mental "object"—the image—which through its "Dinglichkeit" (as Ransom called it) served as simulacrum of reality, psychology provided the basis for an objective aesthetic. In a larger historical perspective, Objectivism, as its proponents indicate, is a logical culmination of ideas originating in Imagism. And the "image" that is so important in post-Behaviorist psychology (exemplified in such works as Plans and the Structure of Behavior and Kenneth E. Boulding's The Image) is related to Objectivism much as Ribot and his contemporaries were related to Imagism.⁴⁴

The Symbolists, according to A. G. Lehmann, were attempting "to find an autonomous field for art, distinct from science or history, and without interference from their intellectual criteria of truth."⁴⁵ Hulme and Pound, on the other hand, based their theories of poetry on the philosophy and psychology of their time, seeking rational solutions to aesthetic problems. If their theories are Romantic, a major segment of twentieth-century science is likewise implicated. And if theory led Pound to practices that fail to satisfy our demand for intelligibility, we can profit from an understanding of how, in his desire to escape both subjective and metaphysical irrelevance, he placed his faith in a scientific reductionism that has, despite reason, survived in our time.⁴⁶

¹ "Revue du mois," Mercure de France, CXI (1915), 355; Stanley K. Coffman, Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry (Norman, Okla., 1951), p. 89.

²The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York, 1950), p. 218.

³ "The Example of Rémy de Gourmont," Criterion, X (1931), 619; L'Influence du symbolisme français sur la poésie américaine (Paris, 1929), p. 85.

⁴Ezra Pound's Poetics and Literary Tradition (Bern, 1966), pp. 70-72.

⁵ London, 1960, p. 51.

⁶Romantic Image (New York, 1964), p. 121.

⁷ "Le Symbolisme pourra (et même devra) être considéré par nous comme le libre et personnel développement de l'individu esthétique." L'Idéalisme (Paris, 1893), p. 12. Gourmont employed substantially the same definition of Symbolism in his later writings. In discussing the Imagists (see n. 1), he cited their "horreur du cliché … de la rhötorique et du grandiose" as evidence of their indebtedness to Symbolism; but such similarities hardly entail any specific indebtedness.

⁸Letters, p. 218.

⁹ "Vorticism," Fortnightly Review, XCVI (1914), 463.

¹⁰The Poet as Sculptor (London, 1965), p. 66.

¹¹ "The Plan for a Book," Speculations, ed. Herbert Read (London, 1924), p. 263.

¹²New Age, IX (1911), 400.

¹³ Kenneth Cornell, The Post-Symbolist Period (New Haven, Conn., 1958), p. 51.

¹⁴ André Lalande, et al., Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (Paris, 1926), I, 339. This definition was first published in the Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, "séance du 2 juillet 1908."

¹⁵ Quoted in Lalande, I, 340.

¹⁶ These examples are taken from Théodule Ribot's Essay on the Creative Imagination, trans. A. H. Baron (London, 1906).

¹⁷On Intelligence, trans. T. D. Haye (London, 1871), p. 34. English translations of French works are quoted when there is no reason to suppose that Hulme or Pound read the French edition.

¹⁸ "Notes on Language and Style," Further Speculations, ed. Sam Hynes (Lincoln, Neb., 1962), p. 84. Elsewhere, I have argued that "Notes on Language and Style" and "Cinders" represent the first phase of Hulme's thought, antedating his discovery of Bergson. Later in this paper, I discuss the importance of Bergson in Hulme's subsequent writings.

¹⁹On Intelligence, p. 3.

²⁰FS designates Further Speculations.

²¹ A letter from Hulme to Edward Marsh indicates that Hulme read Ribot's Essai sur l'imagination créatrice before Nov. 1912. See A. R. Jones, The Life and Opinions of Thomas Ernest Hulme (London, 1960), p. 209. Hulme alludes to Ribot in Speculations, p. 263. On the importance of Taine and Ribot in French psychology, see Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York, 1929), pp. 606-607, 667-668.

²² A. G. Lehmann, The Symbolist Aesthetic in France, 1885-1895 (Oxford, 1950), pp. 60-67; Karl-D. Utti, La Passion littéraire de Rémy de Gourmont (Paris, 1962), p. 65.

²³ Utti, pp. 78-97; p. 272. While Utti acknowledges Gourmont's debt to Ribot, he does not indicate the extent to which Gourmont simply paraphrases Ribot in long passages of Le Probléme du style.

²⁴ "Cinders," Speculations, p. 229.

²⁵EIG designates L'Evolution des idées générales.

²⁶ "Cinders," Speculations, p. 229.

²⁷ECl designates Essay on the Creative Imagination, trans. A. H. Baron (London, 1906).

²⁸ "AI" designates Pound's "As for Imagisme," New Age, XVI (1915).

²⁹ECl, pp. 195-196. Pound wrote a poem entitled "Revolt against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry," in which he proposed to substitute "shapes of power" and "men" for the vague "shadows" and "dreams" in the poetry of his contemporaries.

³⁰ An article that Hulme wrote on Gaultier is reprinted in FS; Séailles is mentioned in Speculations, p. 263.

³¹ Elsewhere, I have discussed the distinction between l'image and l'idée, and that between "la littérature des images" and "la littérature des idées," in nineteenth-century French criticism: '"The Forgotten School of 1909' and the Origins of Imagism," A Catalogue of the Imagist Poets (New York, 1966), pp. 27-28. Georges Renard and (through him) Gourmont reinterpreted these distinctions, which Renard discovered in the writings of Balzac; for a discussion of Balzac's use of the terms, see Marc Eigeldinger, La Philosophie de l'art chez Balzac (Geneva, 1957), pp. 127-141.

³² Glen S. Burne, in Rémy de Gourmont (Carbondale, Ill., 1963), and Karl-D. Utti discuss Gourmont's conception of l'image and touch on its relevance to Pound and Hulme; Donald Davie and N. Christoph de Nagy, in their books on Pound, treat Gourmont's influence on his thought. Taupin's assertion that Gourmont influenced Hulme is cited without comment by Burne and Utti. In "Imagism: A Unity of Gesture," which appears in American Poetry, ed. Irvin Ehrenpreis (London, 1965), Alun R. Jones asserts that Hulme read Gourmont in 1907 (p. 116). Jones has apparently come to this conclusion since writing his book on Hulme, but he does not note the evidence on which it is based.

³³Matter and Memory (London, 1911), pp. vii-viii. Hulme may have read this work in French.

³⁴ Paris, 1989, p. 11. The information concerning when Hulme read this work is from an interview with F. S. Flint.

³⁵An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (London, 1913), p. 14.

³⁶New Age, IX (1911), 400-401.

³⁷Poetry Review, I (1912), 355.

³⁸ See my "Freud and Imagism," N&Q, VIII (1961), 470-471, 474. Walter Sutton discovered the source of Pound's "complex" independently; see his discussion in Modern American Criticism (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1963), pp. 4-5. I am grateful to Prof. Sutton for many helpful suggestions regarding this paper.

³⁹ "Vorticism," p. 467.

⁴⁰ In Subconscious Phenomena, ed. Hugo Münsterberg (London, 1911)—a work which Pound alludes to in the Imagist manifesto—Ribot makes a similar distinction between the static and dynamic subconscious.

⁴¹ In "The New Therapy," New Age, XXX (1922), to cite only one instance, Pound discusses Louis Bernan's thesis that the glands are the primary determinants of human behavior and concludes that this theory "offers us a comforting relief from Freudian excess" (pp. 259-260).

⁴²The Symbolist Movement (New York, 1967), p. 101.

⁴³ The influence of Symons, Dowson, and Yeats on Pound's early poetry and its resultant symbolism are discussed in detail by de Nagy, The Poetry of Ezra Pound: The Pre-Imagist Stage (Bern, 1960), pp. 27-53; pp. 85-104. Neither de Nagy nor Thomas H. Jackson—The Early Poetry of Ezra Pound (Cambridge, Mass., 1968)—suggests that any French poet influenced the symbolism of Pound's early poetry.

⁴⁴ The thesis that the Imagists and their successors inaugu-rated a new tradition that leads to Objectivism is brilliantly presented in J. Hillis Miller's Poets of Reality (Cambridge, Mass., 1965) and L. S. Dembo's Conceptions of Reality in Modern American Poetry (Berkeley, Calif., 1966).

⁴⁵The Symbolist Aesthetic, p. 72.

⁴⁶ Behaviorism has been undermined by rigorous application of the very logical premises upon which it is based. See Sigmund Koch's demolition of Behaviorist theory, and B. F. Skinner's melancholy reply, in Behaviorism and Phenomenology, ed. T. W. Wann (Chicago, 1965), pp. 1-45.

Ian Fletcher

[In the following essay, Fletcher discusses sources of Imagism within the English literary tradition.]

SOURCE: "Some Anticipations of Imagism," in A Catalogue of the Imagist Poets, J. Howard Woolmer, 1966, pp. 39-53.

Sing we a song
To the Blessed Gods
By the dusky olives,

By the green figs
And the violet grapes,
By the water-casks.

Cry to the Gods,
To the Gods that gave us
Heavy harvest.

Hurtful harvest,
Venomous vintage.

In slant sunlight
Fruit by fruit
Of the Earth-Mother.

In grey twilight
Shaft on shaft
Of the Archer-Goddess.

In thick grasses
Sudden gold
Of the glowing crocus.

In dewy gardens
Multitudinous
Sleepy roses.

They have given us corn
And the lurid blood-hued
Dog-star.

Humid woods
And the terror of moist woods
African.

It reads like an imitation of H.D. Clearly it is touched by Imagist influence: verbs are suppressed; verse is free, leaning on musical phrase in sequence rather than on metronome; there is a sensuous verification of objects, accumulating to an emotional climax in the final stanza. The constructions 'fruit by fruit' and 'shaft on shaft' recall similar terse expressions of process in H.D.

The poem was in fact published in the year 1900. It appeared anonymously in an Oxford undergraduate magazine the X, which ran for two years from 1898. The content of the X runs the narrow gamut of subject-matter and attitude typical of its time. Beginning with a somewhat colourless devotion to several arts in a mutedly symboliste vein, it becomes jingoist in 1899, the year when the Boer War was declared, and returns to 'decadent' themes in 1900. The final issue prints an obituary of Wilde, celebrating his genius and deploring the treatment he received from his fellow-countrymen. It is perhaps the last sparkle of the anti-bourgeois virulence of the 1890's and on the episode the Proctors doubtless had the last word, for there were no further issues. The point is, however, that all roads and sewers lead down to the 1890's, that junction of influences, movements, abortive excellencies and wavering anticipations.

In the standard work on imagism, published in 1931, Glenn Hughes treats the movement as an air-plant in relation to the English tradition. His book possesses both the advantages and disadvantages of fairly immediate literary history. It records actual discussion of some of the major figures involved in the movement, evoking such figures in vivid presence. These discussions no doubt enabled Hughes to clarify the phases through which Imagism passed. But Hughes also discriminates between the pure and less pure exponents of the doctrine and 'places' the achievement of H.D. above, for example, that of Flint, while recalling, without actually treating at length, the work of minor or marginal talents (Storer, Cournos, Tancred).

Yet the defects of the book stem from its immediacy. The sources of the movement are derived from the actual programmatic utterances of the Imagists themselves and, no doubt, from the table-talk of the survivors. After listing the remoter models, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Hughes proceeds to the statement that the modern influence was French and in particular French Symbolism. Such a comment is just, but too exclusive. On the other hand, it may be that the insistence on Hulme and De Gourmont was misplaced: their importance lies rather in their influence on Eliot and Pound, while the poems of Hulme which Hughes quotes have little in common with Imagism.

The poet, in the twentieth century, is forced into the role of man of letters, particularly if he is advanced in technique and subject: his audience must be first startled, then subdued. He is forced to propagandize indeed, not merely for his own art, but for the dignity of art in an alien world. In propagandizing for his own art, his version of literary history is certain to be slanted: we may think of Yeats' Preface to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse or Graves' judgments in his recent Oxford and Cambridge lectures. This role requires no defence: apart from the actual achievement of these two poets, although literary tradition remains continuous and enveloping, upon the moment of precipitation, of illumination of one sensibility by another, only the poet himself can pronounce. A poet's canon tends to be formed either from poets to whom he owes everything or those to whom he owes nothing; never from those figures against whom he reacts, however fruitfully, or those whose work in any way stands to muffle the impact of his own. As with propagandists for the 'modern movement' in general, the Imagists in their pronouncements tended for polemical reasons to bracket off the English sources of Imagism. Indeed, much of the literary history of the years 1870 to 1920 is having to be re-written, so brilliant and persuasive have been the arguments for a 'modern movement' virtually autonomous, though Wyndham Lewis' judgment that its revolution consisted rather in the distance it went back than in the leap it took forward, is only faintly over-stated. It is ironic that a similar occultation should be imposed by the figures of the 1890's, to whom the poets of the 'modern movement' owed much. Both the poets of that decade and the writers of naturalist and psychological short stories insisted on French allegiances to an extent that blurred their dependence on purely English sources. It is common to hear these figures discussed exclusively in terms of French sources, while the PreRaphaelite influence, for example, is rarely touched on.

Two attempts have recently been made to re-write the literary history of the period immediately prior to the 'modern movement' of which Imagism forms an early phase. Frank Kermode's Romantic Image seems a brilliant sortie in several directions, ambitions impossible to fulfill within the compass of a protracted essay. One objective is to assert a continuity within the English tradition from Romanticism to Symbolism with some suggestive gestures towards the 'modern movement'. Partly polemical, this involved combating Eliot's version of a 'dissociated sensibility' intensifying in the nineteenth century English tradition. Yet another objective seemed to be towards a reorientation of our attitudes towards presentday poetry. These Kermode seems to suggest are limited still by the noxious symboliste aesthetic which influenced Eliot. Polemical perhaps is the wrong word for Romantic Image since much of the book consists in an exploration of the dancer image as a hieroglyph of associated sensibility. 'Provocative' does more justice to its effect. The polemics are half-hearted, which may explain the odd omission of the Joycean 'epiphany' from the record, with its clear descent from Pater's 'will as vision' and the relation between the doctrine of the essay on Style and the 'images' of the Renaissance.

The relation of Imagism to the 'modern movement' as a whole, considered as a 'general part of the European mind' is discussed in Thomas Parkinson's 'Intimate and Impersonal: An Aspect of Modern Poetic,' (Journal of Aesthetics and Art History, 16, 373-383). For Parkinson, the disjunction between Imagism and the poets of the 1890's and the Symbolists is sharper than it is for Kermode. More positively than Kermode, Parkinson is concerned with the aesthetics of the 'modern movement'. The impersonality of Imagism, the insistence on the artist as creator of artifacts, as formulated by Flint and Pound, Parkinson relates to broadly contemporary and broadly similar notions: Ortega y Gasset's 'dehumanization of art' and Eliot's 'objective correlative'. Eliot's re-statement of the role that tradition plays, that the completely original art-work is either a false concept or involves an unreadable work, Parkinson reminds us, points to the highly polemical nature of Eliot's early essays with their deliberate denial of the Romantic and late-Romantic cult of 'sincerity' and of Pater's unique individual (in the essay on Style) with his unique sense of the world. It is the essay on Style which, for Parkinson, provides the basis for the aesthetic of the poets of the 1890's. In terms of Aesthetic, it might seem, the sole continuity between the poets of the fin de siècle and those of Imagism remains one of conscious antithesis.

It is still curious that in Flint's manifesto the three poets who represent the 'best tradition' are Sappho, Catullus and Villon, all of them concrete and direct perhaps, but apparently confessional, and very much the heroic models for the lyric poets of the 1890's. 'De-humanization' is one aspect merely of Imagist theory and that aspect which appears to distinguish most radically the Imagists from their English predecessors. The constant attempt to direct attention away from the artist towards the artifact can be found in an admittedly obscure sonnet of Mallarmö, Don du Poème where the aim of the poet is to produce an artifact which, perfected, belongs to everyone but the poet himself.

It is pertinent to recall some elements in Imagist doctrine. "An Image" Pound observes is "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time … it is the presentation of such a 'complex' instantaneously 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 the greatest works of art." And again: "the natural object is always the adequate symbol," unadorned, unqualified. The object should be 'presented' rather than 'described' and should be allowed its own identity in presentation through a music which so far as possible flows; "let the beginning of the next line, catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause." The poet should work like the musician in stresses and syllables, studying coldly the rhythms of masters, preferably in other languages, so as not to be distracted by discursive meanings (like Hughes, I ignore Pound's Vorticist re-statements).

What this suggests is Symbolism with its 'magical' assumptions discounted: a renewed attempt to subdue a familiar nineteenth century antinomy between subject and object. Symbolism attempted to maintain the authority of the ego and to invest the object with a sacramental life; to return, though in a purely private manner, to the 'correspondences' of the Renaissance before the duality of subject and object had been painfully surrendered to, which accounts for Pound's accusation that it degrades the symbol to a form of metonymy. In Pater's criticism, it would seem that the antinomy is resolved by dropping the object as far as possible, so that in that sense Parkinson's analysis is valid. However, 'complex' is clearly, in spite of Pound's hints about the 'newer psychologists', a version of 'epiphany' or 'will as vision'. In Pound's imagist poems, if not in W. C. Williams', the mere presentation of the object is not enough. Moreover, theory apart, the actual texts of the Imagist poets are anticipated in several ways by Pater. Pater frequently describes a secular 'epiphany', the moment when a landscape or a townscape so arranges itself, or is patient of arrangement by the spectator into the 'significant forms' hinted at in the essay on Giorgione.

In its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definite message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a few moments on a wall or floor: is itself, in truth, a space of such fallen light, caught as the colours are in an Eastern carpet, but refined upon and dealt with more subtly and exquisitely than by Nature herself.

In describing Du Bellay, Pater speaks of his best-known poem as "a composition in which the matter is almost nothing, the form almost everything"—his own criterion for lyric, and in Pater's usual manner we are given not abstract statement but concrete presentation, in which the object becomes all, the subject nothing, if momentarily only.

A sudden light transfigures some trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing fan, the dust in the barn-door. A moment—and the thing itself has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again.

Symbolism and impressionism, whether in painting (the Rose Croix, the Synthetists) or in literature, are a culmination of that close relation between the arts that distinguishes the nineteenth century. Pound by resisting the 'viewy' reacts against nineteenth century attempts at total art; he sees, for example, a line running from impressionism to futurism and relates the anti-rhetorical movement of the English 1890's with Whistler and the cubists' extrusion of literary matter from painting. Such phenomena 'move together' but 'they do not, of course, move in step.' The painter, Pound observes, can 'describe' natural detail more effectively than the poet.

Pound's references to 'impressionism' must clearly refer to the later stages of that movement. Monet's impressionism of light is based on the unique, individual sensation; so too is Pisarro's. Later impressionism becomes more interested in the poetry of urban life, the dynamic chaos of surging forms and lights: cafes, theatres, night life, musicians, washerwomen; and Degas' dancers, with their colour, form, movement, light, through whom the essence of life itself might be captured. Art becomes free of the social rhetoric of realism, (as through symbolism and the English fin de siècle poetry attempts to free itself of the discursive) even though it requires little distortion to turn the moment of insight (Lautrec's psychological curiosity about the 'moment of life,' for example) into literary anecdote. Degas' Au Cafö, for example, was moralized as 'The Absinthe Drinkers' when that picture was exhibited in England in 1893. However, for the later Impressionists, the object is re-affirmed and the artist retains freedom to find poetry alive even in the most painful and prosaic details of the modern, urban world. (The documentation is in the propaganda of the New English Art Club). Sensuous, mobile, in love with light, the feeling eye, the personal 'impression' the Paterian and the painterly senses of the word are not so embarrassingly disjunct, for Pater, in spite of his subjectivism and moralizing submits to his epiphanies as sui generis.

Free verse, organically determined from within, 'every emotion and every phase of emotion has some toneless phrase, some rhythm phrase to express it,' is one of the marks of Imagism, and the subtler prose rhythmists of the nineteenth century, a Meredith or a Pater, write often in a species of free verse. This was recognized by W. B. Yeats when he prefaced his selections in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse with the famous Mona Lisa passage, typographically arranged as free-verse. The passage was at one time dismissed as 'a purple panel' of the grossest sort, but the analysis of Sr. Giorgio Melchiori and a recent broadcast talk by W. A. Ward make that view untenable. In the simplest sense, Pater gathers up in the passage, insights scattered through his whole essay on Leonardo, but the passage is important for other reasons. As Ward puts it 'Pater plainly attributes much more to the painting of the Mona Lisa than is, strictly speaking, legible upon it.' Pater's contemporary, J. A. Symonds, remarked that he "attributes to the painter a far greater degree of sceptical self-consciousness than he was at all likely to have possessed." Another Victorian critic suggested that Pater was projecting into Leonardo's image "a meaning oddly characteristic of the conventional over-refinement of the present day" and Pater himself admits: "Certainly the Lady Lisa might stand as the symbol of the modern idea." In place of earlier images of Leonardo as great artificer, true to natural appearance (Vasari), as mage, the discoverer and expounder of the secrets of nature (the German romantics), Pater presents Leonardo as victim of the 'Fatal Woman' and yet by presenting the 'Fatal Woman' as image, Leonardo becomes master as well as victim. Pater himself rediscovers his own sense of freedom in creating his image via Leonardo's Lisa; in creating a model which would enable him to continue writing in 'the determinist nightmare' of the Post-Darwinian nineteenth century world. The Mona Lisa image is the first example of Symbolist thaumaturgy. Darwin's authoritative (so it seemed) mechanistic analysis had destroyed in man 'his every illusion of divinity', Pater's phrase, and Pater's aesthetic philosophy and practice were essentially an attempt to restore to man his sense of freedom. Ward reminds us that the explicit statement of how this thaumaturgic activity operates can be found in the essay on Style of 1888. In that essay, Pater makes a distinction between 'masculine' and 'feminine' in art; the 'masculine' Pater defines as the 'controlling, rational, forming, power' of the artist, exerted on 'the feminine' which is the brute mass of the artist's experience. It is 'soul' as opposed to 'mind', a further and related distinction. Art is born out of the work in organization achieved by mind. It is me design made on 'the web' of me artist's experience. The 'web', me feminine part of Pater's experience is his expectation of reality as taught to him by Darwin: perpetual flux, me context of 'determinist nightmare', existing under me influence of natural law or in Pater's despairing term 'necessity'. And, finally, as Ward puts it:

although man's consciousness and being were fragmented into moments which changed even as they were formed, those fragments bore in them 'the central forces' of the world.

For Pater, organic development meant that although the organism constantly changed, it contained vestigially legible upon it the synoptic history of that development.

There are three particulars of me feminine part of Pater's experience, 'the web' on which the design must be projected; all 'that is actual' in his knowledge of the world.

It is the business of art to reflect these in a male manner, submitting them to the rational, controlling, organizing power of design. By reducing as far as may be, the incoherent flux of experience to design, the artist will be able to emancipate himself from that experience. To the extent that the power of design affects the artist's own response to the incoherence and determinism of the nightmare it will establish his freedom from it. And the type of such a design is the Mona Lisa. In that image:

we may see Pater struggling to evolve the myth, or artistic model, which would locate and give expression to that material. He was intent on transmuting those ideas of reality which have been described, into an image—intent on rendering the impalpable, of making the ideas he wished to express 'saturate and become identical with' the vessel made to contain them. He wishes to define the image on the female 'fabric' of his dreams. And he wishes the fabric of dreams to be legible upon the image.

In the Daughters of Herodias, Leonardo's picture, the characters, Pater says, are: "clairvoyants, through whom, as through delicate instruments, one becomes aware of the subtler forces of nature, all that is magnetic in it." They are 'significant examples' in which we actually see those forces at work on the human flesh.… Pater was trying to create an image or model, or design, into which he could pour all the female fluid matter of his understanding of the world so as to locate it there and make it legible.

The 'forces of nature' and the 'magic web' are what he wishes to express. The Mona Lisa contains all the three particulars Ward defines and at the same time the masculine demands Pater is making in that she reduces the particulars to a design. She satisfies what the spirit needs in the face of modern life 'the sense of freedom'. In its free rhythms, not necessarily in Yeats' precise arrangement, the opening lines run:

The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the
waters
Is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand
years:
Man had come to desire.

To desire at the historical moment, when Pater was writing: the Lady Lisa being expressive of what he desires. 'The ways of a thousand years' is both properly liturgical and attempts to give, as Ward notes, universality and authority to the image.

Hers is the head
Upon which all 'the ends of the world' are come and
The eyelids are a little weary.

The ends of the world is also both liturgical and an attempt to invest the image with universality but the phrase contains also the explicit statement of Pater's aims, expressed concretely as always. Mona Lisa is 'a head', a single entity, 'upon which all the ends of the world are come,' concentrating in a single, finite image, all the fluid matter of man's apprehension of the world, his sense of relation to the objects about, and of their 'tyranny' over him. Lisa's beauty is

Wrought out from within upon the flesh,
The deposit, little cell by cell,
Of strange thoughts
And fantastic reveries
And exquisite passions.

The image is organic, but changes, developing as it is conceived: 'cell by cell' shows knowledge of the doctrine of organic development in the biological no less than the aesthetic sense. The Lady Lisa, Pater tells us, the image, defined itself on 'the fabric of his dreams.' All history is vestigially legible in the moment of our apprehension of her face:

All the thought and experience of the world
Have etched and moulded there.

She contains, still following Ward's account, a synoptic history of the development of civilization.

The animalism of Greece,
The lust of Rome,
The mysticism of the Middle Ages
With its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves,
The return of the Pagan world,
The sins of the Borgias.

This subserves Pater's notion of the conflict between the Hellenic and the Christian elements in Western culture and his cyclic theory of civilizations passing through the stages of Saint, Artist and Philosopher. But in a deeper sense evolution has introduced a new conception of time into the English consciousness. In a moment there are concentrated 'a thousand experiences:' just as the notion of carbon contains both the notions of coal and of the diamond. The artist's business, Ward continues,

was thus to collapse the growth of a thing into one of his moments of vision, and to contradict temporal development. He was to make the moment 'wholly concrete'. The moment becomes 'wholly concrete,' Pater maintains, when, in his own words, 'all the interests and effects of a long history, have condensed themselves, and.… seem to absorb past and future in the intense consciousness of the present. Thus are created 'exquisite pauses in time.… in which we seem to be spectators of all the fullness of existence, and which are like some consummate extract or quintessence of life.'

And the Mona Lisa is one such 'exquisite pause,' part of her function being to resist this evanescence and decay. With the world 'melting under our feet', in this post-Darwinian moment, Pater felt the need of security, which was to be achieved by constructing stasis, and art was the means of construction. A man could dwell in one of the 'exquisite pauses' art created and so become freed, emancipated from the deliquescence of the world. Part of the Lady Lisa's function then is to help us 'expand our moments a little beyond their allotted span,' and in a late book, Plato and Platonism, Pater speaks of 'certain pregnant types' who will present in an instant something like 'the accumulated history of mankind'. So we proceed to the passage Yeats quotes at the beginning of his anthology:

She is older than the rocks,
Among which she sits;
Like the vampire she has been dead many times,
And learned the secrets of the grave;
And has been a diver in deep seas
And keeps their fallen day about her;
And trafficked for strange webs
With Eastern Merchants:
And as Leda,
Was the mother of Helen of Troy,
And, as Saint Anne,
The mother of Mary.

Like the Fatal Woman, she is constantly born into time, but older than time. The image picks up all the attempts to interpret Lisa's smile—it was the Germans of the Romantic period, who had first attempted to interpret the background of rock and water. She is 'spectator of all the fullness', ideally detached, passive, like all Fatal Women, for

All this has been to her
But as the sound of lyres and flutes.

The lyres and flutes refer probably to another contemporary interpretation of the Fatal Woman, Swinburne's Laus Ven-eris, and to Vasari's account of how Leonardo arranged for musicians to play to La Gioconda while she was sitting, to dispel the melancholy that so often afflicts the faces of sitters. Ward's analysis continues by pointing out that though she is detached from her experience, she has organized it into her design and so is able to free herself from it. But at the same time as she frees herself from the experience, that experience cannot be denied, and must be suffered.

It lives in the delicacy,
With which it has moulded the changing
lineaments
And tinged the eyelids
And the hands.

We understand, says Pater, that any construction we make 'shows the clear, perpetual outline of face or limb' is but an image of ours—a design in a web, for nothing in our experience of the world is 'perpetual' or 'clear.' But we must, none the less, make the design contradict the reality of our experience, formulate and organize it, or the world will degenerate into total incomprehensibility. The Mona Lisa is Pater's suggested design. The male and female parts of man's experience and desire are reconciled there. She at once resists and gives expression to the 'magnetic nightmare.' In so far as she is eternal, and in so far as she imposed 'a clear, definite outline' on 'all the thought and experience of the world' she succeeds in her resistance. She shows the action of mind on soul, shows man dealing masterfully with his experience so as to control it, thus, gives him back his sense of freedom. She is at once the realisation and the suggestion of an artistic ideal.

As Pater himself puts it:

modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon and summing up in itself all modes of thought and life. Certainly the Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

I have dealt at great length with this passage, because it seems, both in itself and in the doctrine which accompanies it and is crystallized within it, to anticipate aspects of Imagist theory. The repeated 'and' is a trick of syntax used by, for example, H.D.; and Pater uses many auxiliary verbs which have an effect of unobtrusiveness.

According to Ford Madox Ford, it was Arthur Symons who provided the model in free-verse for the Imagists. Symons, however, wrote little in this mode, though as we shall see he has his own importance as precursor. In his introduction to the poems of Lionel Johnson of 1915, Pound seizes on a few lines here and there where Johnson's swift and accurate phrasing seems to fore-shadow Imagism, as well as recall Gautier and Chinese verse. However, Symons is more important both from the point of view of 'organic' verse-structure and the creation of 'images.' Much of his verse is concerned with the glittering patina, the bright surface truths of urban life: the streets by night; the half-world of the ballet and the music-hall. The ideal objectivity of the Imagist is rarely achieved. Landscapes and townscapes remain creations of the observer's mood: the old duality persists. A good example is Dieppe: Grey and Green:

The grey-green stretch of sandy grass,
Indefinitely desolate.
A sea of lead, a sky of slate;
Already autumn in the air, alas!

One stark monotony of stone,
The long hotel, acutely white,
Against the after-sunset light
Withers grey-green, and takes the grass's tone.

Listless and endless it outlies
And means, to you and me, no more
Than any pebble on the shore,
Or this indifferent moment as it dies.

Here, we encounter broken and rugged lines, melting detail, a hazy harmony such as a Monet might relish, and a final evocation of a sad 'epiphany' in Pater's mode. The title is Whistlerian. The scene is analyzed methodically rather as an art-critic might analyse a painting. The hotel for example is described in painterly terms as 'long', all detail evaporated and 'acutely' suggests both painfully and vividly white, the glowing negation of colour. Shape, then, is definite, but defined emotively in terms of colour. The first seven lines are all images: grey-green of sandy grass; sky of slate; stark monotony of stone; long hotel; sea of lead, and so forth. The verse itself, with its careful play of monosyllables, the bare fact, against the subjective polysyllables, moves freely without metronome. It is not until the eighth line that a verb appears and the word 'takes' is satisfyingly ambiguous. The final stanza deviates from Imagist and returns to Impressionist technique. Dieppe: Grey and Green is lyrical in form, as Pater had recommended, for in the lyric, matter and form are as far as possible, fused. Listless, endless, formless, passing, a wavering fugitive moment becomes a sensation worthy of poetic existence because of the 'epiphany' of sky, grass, sea and the ennui of colour in the hotel, almost, we are tempted to say, by the moment's very existence.

In other poems also, imagist lines tend to be embedded in impressionist and 'decadent' detail. In Nocturne, for example, London resolves itself into disparate images: 'the dome of cloud'; 'The long embankment with its lights/ The pavement glittering with fallen rain.' while the river 'shakes with wavering gleams/ That softly plunged through depths that lay/ Impenetrable … ' and most notably:

A bright train flashed with all its squares
Of warm light where the bridge lay mistily.

though once again the poem is tugged back to the subject, the observer.

White Heliotrope similarly opens with a stanza without verbs and with the same irregularities of rhythm and play of monosyllables that characterize At Dieppe: Grey and Green, though in that poem, the scene passes from a Renoir to the psychological curiosity of Lautrec. In Symons' prose impressions of Dieppe, published in the Savoy of 1896, we find again the same primary diction, economy in the use of the verb in order to give an instantaneous impression of the town: line fades, colour shimmers. The life of Dieppe is captured through colour as though it lived in a painting: the bright yellow and blue dresses of the fashionable women with their huge, floating hats; the shadowy grey mass of the Eglise Saint-Jacques; Dieppe's sea and sky whose thousand shifts of luminosity and colour Symons studies from twilight to sunrise. And the same procedure is adopted in his numerous 'impressionistic travel pieces.'

Dieppe deals with that typical impressionistic subject—the sea (Jongkind, Monet, Boudin); in other poems Symons touches on another impressionist and symboliste subject, the dancer; and there are no doubt obscure connexions between the living and moving Symboliste Image and Pound's reaction from Amygisme towards the 'Vortex', but this is not the place for discussing those. Folded away in magazines, without doubt, are other poems which anticipate Imagism in its earlier phases. Such will only alter the received version of literary history very mildly, but they serve as a reminder that tradition is not built on ruptures.

Lorelei Cederstrom

[In the following essay, Cederstrom identifies Whitman as "a powerful and pervasive force " on Imagist theory and practice.]

SOURCE: "Walt Whitman and the Imagists," in Walt Whitman of Mickle Street: A Centennial Collection, edited by Geoffrey M. Sill, The University of Tennessee Press/Knoxville, 1994, pp. 205-23.

The influence of Walt Whitman upon the Imagist poets is a complex issue. Although several recent studies have clarified Whitman's relationship to certain Imagists like Ezra Pound, Whitman's influence upon the poetic theory of Imagism has been less clearly defined.¹ A major difficulty in addressing this question is that many of the Imagists considered their poetic practice to be directly opposed to Whitman's. This essay will demonstrate that, notwithstanding the pleas of Imagists to the contrary, Walt Whitman's poetry was a powerful and pervasive force on their practice and technique.

The most vociferous denial of Whitman's influence came from the Imagists' self-styled spokesperson, Amy Lowell. She found fault with every aspect of Whitman's style and technique, beginning with his point of view, which she felt to be confining: "He had a curiously limited way of viewing life principally from the outside," she noted. She felt that Whitman's form was the result of this superficial viewpoint; his form sprang, she wrote, "not from a positive desire to give substance to a new conception of beauty, but from a negative one not to incorporate in his work any existing beauties, whatsoever. Here at once is a cleavage with the moderns" ("Walt Whitman and the New Poetry" 507). She viewed his use of free verse, an element so vital to the Imagists, with an equally skeptical eye, claiming that Whitman did not write in vers libre at all, but in a "highly emotional prose." She found him guilty of "inversion … clichés … wrong use of foreign words," and that catch-all of modern disparagement, "bad taste." Moreover, Lowell prefaced her first Imagist anthology, Some Imagist Poets (1915), with the Imagist "Credo," which contains a denial of "cosmic" poetry and all it represents: "We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art." In spite of these and other similar denials, a case can be made for a connection between Whitman and the Imagist poets John Gould Fletcher, Richard Aldington, and F. S. Flint; indeed, it can be demonstrated that Whitman had some influence on Lowell herself.

Before exploring the dynamics of these specific relationships, it should be emphasized that there is little doubt that Whitman himself wrote poems that can be called Imagist. This has been noted by several critics—Waskow, Asselineau, and others—and need only be re-emphasized here. An early poem, "Pictures," rejected for the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, leaned strongly in the direction of Imagism. Such poems as "A Farm Picture," "The Runner," "The Dalliance of the Eagles," "Cavalry Crossing a Ford," "Bivouac on a Mountain Side," and others are Imagist poems in the purest sense. However, these "Imagist" poems of Whitman's can be dismissed as accidental unless it can be determined that Whitman's aesthetic principles are in agreement with Imagist theory. A comparison of Whitman's poetic theory with the Imagist "Credo" set out by Lowell will demonstrate the accord in their ideas about the nature of poetry.

The first principle of the Imagists, as described by Lowell, is to "use the exact word," the word that most precisely describes the object, but in the language of common speech. We can find no contradiction of this principle in Whitman's 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, where he states: "The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity.… nothing can make up for excess or for lack of definiteness" (LG 717).

Second, the Imagists emphasize the importance of the use of new rhythms in poetry, and in spite of Lowell's condemnation of Whitman's use of free verse, the continuing influence of his poems stands as a testament to the fecundity of the verse from which has come to be associated with his name. Whitman emphasizes the organic development of rhythm from thought, noting: "The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form" (LG 714). The concept of form in Imagist theory emphasizes the same freedom: "In poetry," Lowell writes, "a new cadence means a new idea." Whitman also encourages the organic development of form: "The cleanest expression is that which finds no sphere worthy of itself and makes one" (LG 717).

The third principle of the Imagists is absolute freedom in the choice of subject. Neither objects nor ideas of the past or present should predominate, for good art may be about either age. Subjects drawn from the modern age must, however, be used with caution, since, as Lowell warned in 1915, "There is nothing so uninspiring nor so old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 1911." Whitman, too, asserts the need for durability in the choice of subjects. He emphasizes the necessity of speaking to the modern world, but at the same time notes that the "prescient" poet "projects himself centuries ahead and judges performer or performance after the changes of time." Whitman's statements recall Lowell's about the aeroplane, for he warns the poet to ask himself whether a "new discovery in science or arrival at superior planes of thought and judgment and behavior fixed him or his so that either can be looked down upon" (LG 726).

The most critical area of comparison occurs with the fourth statement of the Imagist credo. Here the Imagists state their rejection of the cosmic poet and their own dedication to the portrayal of an image. As noted earlier, there is evidence within the body of Whitman's work that he found the simple portrayal of an image to be a worth-while artistic pursuit, and there is evidence of this belief in his artistic creed as well. He notes, "In these Leaves everything is literally photographed. Nothing is poeticized, no divergence, not a step, not an inch, nothing for beauty's sake, no euphemism, no rhyme" (Whitman, Complete Writings 6: 71). Whitman agrees most heartily that the poet should not deal in vague generalities. Things and their description are the lifestream of the poet. In "Song of Myself he writes: "I accept Reality and dare not question it. / Materialism first and last imbuing" (LG 51). For Whitman all ideas, all metaphysics, are inherent in things. The thoughts of the poet "are the hymns of the praise of things. In the talk on the soul and eternity and God off of his equal plane he is silent.… he sees eternity in men and women" (LG 713). Whitman departs from the Imagists in that he goes beyond them; he begins with things, and, from things shown clearly, the poet points the way to the soul. In Whitman's words, "folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects.… they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls" (LG 714). This is not to say that the way to the soul should be described in vague abstractions. It should, rather, grow out of the life of the things described. The great poet, by careful choice of image, creates a cosmic awareness, a consciousness of the life which illuminates the simplest picture. The great poet is not to speak of the soul directly, although Whitman himself often does this, but refer to it by precise, definite pictures.

Whitman's remarks about definiteness seem to contradict another of his statements, namely, his demand for "indirection." He writes: "For such the expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new. It is to be indirect and not direct or descriptive or epic" (LG 712). It is necessary to understand what Whitman means by "indirect" here, for it appears to contradict his earlier statements regarding the presentation of a definite thing, a rendering of particulars. Whitman is referring here to the role of the poet as one who "points the way to the soul." The way to cosmic consciousness is by indirection; through image, the soul enters the poem secretly, indirectly. The poet, for Whitman, does more than describe. He describes, photographs, excluding nothing for beauty's sake, and by this presentation of direct image, transcendence occurs, cosmic values enter. It is because the Imagist poets value the image not for its own sake but, in Pound's words, for the "intellectual and emotional complex" which surrounds it, that Imagist theory can be said to be in agreement with Whitman. When the Imagists speak of their disagreement with cosmic poetry, they voice disapproval of the very vague abstract discussions of God and the universe which Whitman himself deplores. Whitman writes, "The poetic quality is not marshaled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract addresses to things nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else and is in the soul" (LG 714). E. H. Eby, in a study of Whitman's use of the word "indirection," points out also that indirection transcends simple image-making: "Indirection, then, involves but is more than image-making, more than an analogy, more than myth, more than symbolism. It goes beyond all that because it must be free and fluid and illimitable in its suggestiveness" (9). Although it is plain that Whitman's verse transcends image-making, it does not transcend the principles of the Imagist poet, for Pound also writes of the ability of the great poet to "liberate," to set the reader free from time limits and space limits," and infuse the reader with a "sense of sudden growth" (Hughes 28-29).

An image may thus be both definite and suggestive. To return to the Imagist doctrine, the fifth statement can be presented here without comment, as it touches on the last statements. Lowell notes that the Imagist wishes to "produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite." Whitman has written as well that "nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness" (LG 717). The final statement of the Imagist theory reads, "Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry." Whitman similarly compares the poet to a stone-cutter who carves "solid and beautiful forms … where there are now no solid forms" (LG 712). The poet is "the arbiter of the diverse and he is the key." Although Whitman is aware of the need for concentration in image-making, in his theories of method he advocates neither the narrow compactness found in Pound, nor the extreme vagueness of the Symbolists or cosmic poets. "The greatest poet," he writes, "has less a marked style and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself (LG 717). The self is the measure, and the self both expands and contracts, concentrates and diversifies. Whitman's poetry is often extremely concentrated; the catalogs are an obvious testament to this concentration. It is his soul that is expansive, but his expansive soul finds expression in earthbound, physical imagery. Thus, point for point, there is a consistent similarity between Whitman's poetics and the Imagist theories set out by Lowell.

Let us now examine in some detail Whitman's influence on the early Imagist writers. Amy Lowell has stated that Whitman gave to the Imagists no more than an attitude, a vision of the poet as a seer which she and the other modern poets could accept. She was aware of the several short Imagist poems to be found within Leaves of Grass, but in the end disavowed their influence on her or the others. In her 1927 article in the Yale Review, she writes: "It would be utter folly to consider that the vignettes in modern work derive from Whitman when Emily Dickinson did the same thing better" (515). But it is possible, nonetheless, to trace an example in which her own poetic practice derived directly from Whitman. In his autobiography, John Gould Fletcher mentioned a circumstance wherein Whitman inspired him and he, in turn, had some influence upon Lowell's method. While on a visit to London, Fletcher was seized by the desire to present London in a series of images of the kind Whitman used in his city catalogs. "I was carried away by Whitman's robust realism, by his masterly grasp of the details and contrasts of life to be found in just such a city as I was now visiting" (Life Is My Song 42). In a discussion of the poems they both were working on, Fletcher described to Miss Lowell his desire to capture London life in a poem.

Miss Lowell asked about this method. Looking out a window, Fletcher said:

I would sit and look at every object in just such a view as this is.… I would try and describe all these objects without in any way identifying myself with them. I would try and put down their essence, their moods … by finding words and color sounds that would orchestrate them, make them speak to the reader by means of such combinations. I would thus try and get at the dominant moods of the city; the moods of early morning, the moods of evening, the mood of midnight. Then I would take in other objects. For example, the banks, the hospitals, the churches, the hotels, the clubs, the theaters, the stores, the street traffic, the railway stations, the restaurants, the parks, the public houses, the street corners. Thus the whole city would become recreated in my mind by grasping the objects in it simply as objects and nothing more.… The trouble with them [the Imagists] is that they cultivate too much the fragment. They haven't tackled yet, in perfectly free form, a whole city full of people. It has always been my ambition to do so. (Life Is My Song 92)

Fletcher quotes Lowell as describing his idea as "fascinating" and "perfectly original." She suggested that he call this idea the "unrelated method." "Not quite unrelated," Fletcher replied, "I simply want to be able to look at everything frankly as if for the first time. For that reason, I want to feel detached from it, as if it had a life of its own, which is my business to see and describe." Finally, Fletcher confessed, to the reader but not to Lowell, the origin of his "new" method:

I was not aware how much Miss Lowell could understand of this; but at any rate, I felt, as I sat there, that she understood and sympathized far more than Pound would have done. I had never mentioned this particular desire of mine to him, nor to any of his friends.… Moreover, the idea itself was derivable remotely from Whitman's realistic "catalogue passages" interspersed throughout Leaves of Grass and from Blake's "seeing through, not with the eye," and I already knew what he thought of Blake and Whitman. (Life Is My Song 93)

Amy Lowell later confessed to Fletcher that her poem "A London Thoroughfare" had been written as a direct result of the method she heard him describe (Life Is My Song 102).

In addition to this direct influence, Whitman's influence is obvious in other poems of Miss Lowell's as well. She was probably unaware that she was using Whitman's techniques, but she freely admitted that she admired his attitudes and his visions, and they appear in her work. She uses images in "In Excelsis" which are highly reminiscent of "Song of Myself and "Children of Adam":

I drink your lips,
I eat the whiteness of your hands and feet.
My mouth is open,
As a new jar I am empty and open.

(Untermeyer 170)

Her long poem "Lilacs" bears a resemblance to Whitman's "When Lilacs Last At The Dooryard Bloom'd":

Lilacs in dooryards,
Holding quiet conversations with an early moon;
Lilacs watching a deserted house
Settling sideways into the grass of an old road;
Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided
shock of bloom
Above a cellar dug into a hill.
You are everywhere.
You are everywhere.

(Untermeyer 172)

The ending of Lowell's poem refers to Whitman's last thought in "When Lilacs." Whitman's poem concludes with an image of "Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul." Lowell's ends with the self as well: "Lilac in me because I am New England." Also, in "Solitaire," Lowell describes the wandering exploration of the mind through a sleeping city, in a poem that could be called a miniature of Whitman's "The Sleepers." The opening lines suggest the comparison immediately:

When night drifts along the streets of the city,
And sifts down between the uneven roofs,
My mind begins to peek and peer.…

(Untermeyer 161)

Lowell's prose poems such as "Midday and Afternoon" are reincarnations of Whitman's catalogs and use the method that Fletcher described. The very conception of a prose poem may have come from Whitman, for Lowell called his poetry "a highly emotional prose." Lowell accepted this "prose" as having poetic value because of its "approach and return." She defines return as "some device by which a poem is brought back to its starting place," or some "dominant emotional symbol" ("Walt Whitman and the New Poetry" 509). For Whitman, this dominant emotional symbol was the self, which unites the profusion of life. In "Midday and Afternoon," Lowell, too, finds a center in the "I": "Swirl of crowded streets. Shock and recoil of traffic. The stock-still brick facade of an old church, against which the waves of people lurch and withdraw.… I am a place of the town, a bit of blown dust, thrust along with the crowd. Proud to feel the pavement under me, reeling with feet" (Some Imagist Poets 1916, 84-85). Thus, in spite of her denials of Whitman's influence, it is present in the theme, the vision, the images, and even the method which Amy Lowell consistently employs in her own work.

It is not surprising that John Gould Fletcher should have explained a Whitmanian technique to Amy Lowell, for, of all the Imagists, Fletcher, spiritually, is most indebted to Whitman. Fletcher loved and admired Whitman greatly. In a poem called "Whitman," he describes him as a "mountain" of poetic vision which no single man can quarry. The influence of Whitman on Fletcher has been mentioned by other critics, including Lowell: "He became an ardent Whitmanite and his own writing reflected this devotion," she writes ("Walt Whitman and the New Poetry" 511). Fletcher shares Whitman's mysticism, his peculiar kind of patriotism, his method of intuiting the inner life and essential being of things, his poetic freedom, and many of his themes. In Fletcher's first book, Irradiations—Sand and Spray, there are passages that could be inserted directly into "Song of Myself," so close are they in theme and style to Whitman's own, albeit lacking in Whitman's power:

O seeded grass, you army of little men
Crawling up the long slope with quivering quick
blades of steel,
You who storm millions of graves, tiny green
tentacles of earth,
Interlace yourselves tightly over my heart,
And do not let me go!
For I would be here forever and watch with one
eye
The pilgrimaging ants in your dull, savage
jungles,
The while with the other I see the stiff lines of the
slope,
Break in mid-air, a wave surprisingly arrested, and
above it, wavering, dancing, bodiless,
colourless, unreal,
The long, thin, lazy fingers of the heat.…

(Selected Poems 6)

Fletcher's early "Symphonies," from Goblins and Pagodas, the Green, the White, the Blue, and the Scarlet, all bear clear evidence of Whitman's brand of mystical vision. "Oh, old pagodas of my soul, how you glittered across green trees!" is the cry of the "Symphonies," a vision of the soul in flight, absorbing, transcending, dreaming. Like Whitman, he becomes one with the cosmos in his mystical visions:

I am a glittering raindrop
Hugged close by the cool rhododendron.
I am a daisy starring
The exquisite corners of the close-cropped turf.…

(Selected Poems 21)

I will abide in this forest of pines;
For I have unveiled naked beauty,
And the things that she whispered to me in the
darkness
Are buried deep in my heart.

(Selected Poems 25)

Throughout these poems, Fletcher describes the flight of what Whitman terms the "fluid and swallowing soul":

Towards the impossible
Towards the inaccessible
Towards the ultimate,
Towards the silence,
Towards the eternal
These blossoms go.

The peonies spring like rockets in the twilight,
And out of them all, I rise.

(Selected Poems 27)

Glenn Hughes, in his study of the Imagists, has noted other relationships between Fletcher and Whitman. "The Return to Life" in Fletcher's The Sea of Life, he notes, is straight out of Whitman. He calls Breakers and Granite "Fletcher's salute to America"—"a Whitmanesque book, overflowing with rich impressions"—and states that Fletcher's "Lincoln" has already taken its place beside Whitman's "When Lilacs" as "one of the greatest eulogies inspired by the best-loved American" (Hughes 147). Whitman's voice can be found throughout Fletcher's poems. The latter writer's long poem "Autobiography" contains many elements of "Song of Myself," including catalog passages, a traveling point of view, and an attempt at identification with universal values. Fletcher's poem "To Columbus" refers persistently to Whitman's "A Thought of Columbus"; each emphasizes the "cumulus" of life, the years and people that have gone in and out of existence in the centuries since Columbus set forth. Both point out the relationship between the journey of the soul through life and Columbus's journey to the new world. Both poems end with a juxtaposition of Columbus's dreams and modern perspectives. Fletcher states:

And we bring with us the old seed ripened to a
fruit, the proud will grow bitter and silent.…
You who once guided us westward, here on this
eastward shore will not look down and
understand.

{Selected Poems 155)

Whitman's poem ends with a similar, though less bitter, testament to Columbus as progenitor of the present:

O'er the long backward path to thee—one vast
consensus, north, south, east, west,
Soul plaudits! acclamation! reverent echoes!
One manifold, huge memory to thee! oceans and
lands!
The modern world to thee and thought of thee!

(LG 582)

In spite of the many resemblances to Whitman, Fletcher seems to have missed many of Whitman's methodic innovations and, with the exception of his new use of Whitman's city imagery, he used very few of the dynamic techniques which Whitman anticipated. He did, however, inherit Whitman's concerns, and the cosmic awareness that shaped Whitman's poetry was very much a part of Fletcher's perception. Fletcher proves that a cosmic view need not bar a poet from the Imagist movement, of which he was very much an accepted member.

In opposition to Fletcher, Richard Aldington, of all the Imagists, is the least obviously indebted to Walt Whitman. His poetic vision lacks Whitman's love and Whitman's joy. Aldington, like his close friend D. H. Lawrence, rejected Whitman's desire to merge with every aspect of humanity. Aldington rejected much of society, appalled by its cruelty, hurt by its indifference, and disgusted by its ugliness. This rejection found its way into his poetry. A poem called "People," later titled "Resentment," strongly suggests Whitman's influence in its negation of Whitman's merging self:

Why should you try to crush me?
Am I so Christlike?
You beat against me,
Immense waves, filthy with refuse.
I am the last upright of a smashed break water.
But you shall not crush me
Though you bury me in foaming slime
And hiss your hatred about me.
You break over me, cover me; I shudder at the
contact;
Yet I pierce through you
And stand up, torn, dripping, shaken,
But whole and fierce.

(116)

Aldington achieves wholeness by resisting others, Whitman by accepting them.

Whitman and Aldington approach each other more directly in their war poetry, for both lived through war, were closely connected to it, and revealed in their poetry that they were affected by it. Whitman in "Drum Taps" and Aldington in "Images of War" share an ability to transcend the horrors of the battlefield. In "Bivouac on a Mountain Side," Whitman, in pure Imagist terms, describes a "traveling army halting"; then, without moralizing, he turns his attention overhead: "And over all the sky—the sky! far, far out of reach, studded, breaking out, the eternal stars" (LG 300). Aldington's "In the Trenches" makes the same kind of transcendental leap. From the weary soldier the poet turns his eyes upward:

Impotent,
How impotent is all this clamour,
This destruction and contest…
Night after night the Pleiades sing
And Orion swings his belt across the sky.…

But Aldington moralizes, preaches, and ends with the bitter question:

Can you stay them with your noise
Then kill Winter with your cannon,
Hold back Orion with your bayonets
And crush the spring leaf with your armies!

(82-83)

Here we have one example of Whitman writing a more nearly perfect Imagist poem than a writer commonly associated with the Imagist tradition. This becomes ironic in light of Aldington's comments about Whitman:

If you feel you are too rhetorical or too didactic, you must have a tendency to write like old Walt Whitman, whom I have just been reading, and who might have been a jolly fine poet, if he hadn't been spoilt with the ideal that all poets should mouth platitudes in pompous language, and so draw a highly moral lesson from what they saw. Like every American, Whitman had to be cosmic. Bah! what is cosmic? (Fletcher quoting Aldington, Life Is My Song 79)

It is safe to answer that Aldington was as cosmic as Whitman in the two poems discussed above and certainly more didactic, rhetorical, and pompous.

A cosmic point of view derives from the ability to transcend actuality, no matter how grim. In their poems of war, both Whitman and Aldington were able to transcend death and attain a vision of beauty. Aldington describes a dead soldier as abstractly beautiful:

More beautiful than one can tell,
More subtly colored than a perfect Goya,
And more austere and lovely in repose
Than Angelo's hand could ever carve in stone.

(96)

Whitman finds the beauty of the soul present in the face of a dead youth:

O the bullet could never kill what you really are,
dear friend,
Nor the bayonet stab what you really are;
The soul! yourself I see, great as any, good as the
best,
Waiting secure and content, which the bullet
could never kill,
Nor the bayonet stab O friend

(LG 322)

The climax of "Drum Taps" occurs when Whitman sees in the face of a dead boy that "this face is the face of the Christ himself. / Dead and divine and the brother of all, and here again he lies" (LG 307). Aldington's ability to transcend never goes beyond the visual appreciation of the dead in repose and the evidence of recurring life found in nature. Aldington was too horrified by war and death ever to achieve the acceptance and transcendence that Whitman did. Whitman's sympathies always reached beyond the bounds of individuality, so much so that he could write of a soldier, "poor boy! I never knew you, / Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to the for you, if that would save you" (LG 310).

Apart from Aldington's direct denials of Whitman, it is only in their war poetry that the two poets reveal any similarities. After his early work, Aldington's poetry became bitter and ironic, its sensuality earthbound rather than transcendental. It was only the soul-shattering experience of war that forced Aldington to search for universal or cosmic realities. In his writings about his poetry, particularly in his preface to The Complete Poems, Aldington gives us a clue to the areas of similarity he has with Whitman, as well as to their fundamental differences. He writes:

This brings me to two other elements of poetry about which I feel great diffidence in speaking—I mean reverence and the sense of mystery. By "reverence" I understand no false or affected humility, but an intàmate and spontaneous conviction that what is not me, what is outside of me, is far greater and more interesting than I am, although the only account I can give of it is how it appears to me and through me.

Thus, by his own admission, Aldington never achieves the pure union of the Me and the Not-Me that Whitman did, even though he does share with Whitman a genuine humility and the awareness that the Me and the Not-Me can only be united in the self. Yet, in his next statement, which follows the one above, he demonstrates that he was aware of the cosmic powers which hold everything together:

By the sense of mystery I understand the experience of certain places and times when one's whole nature seems to be in touch with a presence, a genius loci, a potency. I won't go into the psychology of this or even attempt to argue that it may not be a self-induced delusion. I shall only say that the experience seems to have occurred to many other people in many ages, and add that when I use the word "god" or "gods" or the name of some Hellenic deity, I am not indulging in a mythological flourish but refer to the actual experience of some "potency." (16)

Because Aldington never achieves any true union of Me and Not-Me, his poems remain spiritually on a lower level than Whitman's. Clouded by maya, his transcendence never more than momentary, he could not free the self from bitterness. It might have benefited Aldington's poetic vision if he had not confused Whitman's cosmic spirit with platitude, but had grasped it as Whitman's relationship with the "potency" he so greatly respected.

Finally, some brief mention should be made of F. S. Flint, as certain of Whitman's tendencies found their way into his work. In the title poem of Otherworld, for example, Flint has written what has almost come to be a pattern poem for the Imagist writers, a description of the workaday London world and a transcendental view of that world. We have seen how this method can be traced back to Whitman. Each of the Imagist poets seems to draw back from Whitman's idea of merging, and Flint is no exception. His poem called "Easter" describes both a brand of camaraderie very like Whitman's own and a revulsion at the notion of a union with mankind in multitude. The poem begins with words right out of Whitman:

We lurch on, and, stumbling,
touch each other.
You do not shrink, friend,
There you, and I here,
Side by side, we go, jesting.
We do not seek, we do not avoid, contact.

But Flint then sets up a separation between him and his friend and the rest of humanity:

The flags of the stone steps are hollowed;
and you and I must strive to remain two
and not to merge in the multitude.
It impinges on us; it separates us;
we shrink from it; we brave through it;
we laugh; we jest; we jeer;
and we save fragments of our souls.

(Some Imagist Poets 1916, 51)

By their constant assault on Whitman's idea of merging, the Imagist writers reveal how very much he remains in their thoughts. However, Flint reveals that he shares many of Whitman's attitudes. In "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun," Whitman describes a dichotomy in his desires. The first half of the poem describes his love of, his yearning for, "solitude" and the "primal sanities of Nature" (LG 312). In the latter half of the poem, he rejects these visions of peace for the bustling and confusion of Manhattan streets in wartime, for "the endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even the sight of the wounded)" {LG 314). In a poem on the same theme, "War-Time," Flint rejects the road that leads "past the bovine quiet of houses," the "tranquillity of … gardens." The road he would take is the one to the city with its "swift-rattling of motor buses, and the dust and the tattered paper." He wants the place

where amid the din…
the news is shouted,
and soldiers gather, off duty.

There I can feel the heat of Europe's fever;
and I can make,
as each man makes the beauty of the woman he
loves,
no spring and no woman's beauty,
while that is burning.

Present throughout Whitman's work is his vision of the poet. Every experience for Whitman is good because it becomes a part of his poetry; he transforms everything he sees, every incident into art. Even in the midst of war he could write, "I have nourish'd the wounded and sooth'd many a dying soldier, / And at intervals waiting or in the midst of camp, / Composed these songs" {LG 319). Flint is capable as well of transcending experience by writing a poem about it. Flint transforms and transcends actuality by a series of Platonic steps which Whitman often utilized. The path from the locked-up ego, to sympathy for another person, to transcendence of the painful experience, to cosmic realization, to art, is a course both Whitman and Flint describe in their poetry. In "Gloom," Flint describes the loneliness of the self without transcendental view:

I sat there in the dark
of the room and of my mind…
Then
I gathered up within me all my powers
until outside of me was nothing:
I was all—
All stubborn, fighting, sadness and revulsion.

{Some Imagist Poets 1916, 51)

A woman touches him, but he is closed against her until he intuits her pain: "Then I thought: she has gone away; she is hurt." His intuition gives him grace; by sympathy with another being, by rising above his selfish ego, Flint is able to move above the "gloom," release the flow of his cosmic spirit, become creative soul and write a poem:

… and I felt the presence of the fields we had
walked over, the roads we
had followed,
the flowers we had watched together,
before it [gloom] came.
… And I came away,
full of the sweet and bitter juices of life;
and I lit the lamp in my room,
and made this poem.

{Some Imagist Poets 1916, 64)

This process, though on a scale smaller than Whitman's, is a central aspect of his method. Implicit here is a step that goes beyond Plato's final stage of identification with universal values. For Flint and Whitman, this awareness leads to the release of the creative energies. Thus, awareness of the universal serves a Bergsonian function, intuiting for the purpose of art.

In conclusion, it can be seen that, in spite of their denials, the Imagists learned a great deal about poetic technique from Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Ezra Pound was later to see himself and Imagism as "an encrustation of the ages" (59) upon the rock of Whitman's power, for all of the basic elements of Imagist technique are present in Whitman's theoretical writings as well as his poetry. Whitman believed that poetry should be particular; he incorporated within his method the juxtapositions and tensions between the real and the ideal that are so much a part of the Imagist method. He felt that common objects had their place in poetry, yet enveloped these objects with his own "intellectual and emotional complex."² Whitman was an Imagist in the way that Pound was later to be an Imagist; each used Imagist techniques to write cosmic poetry. Whitman anticipated every essential aspect of Imagist theory and technique; his own words best summarize his influence: "I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and an encloser of things to be" {LG 80).

NOTES

¹ Cf. James E. Miller, American Quest, and Erkkila, Walt Whitman among the French. Miller, in his chapter on "Ezra Pound's Cantos," explores Whitman's "presence in both the form and content of The Cantos" (69-98). Erkkila, similarly, in the epilogue to her book, discusses the indirect path by which Whitman influenced such American authors as Pound and Eliot through French authors. She notes: "Pound consistently proposed Whitman's French followers and admirers as models for literary America" (234). In spite of the excellence of these studies and their clarification of the relationship between Whitman and the later Imagists, Whitman's influence on the early Imagists requires some explication.

² Pound, of course, defined the image as "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." However, Pound's definition is frequently clipped at this point, and it is the next sentence that looks directly toward Whitman. Pound continues: "It is the presentation of such a complex instantaneously 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 greatest works of art."

WORKS CITED

Aldington, Richard. The Complete Poems. London: A. Wingate, 1948.

Asselineau, Roger. "Whitman's Style: From Mysticism to Art." Whitman. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice, 1962. 89-106.

Eby, E. H. "Walt Whitman's Indirections." Walt Whitman Review 12 (1966): 5-16.

Erkkila, Betsy. Walt Whitman among the French. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

Fletcher, John Gould. Selected Poems. Boston: Houghton, 1938.

Flint, F. S. "Otherworld." Some Imagist Poets. Ed. Amy Lowell. Boston: Houghton, 1916.

Hughes, Glen. Imagism and the Imagists. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 1931.

Lowell, Amy, ed. Some Imagist Poets. Boston: Houghton, 1915. 2d ed. 1916. 3d ed. 1917.

—. "Walt Whitman and the New Poetry." Yale Review 16 (Apr. 1927): 502-19. Rpt. Poetry and Poets: Essays. Boston: Houghton, 1930. 61-87.

Miller, James E., Jr., ed. The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.

Pound, Ezra. "Walt Whitman." In "Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound." By Herbert Bergman. American Literature 27 (1955): 59.

Untermeyer, Louis, ed. Modern American Poetry. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950.

Waskow, Howard J. Whitman: Explorations in Form. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.

Whitman, Walt. The Complete Writings. Ed. R. M. Bucke et al. New York: Putnam's, 1902.

—. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965. Abbreviated as LG.

Daniel Stempel

[In the following essay, Stempel asserts that translations by Lafcadio Hearn served as an important source of Japanese style and technique for writers of the Imagist movement.]

SOURCE: "Lafcadio Hearn's Translations and the Origins of Imagist Aesthetics," in Comparative Literature East and West: Traditions and Trends, edited by Cornelia N. Moore and Raymond A. Moody, The College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature, University of Hawaii and the East-West Center, 1989, pp. 31-7.

Lafcadio Hearn is a minor figure in American literary history, a transplanted exotic who flourished in the hot-house atmosphere of late nineteenth century aesthetic impressionism. But literary history, like political history or economic history, too often ignores what lies outside its self-defined limits. It constructs what it imagines is a temporal narrative of authors and works when it is, in fact, deciding in advance just which texts can be admitted into the canon of so-called "literary" documents. It ignores those which may lie in the border regions of journalism and travel literature, for example. There are times when literary historians must be reminded that there is a broader history outside their discipline and that it cannot be isolated from that history without becoming a victim of its own myopic methods. Poets do not spend their lives reading only poetry, novelists do not read only the novels of their predecessors. Literature, like every other human activity, interacts with society, past and present.

As a specific example, we search in vain for any mention of Lafcadio Hearn in the histories of the Imagist movement of the first two decades of this century. The Imagists claimed to have derived their principles of economy of diction and sharp visual focus from the poetry and art of Japan, among other sources, but the literary historians seem to be unaware of the contribution of the Japanese poems and songs which Hearn collected, translated, and explicated in the articles and books which he published between 1894 and 1904.

Yet there is ample evidence that anyone interested in Japan at that time would have turned to Hearn as the most popular and most readable expert on Japan. Richard Aldington, who was in the movement from the time that it was named and founded by Ezra Pound in 1912 in a Kensington tea-shop to its gradual demise a decade later, wrote that he had read Lafcadio Hearn when he was a schoolboy, in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5.1 We do not know when Pound himself read Hearn, but in 1916 and 1917 he urged James Joyce to read George Gould's 1908 biography of Hearn. Gould was a Philadelphia ophthalmologist who had treated Hearn for failing vision with some degree of success. It is significant, I think, that Pound did not have to explain to Joyce who Hearn was.² John Gould Fletcher recalled that he had read Hearn's translations of Japanese poetry, among others, when he was associated of with the Imagist.³ In 1915 amy Lowell delivered a lecture on "the New Manner in Modern Poetry" and illustrated it by reading poems by Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, H.D., and translations of Japanese poems by Lafcadio Hearn.⁴

But perhaps more important was the fact that two influential men of letters in America and England, Ferris Greenslet, Hearn's editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Edward Thomas, critic and poet, were actively campaigning for recognition of the value of Hearn's writings. Greenslet contributed an article on John Gould Fletcher to the special issue on Imagism of The Egoist (May 1915) and published a collection of some of Hearn's translations in the same year. His prefatory Publisher's Note observes: "In their limitation of a poem to the presentation of a single impression and in their ability to present that impression with the utmost vividness and with the sternest economy of words, these Japanese poets are strangely akin to the Imagist, the youngest of the modern schools."⁵ Edward Thomas, already respected and admired by poets like the young Robert Frost, published a short biography of Hearn in 1912, at about the same time that the Imagist movement officially began. Rather than asking if any Imagists had read Hearn's translations, perhaps we should ask if there were any who had not.

J. B. Harmer's history of Imagism and the Imagists, Victory in Limbo: Imagism 1908-17 (1975), is the latest and most thoroughly researched of the three standard histories. Harmer devotes ten pages to the Japanese influence on the Imagists without once mentioning Hearn's work. Why not? I suspect that the answer lies in the unfortunate practice of writing literary history by relying on other literary histories rather than by checking the original texts. Harmer's major source is Earl Miner's The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature, published in 1958 and based on his 1955 doctoral dissertation. Miner recognizes Hearn's "enormous popular appeal"⁶ and attempts to distinguish between what was mere romantic journalism and what was of lasting literary value in Hearn's work, but he has very little to say about Hearn's translations of Japanese poetry and what little there is, is incorrect.

Miner notes that Hearn "recognized himself that he had no poetic genius." But he goes on to make questionable literary judgments: "He did have a talent approaching genius for that rhythmical prose which is frequently and mistakenly called poetic, but it is easy to see that concentrated and brief poems like the Japanese forms cannot be adequately translated by a writer of periodic prose.… Hearn did adapt the translations of his acquaintances, but only to flavor his prose or for short chapters on special subjects such as poems about insects or folk songs, and with no aim to set himself up as a translator. All of his translations of Japanese poetry, culled from here and there, have made up only one small, posthumous volume."⁷ This is a reference to Greenslet's collection which does not contain all of Hearn's translations of Japanese poetry. It is, in fact, composed almost entirely of translations into prose, but much of his work was in verse, not prose.

Miner is forced to confess at one point that Hearn's translations had some influence on American poets. Conrad Aiken wrote him: "Of course [Japanese poetry] was all in the air—at Harvard [and everyone] around the Harvard Advocate was already aware of Hearn's hokku, and we all had shots at them. So when Fletcher and I dived into Japanese and Chinese poetry and art [in the years between 1915 and 1917] it was already old stuff for me."⁸ Miner seems to be taken aback by this statement: "The intermingling of talk about Hearn and haiku makes more sense than it at first seems to, because the section indebted to Hearn [in Aiken's The House of Dust] offers examples of Pound's super-pository technique which recur in Aiken's work of this period.… "⁹

Miner refuses to accept his own evidence mat Aiken could have learned "Pound's super-pository technique" from Hearn's translations, which he had read at Harvard before Basil Hall Chamberlain's Japanese Poetry (1911) appeared and certainly before Pound began to devise his program for me Imagists. Perhaps Miner was too quick in dismissing me influence of Hearn's translations on modern poetry.

Let us take a look at the translations which Miner excludes from consideration. Anyone who has read Hearn's essays and his correspondence soon realizes that he had thought deeply about the problems of translation and mat he would never have dashed off a sloppy rendering of an original merely to supply some romantic atmosphere for his travel sketches. The fact that he did not think of himself as a poet was a point in his favor as a translator. Instead of Pound's "creative misprision," to use contemporary critical jargon, he sought accuracy in translation. Translation, Hearn believed, begins with total fidelity to the original, although the best translations—which are very rare—do not halt there.

Hearn was not a novice in the art of translation when he came to Japan in 1890. In 1882 he published a book of translations of Thöophile Gautier's short stories, a task which he had begun when he went to New Orleans in 1877 to work as a journalist. He had no illusions about his work, remarking wryly, "Verily the path of the translator is hard."¹⁰ Perhaps even more rare in translators, he had a generous appreciation of the work of his rivals. In a letter to Jerome A. Hart of San Francisco, commenting on Hart's review of his book, Hearn corrected a rather free rendering of a line from Gautier's epitaph for Clarimonde (in me story of that name) which Hart had offered as a substitute for Hearn's original rendering. He added apologetically, "But I think your second line is a masterpiece of faithfulness; and, as you justly remark, my hobby is literalism."¹¹ He carried this hobby to its logical extreme in his first translations from Japanese, which tried to capture for Western readers me peculiarities of Japanese syntax. These translations of prose, not poetry, follow exactly the form of the interlinear translations in Chamberlain's A Handbook of Colloquial Japanese (1888). Chamberlain was trying to convey in English the levels of honorific usage in Japanese:

Otottsan wa, d de gozaimasu?
Honourable-father-Mr. as-for, how is?
Or, more politely
Go shimpu wa, ikaga de irasshaimasu?
August real-father as-for, how deigns-to-be?12

When Hearn tried to capture the language of an inn-keeper chasing away the curious villagers from his foreign guests, he used the same technique: "Now august-toeat-time-is; to-look-at evil matter is. Honorable-return- mg-iime-m-to-look-at-as-for-is-good."¹³

For his translations of Japanese poetry Hearn used a variety of methods, ranging from literal word by word renderings to paraphrases in English metrical forms. For the purposes of this paper, however, the most interesting translations are those for which Hearn chose an un-rhymed couplet, either metrical or in free verse. He often used the couplet form for different Japanese verse forms, without regard for the number of lines in the originals, which might vary from three for the haiku to four for the dodoitsu, a folk song form, and five for the tanka. One of his most successful efforts is this translation of a dodoitsu, a street song:

Kamiyo konokata
Kawaranu mono wa
Midzu no nagare to
Koi no michi.

Things never changed since the Time of the Gods: The flowing of water, the Way of Love.¹⁴

Although Hearn had to shift the word order to fit English patterns, he did not add anything which was not in the original. Moreover he succeeded in reproducing the effect of the short five-syllable final line. This was rarely possible, Hearn believed, without confusing the Western reader who lacked the background to understand the elliptical references of Japanese verse. "So the term 'ittakkiri'—meaning 'all gone,' or 'entirely vanished' is contemptuously applied to verses in which the versemaker has uttered his whole thought;—praise being reserved for compositions that leave in the mind the thrilling of a something unsaid." He warned, "The impossibility of preserving the inner quality of such poems in a literal rendering will now be obvious. Whatever I attempt in this direction must of necessity be ittakkiri; for the unspoken has to be expressed; and what the Japanese poet is able to say in seventeen or twenty-one syllables may need in English more than double that number of words."¹⁵ So, for example, Hearn translates a haiku on the higurashi, a species of cicada, whose name signifies that its cry heralds the coming of twilight:

Already, O Higurashi, your call announces the
evening! Alas, for the passing
day, with its duties left undone!16

The first line of his couplet expands and explains the meaning of the simple apostrophe "Higurashi ya!" which is the first line of the haiku. The second and third lines "Ky no ketai wo / Omou toki", literally translated, mean simply: "Time to think of today's unfinished work."

This juxtaposition of an explanatory or descriptive line and a line containing a personal image or impression can be found throughout Hearn's translations. In one instance he even supplied an explanatory line which is not found in the original:

However fickle I seem, my heart is never
unfaithful: Out of the slime itself,
spotless the lotus grows.17

The original, the song of a prostitute, is simply: "In muddy water / Though it is raised / With roots growing here and there / The lotus blossoms / As a beautiful flower." Hearn's couplet pairs the image in the second line, which needs no explanation for a Japanese audience, with a preceding line that gives its significance for the Western reader.

These are not isolated examples, although someone acquainted only with Greenslet's collection might think so. Of course, he also translated many haiku into prose, but there is one characteristic of his translations, prose or poetry, which one does not find in Chamberlain's essay on "Bash and the Poetical Epigram," which first appeared in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan in 1902 and was reprinted in Japanese Poetry (1911).¹⁸ Hearn sensed the division between thematic statement and specific impression and arranged his translations to mirror that contrast. Chamberlain used shorter couplets with run-on lines that compress the haiku into a single English sentence that ignores the dual structure.

This brings us back to Miner's discussion of Pound's "super-pository technique." Describing his efforts to crystallize in as short a form as possible the experience of seeing beautiful faces as he got out of a train in the Paris métro, Pound writes:

The 'one image' poem is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my métro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work 'of second intensity.' Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence:

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

I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. 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.¹⁹

Miner describes this poem, "In a Station of the Mötro," as a "discordia concors, " a combination of a line which is "a relatively straightforward, unmetaphorical statement" and a line which is a "sharply defined metaphorical image.… " He praises Pound for being the first to discover and define this technique: "The discovery of this technique in a poetic form written in a language he did not know is one of the insgihts of Pound's genius."²⁰ Miner then goes on to grace its use thorughout Pound's writings, including the Cantos.

As I have shown in a few examples, one of Hearn's techniques of translation was to provide an explanatory line combined with the image in the Japanese original and mis is exactly what Pound did in his "In a Station of the Métro." It is not a haiku—only the thematic subject simply named or announced, as in Japanese, combined with the image or impression can create a true haiku. Perhaps if Pound had written "Mötro Station—/ Petals on a wet black bough" that would have been a haiku. As it is, he imitated Hearn's practice of going beyond the limits of the literal in order to guide the Western reader to the proper interpretation, thinking that this was a Japanese technique. So Pound's "super-pository method" turns out to be based on the translations of that minor exotic, Lafcadio Hearn.

Miner pokes fun at the popular conception of Hearn as the romanticizer of all things Japanese: "It is this view of Japan replacing Loti's harsher one, which probably helped give currency to the stage and fictional types " the refined and intrepid Japanese, which makes dowagers gush and gruff men sigh, and which the mature reader can only feel is an impairment of the spirit called Lafcadio Hearnia."²¹ That view of both Hearn and Japan has long since disappeared and we no longer romanticize either. Unfortunately, one cannot say the same about the critical adulation of Ezra Pound which (uncritically) credits him with something between papal infallibility and divine omni-science. I think it is time that we began to ask for another view of Ezra Pound—one that goes beyond the ideal image of Pound as the only begetter of all that is new in modern poetry to an understanding of his faults as well as his virtues. For Pound, who spent a long life playing the enfant terrible in a world he never understood, was human, all-too-human. I am merely asking for a Pound of flesh.

NOTES

¹ Alister Kershaw and Frödöric-Jacques Temple, eds., Richard Aldington: An Intimate Portrait (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1965) 74.

² Forrest Reid, ed., Pound/Joyce (New York: New Directions, 1967) 85, 96, 97.

³ Earl Miner, The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1958) 91.

⁴ S. Foster Damon, Amy Lowell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935) 301.

⁵ Lafcadio Hearn, trans., Japanese Lyrics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915) n.p.

⁶ Miner 62-63.

⁷ Miner 90-91.

⁸ Miner 183.

⁹ Miner 183-184.

¹⁰ Elizabeth Bisland, The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906) 250.

¹¹ Bisland 244.

¹² Basil Hall Chamberlain, A Handbook of Colloquial Japanese (London: Trubner, 1888) 4.

¹³ Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, vol. 5 of The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, Koizumi edition (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1923) 263.

¹⁴ Lafcadio Hearn, Gleanings in Buddha-Fields, vol. 8 of The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn 24-27.

¹⁵ Lafcadio Hearn, In Ghostly Japan, vol. 9 of The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn 313-316.

¹⁶ Lafcadio Hearn, Shadowings, vol. 10 of The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn 55.

¹⁷ The original, which Hearn does not supply, is: "Doro mizu ni / Sodaterarete mo / Ne wa shosho ni / Saite kirena / Hasu no nana." See John F. Embree, Japanese Peasant Songs. Memoirs of the American Folklore Society 38 (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1943) 28.

¹⁸ In a note appended to this essay, Chamberlain writes, "Since the present essay was completed, the writer's attention has been drawn to Mr. Hearn's two latest works, 'Shadowings,' pp. 69-100 (1901), and 'A Japanese Miscellany,' pp. 92-118 (1901), containing respectively collections of epigrams on the curious subjects of cicadae and dragon-flies,—no less than 107 in all, or more, if those are counted of which not the original text, but only the translation is given. Some of the renderings are in the metre of the elegiac distich, which, owing to the far larger number of syllables of that form of verse, necessitates more or less expansion of the originals. Others, rendered literally, though less attractive as English—or Anglicized—poems, possess superior value for the scientific inquirer. All well exhibit the endless dexterity with which the Japanese epigrammatist can modulate the trilling of his tiny pipe" ("Bash and the Japanese Poetical Epigram," Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, vol. XXX [Tokyo: Rikkyo Gakuin Press, 1902] 362).

¹⁹ Ezra Pound, "Vorticism," Fortnightly Review 96 (1914): 467.

²⁰ Miner 115.

²¹ Miner 61-62.

Yoshinobu Hakutani

[In the following essay, Hakutani focuses on the poetry, essays, and correspondence of Yone . Noguchi as sources of Japanese poetics in the Imagist techniques of Ezra Pound.]

SOURCE: "Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi and Imagism," in Modern Philology, Vol. 90, August, 1992, pp. 46-69.

I

It is commonplace to say that imagism played a crucial role in poetic modernism and that Ezra Pound, more than anyone else, put this poetics to practice in the 1910s. Yet imagism still remains a somewhat cloudy topic. Many discussions content themselves with restatements of Pound's celebrated essay on vorticism, published in September 1914.¹ Even Hugh Kenner, the most eminent critic of Pound, says, "The history of the Imagist Movement is a red herring." He admonishes one "to keep one's eyes on Pound's texts, and avoid generalities about Imagism."²

In that "Vorticism" essay, Pound acknowledged for the first time in his career his indebtedness to the spirit of Japanese poetry in general and the technique of hokku in particular. Among the Poundians, and there have been many in the East and in the West, who have tried to reconstruct the historical set of circumstances in which Pound moved, Earl Miner gives the best account of the profound influences Japanese poetry had upon the early Pound. It is Miner who offers the best annotated evidence that the sources for Pound's interest in Japanese poetics were partly provided by Pound's fellow imagists such as T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, and Richard Aldington.³

It is Miner as well who most frequently comments on the role Yone Noguchi played in the introduction and interpretation of Japanese poetry to an English audience during the early decades of the twentieth century.⁴ Noguchi was indeed a well-known bilingual Japanese and American poet, who by 1915 had published not only books of criticism widely read in England and America {The Spirit of Japanese Poetry and The Spirit of Japanese Art), but also several collections of his own English poems. By this date, moreover, his poems had been praised by Willa Cather, Joaquin Miller, and Gelett Burgess in America, by Bliss Carman in Canada, and by George Meredith, William Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, and others in England. What is surprising, therefore, is Miner's dismissive treatment of Noguchi's English writings as having had little to do with the imagist movement and with Pound in particular.

II

As Pound explained in his essay, the image is not a static, rational idea: "It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing. In decency one can only call it a VORTEX. And from this necessity came the name 'vorticism'" ("Vorticism," pp. 469-70). A year later Pound defined the form of an image by stating that the image "may be a sketch, a vignette, a criticism, an epigram or anything else you like. It may be impressionism, it may even be very good prose." An image, he argued, does not constitute simply a picture of something. As a vortex, the image must be "endowed with energy."⁵ Imagism, in turn, is likened to the painter's use of pigment. "The painter," Pound wrote, "should use his colour because he sees it or feels it. I don't much care whether he is representative or non-representative.… It is the same in writing poems, the author must use his image … not because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed or some system of ethics or economics" ("Vorticism," p. 464).

To demonstrate his poetic theory, Pound thought of an image not as a decorative emblem or symbol but as a seed capable of germinating and developing into another organism. As an illustration he presented what he called "a hokku-like sentence" he had written:

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

"In a poem of this sort," he explained, "one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective" ("Vorticism," p. 467). The image of the faces in the crowd is based in immediate experience at a metro station in Paris; it was "a thing outward and objective." Not only did Pound actually see the "thing," but it generated such a sensation that he could not shake it out of his mind. This image, he emphasizes, "transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective," that is, the image of the "Petals, on a wet, black bough." Imagism is further contrasted to symbolism: "The symbolist's symbols have a fixed value, like numbers in arithmetic, like 1, 2, and 7. The imagiste's images have a variable significance, like the signs a, b, and x in algebra" ("Vorticism," p. 463).

Although Pound's definition is clear enough, the sources for his ideas are hard to determine. Most discussions about the genesis of the imagist movement are speculative at best. Pound's insistence that an image in poetry must be active rather than passive suggests that a poem is not a description of something, but, as Aristotle had said of tragedy, an action. Pound approaches Aristotelianism in his insistence that the image of the faces in the crowd in his metro poem was not simply a description of his sensation at the station but an active entity capable of dynamic development. According to his experience, this particular image instantly transformed itself into another image, the image of the petals on a wet, black bough. To Pound the success of this poem resulted from his instantaneous perception of the relatedness between the two entirely different objects.

But Pound's note on the genesis of "In a Station of the Metro" in the "Vorticism" essay makes it clear that there was nothing instantaneous about the composition of this poem. It was in 1911 that Pound, having seen those "beautiful faces" at La Concorde, wrote a thirty-line poem "and destroyed it because it was what we call work 'of second intensity'" ("Vorticism," p. 467). Six months later he reduced the longer text to a poem half the length, and still a year later he wrote the final version, a two-line poem. Pound's insistence on the instantaneous perception of the metro images drove him to repeated attempts at recreating the instantaneous images he had perceived a year-and-a-half earlier. Traditionally, the principles of instantaneity and spontaneity are as fundamental for the composition of hokku as when applied to Zen-inspired painting and calligraphy. In any event, his discovery of hokku in 1913-14 was, as he says, "useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion" ("Vorticism," p. 467). To Pound, the most important thing he learned about hokku was "this particular sort of consciousness," which he was unable to identify with any version of impressionist art.⁶

Another equally important tenet of imagism calls for directness in expression. The immediate model for this principle was nineteenth-century French prose. Pound did not mention specific English poets but seemed adamantly opposed to Victorian poetry, which he characterized as wordy and rhetorical. Instead he urged his fellow poets "to bring poetry up to the level of prose." "Flaubert and De Maupassant," he believed, "lifted prose to the rank of a finer art, and one has no patience with contemporary poets who escape from all the difficulties of the infinitely difficult art of good prose by pouring themselves into loose verses" ("Vorticism," p. 462).

If Pound's ideal poetry has the directness and clarity of good prose as opposed to the suggestiveness and vagueness of symbolist poetry, then his sources certainly did not include W. B. Yeats. Even though Yeats dedicated the noh play At the Hawk's Well to Pound, Yeats was not enthusiastic about Pound's poetics. "My own theory of poetical or legendary drama," Yeats wrote to Fiona Macleod, "is that it should have no realistic, or elaborate, but only a symbolic and decorative setting. A forest, for instance, should be represented by a forest pattern and not by a forest painting."⁷ The difference between Pound and Yeats reveals itself in the two poets' differing views of the Japanese noh play. A symbolist and spiritualist poet, Yeats was fascinated by the noh play. By contrast, Pound was interested not in particular images and symbols but in the unifying effect a noh play produces on the stage.

This disagreement between Pound and Yeats over whether poetic images should be suggestive or active also involves what Noguchi, a poet and critic well acquainted with both poets, felt compelled to write in "What Is a Hokku Poem?" published in London.⁸ In that essay, Noguchi first defined hokku as an expression of Japanese poets' "understanding of Nature" or, better put, as a song or chant of "their longing or wonder or adoration toward Mother Nature" that is "never mystified by any cloud or mist like Truth or Beauty of Keats' understanding." Noguchi differentiated between the "suggestive" and subjective coloration of English poetry and the Japanese hokku, "distinctly clear-cut like a diamond or star." "I say," he argued, "that the star itself has almost no share in the creation of a condition even when your dream or vision is gained through its beauty.… I value the 'hokku' poem, at least some of them, because of its own truth and humanity simple and plain." Noguchi then analyzed the aim of hokku: the hokku poet expresses the spirit of nature rather than the will of man or woman. Noguchi would agree that hokku is "suggestive" only if the word 'suggestive' means that "truth and humanity are suggestive." He added, "But I can say myself as a poet … that your poem would certainly end in artificiality if you start out to be suggestive from the beginning."⁹

Finally, Noguchi based his definition and analysis of aim in Zen philosophy, understood as discipline of the mind: one should not allow one's individuality to control action. Zen does not, indeed, recognize human reality, the existence of good and evil, because this reality is but the creation of man's will rather than the spirit of nature. Noguchi thus observed that "there is no word in so common use by Western critics as suggestive, which makes more mischief than enlightenment." Although Western critics "mean it quite simply … to be a new force of salvation,… I say that no critic is necessary for this world of poetry."¹⁰

By 1918 Pound's vorticist theory had extended to his discussion of Chinese characters. As the correspondence between Pound and Mary Fenollosa, widow of Ernest Fenollosa, indicates, Pound began to receive Fenollosa's manuscripts as early as 1913.¹¹ Fenollosa's essay "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry," posthumously published by Pound in The Little Review in 1918, attempted to show that Chinese characters, which Pound called ideograms, derive from visual rather than aural experiences. A Chinese character, Fenollosa noted, signifies an observable action instead of an abstract notion. Unlike a Western word, a phonetic sign, it denotes a concrete, natural phenomenon. The Chinese character, Fenollosa wrote, "is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature. In the algebraic figure and in the spoken word there is no natural connection between thing and sign: all depends upon sheer convention. But the Chinese method follows natural suggestion."¹²

Pound's attempt to verify Fenollosa's thoery involved not only his contemporaries, poets and critics living in London in the 1910s, but his own effort to search for ideas in other sources. One of these sources was the Japanese noh play, in which Pound became interested through Fenollosa's notes. It is generally understood that Pound's interest in Japanese poetry, especially hokku, grew partly through his acquaintance with Fenollosa's writings. None of Fenollosa's writings, however, directly concerns Japanese poetry, let alone hokku. Having lived many years in Japan as an art critic, Fenollosa became well versed in Japanese art and literature, but his actual knowledge of the Japanese language was not profound.¹³ It is, therefore, inconceivable that Pound became well acquainted with hokku through Fenollosa. It is also unlikely that English contemporaries such as T. E. Hulme and F. S. Flint, who are said to have introduced hokku to Pound, served his purpose. Pound would not have been able to learn from them the subtle elements of Japanese poetry because they had no firsthand knowledge of the Japanese language.¹⁴

III

Pound's most likely source of information was Noguchi. He first corresponded with Pound and then met Pound, along with Yeats, when he gave a series of lectures on Japanese poetry in England in early 1914. The relationship between Pound and Noguchi began in 1911, when Noguchi sent his fifth collection of English poems, The Pilgrimage (1908 and 1909) in two volumes, to Pound with a note: "As I am not yet acquainted with your work, I wish you [would] send your books or books which you like to have me read. This little note may sound quite businesslike, but I can promise you that I can do better in my next letter to you." Noguchi also wrote as a post-script: "I am anxious to read not only your poetical work but also your criticism."¹⁵ Pound acknowledged receipt of the books and note in a letter postmarked September 2, 1911.

c/o Elkin Mathews Vigo St. London.

Dear Yone Noguchi:

I want to thank you very much for your lovely books & for your kindness in sending them to me.

I had, of course, known of you, but I am much occupied with my mediaeval studies & had neglected to read your books altho' they lie with my own in Mathews Shop & I am very familiar with the appearance of their covers.

I am reading those you sent me but I do not yet know what to say of them except that they have delighted me. Besides it is very hard to write to you until I know more about you, you are older than I am—I gather from the dates of the poems—you have been to New York. You are giving us the spirit of Japan, is it not? very much as I am trying to deliver from obscurity certain forgotten odours of Provence & Tuscany (my works on Guido Cavalcanti, & Arnaut Daniel, are, the one in press, the other ready to be printed.)

I have sent you two volumes of poems. I do not know whether to send you "The Spirit of Romance" or not: It treats of mediaeval poetry in southern Europe but has many flaws of workmanship.…

Of your country I know almost nothing—surely if the east & the west are ever to understand each other that understanding must come slowly & come first through the arts.

You ask about my "criticism". There is some criticism in the "Spirit of Romance" & there will be some in the prefaces to the "Guido" & the "Arnaut". But I might be more to the point if we who are artists should discuss the matters of technique & motive between ourselves. Also if you should write about these matters I would discuss your letters with Mr. Yeats & likewise my answers.…

Yours very sincerely

Ezra Pound¹⁶

Although Noguchi did not write again as Pound had suggested, Noguchi published his essay "What Is a Hokku Poem?" in London in January 1913, as noted earlier. In the meantime three books of criticism by Noguchi appeared during this period: The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (London, 1914; cited hereafter in the text), Through the Torii (London, 1914), and The Spirit of Japanese Art (London, 1915). Noguchi was also invited to contribute "The Everlasting Sorrow: A Japanese Noh Play" in 1917 and an article, "The Japanese Noh Play," in 1918 to The Egoist.¹¹ Pound's encouragement was perhaps responsible for the publication of some of Noguchi's own hokku poems in The Egoist and in Poetry.18

Because his essays and lectures during this period also dealt with Japanese art, Yeats, who was interested in Japanese painting and the noh play, became interested in Noguchi's work as well.¹⁹ As Pound's and Yeats's letters to Noguchi indicate, Pound and Yeats not only were close associates themselves but also were both well acquainted with Noguchi. Despite the active dialogues that occurred between Pound and Noguchi, critics have not seriously considered their relationship. The only critic who has mentioned Noguchi in discussing the imagist movement regarded him not as a poet and critic from whose ideas Pound might have benefited but as one of the poets whom Pound himself influenced.²⁰ Such a preposterous connection is undermined by the simple fact that most of Noguchi's English poems, as Pound noted in his letter to Noguchi, had been published in America and England long before the early 1910s, when Pound and his fellow poets began to discuss imagism among themselves. It is more accurate historically to say that Noguchi influenced Pound rather than the other way around.

Pound had apparently known little about Japanese poetry before he attended the April 1909 meeting of the Poet's Club. This group, headed by T. E. Hulme, was succeeded by another group called "Les Imagistes," or "Des Imagistes," which Pound led from 1912 to 1914.²¹ Although Pound in fact joined the Poets' Club, its sessions did not prove of much inspiration to him. Richard Aldington, who joined in 1911, was more interested in the color prints of Utamaro, Hokusai, and others found in the British Museum than in Japanese poetry.²² The fact that Pound was more seriously interested than Aldington was in Japanese poetry is indicated by Aldington's parody of Pound's metro poem that appeared in the January 1915 issue of The Egoist.23 Allen Upward, another member of "Les Imagistes" whom Pound had met in 1911, had some importance for Pound because Upward used the term "whirl-swirl" in his book The New Word (New York, 1908). Upward, a self-styled intellectual and a poet, had "a powerful and original mind clearly and trenchantly concerned with matters that bear directly on what Pound meant by 'vortex.'"²⁴ But Upward, who was well read in Confucius and perhaps familiar with Chinese poetry, did not have sufficient knowledge of Japanese poetry, let alone of hokku, to influence Pound.²⁵

The degree of Pound's initial interest in hokku, therefore, was not entirely clear, for he was much occupied with Provençal poetry and criticism, as his letter to Noguchi indicates. It is quite possible that Pound learned about hokku from T. E. Hulme and F. S. Flint, who were experimenting with hokku and tanka, the thirty-one-syllable Japanese poetic form.²⁶ The difficulty with this assumption, however, is that Hulme and Flint studied hokku through French translators and critics who used the terms 'haiku' and 'haikai', more modern words, rather than 'hokku'. Most strikingly, neither Pound nor Noguchi referred to the Japanese poem as 'haiku' or 'haikai'; both consistently called it 'hokku' in their writings.

However coincidental this might have been, there are two more pieces of evidence suggesting that Pound might have learned about hokku in Noguchi's work. First, as I have already observed, the essay "What Is a Hokku Poem?"—in which Noguchi declared that poetic images must be active instead of suggestive, direct instead of symbolic, and that the aim of a hokku is to understand the spirit of nature rather than to express the will of man—was published in Rhythm (London) in January 1913, almost two years before Pound's essay "Vorticism." Even Pound's essay "A Few Don'ts," the earliest manifesto on imagism, appeared in the March 1913 issue of Poetry (Chicago) two months after Noguchi's essay. Second, Noguchi's book of criticism, The Spirit of Japanese Poetry, was published in London by John Murray in March 1914, half a year before Pound's "Vorticism" essay.²⁷

Moreover, the key chapter of Noguchi's book, entitled "The Japanese Hokku Poetry," was a lecture delivered in the Hall of Magdalen College, Oxford, on January 28, 1914, at the invitation of Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, and T. H. Warren, president of the college and professor of poetry in the university. The first chapter, "Japanese Poetry," was also based on a lecture Noguchi gave at the Japan Society of London on January 14. The rest of the book had been presented as other lectures to such audiences as the Royal Asiatic Society and the Quest Society in England before April 1914, when Noguchi left London for Tokyo by way of Paris, Berlin, and Moscow. It is altogether possible that Pound heard Noguchi lecture at the Quest Society since Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and T. E. Hulme all lectured there in 1914.²⁸ During this stay in England, Through the Torii, another collection of essays that included a variety of commentary on William Rossetti, James Whistler, W. B. Yeats, and Oscar Wilde, and his autobiography, The Story of Yone Noguchi Told by Himself, also appeared in print.

Interestingly enough, Pound's "Vorticism" essay quoted a famous hokku by Moritake (1452-1540) just before discussing the often-quoted metro poem:

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

["Vorticism," p. 467]

This hokku in Japanese has three lines:

Rak-ka eda ni
Kaeru to mireba
Kocho-o kana

Noguchi translated this poem in three lines:

I thought I saw the fallen leaves
Returning to their branches:
Alas, butterflies were they.

[Spirit of Japanese Poetry, p. 50]

Pound must have reconstructed the hokku in two lines simply because he had in mind "a form of super-position" in which his metro poem was to be composed. The similarities between Pound's and Noguchi's versions of the poem in question do not seem coincidental, because the superpository division is indicated by a colon in both constructions. Both translations have identical key words: "fallen," "branch," and "butterfly." The only difference in diction is between Pound's "blossom" (ka in Japanese) and Noguchi's "leaves." In syntax, however, these translations are different: Noguchi's version is subjective from the start and ends objectively; the reverse is true in Pound's rendering. Syntactically, Noguchi's version is closer to the Japanese original than Pound's. A literal translation of Moritake's first two lines, "Rakka eda ni / Kaeru to mireba," would read: "The fallen blossom appears to come back to its branch."

What appealed to Pound was the terseness and intensity of imagery in a hokku. Irked by the decorative and superfluous style of much Victorian poetry, he urged his fellow poets to eliminate words that do not contribute to the central meaning of the poem. "All poetic language," Pound insisted, "is the language of exploration. Since the beginning of bad writing, writers have used images as ornaments" ("Vorticism," p. 466). By saying, "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree," he meant to elaborate the imagist principle that using fewer words maximizes and intensifies meaning.²⁹ In "What Is a Hokku Poem?" Noguchi wrote, "I always thought that the most beautiful flowers grow close to the ground, and they need no hundred petals for expressing their own beauty; how can you call it real poetry if you cannot tell it by a few words?"³⁰

Pound, furthermore, applied the principle of terseness and intensity to the construction of a single image in his poetry. "The 'one image poem,'" Pound noted, "is a form of superposition, that is to say it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion" ("Vorticism," p. 467). Noguchi pointed out the same technique: "Hokku means literally a single utterance or the utterance of a single verse; that utterance should be like a 'moth light playing on reality's dusk,' or 'an art hung, as a web, in the air of perfume,' swinging soft in music of a moment" (Spirit of Japanese Poetry, p. 39). To illustrate his point, Noguchi quoted a hokku by Buson:

The night of the Spring,—
Oh, between the eve
And the dawn.

This hokku was placed against the opening passage of Makura Zoshi (Pillow Sketches) by Sei Shonagon, a celebrated prose writer in medieval Japan: "I love to watch the dawn grow gradually white and whiter, till a faint rosy tinge crowns the mountain's crest, while slender streaks of purple cloud extend themselves above." Noguchi considered Buson's image far more vivid and intensive than Sei Shonagon's, remarking, "Buson is pleased to introduce the night of the Spring which should be beautiful without questioning, since it lies between those two beautiful things, the eve and the dawn" (Spirit of Japanese Poetry, pp. 48-49).

IV

Not only was Noguchi an interpreter of hokku poems for the English reader, but he tried his hand at writing hokku poems in English as well. He later collected them in the volume Japanese Hokkus (Boston, 1920), which he dedicated to Yeats.³¹ One of Noguchi's earliest hokku is reminiscent of Buson's, quoted above:

Tell me the street to Heaven.
This? Or that? Oh, which?
What webs of streets !

He wrote this hokku in England, he says, "when I most abruptly awoke in 1902 to the noise of Charing Cross.… And it was by Westminster Bridge where I heard the evening chime that I wrote again in 'hokku' which appears, when translated, as follows":

Is it, Oh, list:
The great voice of Judgment Day?
So runs Thames and my Life.32

Noguchi wrote many such hokku-like poems in imitation of the Japanese hokku, as did Pound. The superpository technique, which Pound said he had discovered in Japanese hokku, resembles that of Noguchi. For instance, Pound's "Alba," typical of his many hokku-like poems, reads:

As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.33

Most of Noguchi's hokku, as the two poems quoted above show, do have a form of superposition. Like Pound's, Noguchi's hokku constitutes one image poem which has two separate ideas set on top of one another. In the first poem by Noguchi, an idea of "the street to Heaven" is set on top of an idea of "webs," despite a close similarity between the two images. In the second, an idea of the flow of the Thames is set on top of an idea of the course of "my Life."

But there are some differences between Noguchi's and Pound's hokku. Noguchi does not as closely adhere to the well-established Japanese syllabic measure of five or seven as does Pound. Noguchi's two hokku above have 7-5-4 and 4-7-6 measures; Pound's "Alba," "Fan-Piece, for Her Imperial Lord," and "Ts'ai Chi'h" have those of 7-7-8, 7-5-7, and 8-7-7, respectively. If the first line of Pound's metro poem had been reconstructed as two lines, the poem would have had a measure of 5-7-7 (The apparition / Of these faces in the crowd: / Petals, on a wet, black bough) much like a Japanese hokku. Noguchi, moreover, tends to ignore the long-established poetic tradition in which a Japanese hokku has an explicit reference to a season. Pound, on the other hand, consciously adheres to this tradition as seen in many of his hokku-like poems and somewhat longer pieces such as "Heather" and "Society."³⁴

What a Japanese hokku and Pound's image share besides their brevity and intensity is the poet's ability to escape the confinement of the poem. The sense of liberation in hokku is usually accomplished through references to time and space. A Japanese hokku contains not only a reference to a season, an indication of time, but also an image of nature, that of space. Pound's hokku-like poems, such as "In a Station of the Metro" and "Alba," indeed have references to time and space. Pound called the metro emotion, which came from the image of the faces in the crowd, "a thing outward and objective" and the image of the "petals, on a wet, black bough" "a thing inward and subjective." The image of the petals, nevertheless, is a natural object in contrast to that of the faces in the crowded station, a human object.

In Pound's mind—in the realm of subjective perception—the image of the faces, an objective image, trans-forms into the image of the petals, a subjective image. This perception also means that the image of the faces, an image of man, transforms into that of the petals, an image of nature. The shifting of objective and subjective images in Pound's poem is depicted in terms of a vortex, in which an image is not only active in itself but capable of merging into another image that appears in its wake. Because Pound's image has this tendency, it is often as difficult to separate the mental vision from the external as it is to separate mind from matter, the perceiver from the perceived, in Japanese hokku.

In The Spirit of Japanese Poetry, Noguchi is as critical as Pound of the Western poet's tendency to wordiness. Noguchi's emphasis on the Japanese hokku as "the real poetry of action" entails that a hokku aim to narrow the distance between man and nature, the perceiver and the perceived. The narrower the distance, the better the hokku becomes. Based upon "Lao Tze's canon of spiritual anarchism" and Zen's principle of controlling the mind, Noguchi declares:

To attach too closely to the subject matter in literary expression is never a way to complete the real saturation; the real infinite significance will only be accomplished at such a consummate moment when the end and means are least noticeable, and the subject and expression never fluctuate from each other, being in perfect collocation; it is the partial loss of the birthright of each that gains an artistic triumph.… I do never mean that the Hokku poems are lyrical poetry in the general Western understanding; but the Japanese mind gets the effect before perceiving the fact of their brevity, its sensibility resounding to their single note, as if the calm bosom of river water to the song of a bird. [Spirit of Japanese Poetry, p. 34]

To illustrate what he calls "the sense of mystical affinity between the life of Nature and the life of man, between the beauty of flowers and the beauty of love," he quotes his own poem:

It's accident to exist as a flower or a poet;
A mere twist of evolution but from the same force:
I see no form in them but only beauty in evidence;
It's the single touch of their imagination to get the
embodiment of a poet or a flower:
To be a poet is to be a flower,
To be the dancer is to make the singer sing.

[Spirit of Japanese Poetry, p. 37]

Pound, on the other hand, views the affinity between man and nature differently. What Pound calls "a thing inward and subjective" does not necessarily correspond to a vision of man; nor is "a thing outward and objective" the same thing as a vision of nature.

To explain the transformation of images between man and nature, the perceiver and the perceived, in Japanese hokku, Noguchi quoted Basho's "The Old Pond," perhaps the most celebrated hokku ever written:

The old pond!
A frog leapt into—
List, the water sound!

One may think a frog an absurd poetic subject, but Basho focused his vision on a scene of autumnal desolation, an image of nature. The pond was perhaps situated on the premises of an ancient temple whose silence was suddenly broken by a frog plunging into the deep water. As Noguchi conceived the experience, Basho, a Zen Buddhist, was "supposed to awaken into enlightenment now when he heard the voice bursting out of voicelessness, and the conception that life and death were mere change of condition was deepened into faith" (Spirit of Japanese Poetry, pp. 45-46). Basho was not suggesting that the tranquility of the pond meant death or that the frog symbolized life. Just as Pound had the sensation of seeing the beautiful faces in the metro station, Basho here had the sensation of hearing the sound bursting out of soundlessness. A hokku is not a representation of goodness, truth, or beauty; there is nothing particularly good, true, or beautiful about a frog's jumping into the water.

It seems as though Basho, in writing the poem, carried nature within him and brought himself to the deepest level of nature where all sounds lapse into the world of silence and infinity. Though his vision is based upon reality, it transcends time and space. What a Zen poet like Basho is showing is that man can do enough naturally, enjoy doing it, and achieve his peace of mind. This fusion of man and nature is called spontaneity in Zen.

The best hokku poems, because of their linguistic limitations, are inwardly extensive and outwardly infinite. A severe constraint imposed on one aspect of hokku must be balanced by a spontaneous, boundless freedom on the other.

From a Zen point of view, such a vision is devoid of thought and emotion. Since Zen is the most important philosophical tradition influencing Japanese hokku, the hokku poet aims at understanding the spirit of nature. Basho thus recognizes little division between man and nature, the subjective and the objective; he is never concerned with the problems of good and evil. Placed against this tradition, Pound's poetics in its philosophical aspect considerably differs from Basho's. Pound cannot be called a Zen poet because he declared: "An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."³⁵ A Zen poet seeks satori, an enlightenment that transcends time and place, and even the consciousness of self. This enlightenment is defined as a state of mu, nothingness, which is absolutely free of any thought or emotion; it is so completely free that such a state corresponds to that of nature. For a Zen-inspired poet, nature is a mirror of the enlightened self; one must see and hear things as they really are by making one's consciousness pure and clear. Pound seems to be able to appreciate this state of mind, but obviously he does not necessarily try to seek it in his own work.

In fact, Japanese hokku seldom take physical love, war, beasts, earthquakes, floods, and the like for their subjects. And while Pound's poetry does express good and evil, love and hatred, individual feeling and collective myth, Basho's shuns such sentiments and emotions altogether. Pound and a Zen poet, however, do agree that their poetic vision is spontaneous and capable of attaining enlightenment. Pound maintained, 'It is the presentation of such a 'complex' instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art."³⁶ Pound's observation, however, is very much a Western however, formulation of an experience familiar to Zen-inspired artists.

This sense of liberation suggests an impersonal conception of poetry, for it focuses attention not upon the poet but upon the image. T. S. Eliot, whom most observers agree Pound influenced, held the same view.³⁷ Japanese poets such as Basho and Buson held the same principle. Their poetry seldom dealt with dreams, fantasies, or concepts of heaven and hell; it was strictly concerned with the portrayal of nature—mountains, trees, birds, waterfalls, nights, days, seasons. For the Japanese hokku poet, nature is a mirror of the enlightened self; the poet must see and hear things as they really are by making his or her consciousness pure, natural, and unemotional. "Japanese poets," Noguchi wrote, "go to Nature to make life more meaningful, sing of flowers and birds to make humanity more intensive" (Spirit of Japanese Poetry, p. 37).

As opposed to his later poetry, Pound's early poetry, and his hokku-like poems in particular, have little to do with his personal emotion or thought. In such poetry, Pound is not really concerned with thought and emotion. If Pound's hokku sounded intellectual or emotional, it did so only to an English reader who was still Arnoldian in his or her taste and unfamiliar with the imagist movement of the 1910s, not to mention with "the spirit of Japanese poetry" Noguchi tried to introduce to the English audience. Japanese poetry shuns symbols and metaphors because figurative language might lessen the intensity and spontaneity of a newly experienced sensation. Such expressions would not only undermine originality in the poet's sensibility but resort to intellectualization—as well as what Noguchi, perhaps echoing Matthew Arnold, called "a criticism of life," which traditionally Japanese poetry was not.³⁸

The hokku poet may not only aim at expressing sensation but also at generalizing and hence depersonalizing it. This characteristic can be shown even by one of Basho's lesser-known hokku:

How cool it is,
Putting the feet on the wall:
An afternoon nap.39

Basho was interested in expressing how his feet, anyone's feet, would feel when placed on a wall inside a house on a warm summer afternoon. His subject was none other than this direct sensation. He did not want to convey any emotion, any thought, any beauty; there remained only poetry, only nature.

In "Alba" what Pound expressed was not the personal feeling he had about the woman lying beside him at dawn but his spontaneous sensation of the coolness of "the pale wet leaves / of lily-of-the-valley." Likewise, the sensation of slowly cooling hot water was Pound's subject in "The Bath Tub," as the title suggests, rather than his feelings about the woman.⁴⁰ The image of a "fan of white silk, / clear as frost on the grass-blade" is central in "Fan-Piece, for Her Imperial Lord," where a minimal image of the lord's concubine is evoked by a one-word reference to her: "You also are laid aside."⁴¹ Such subtleties could not have been learned from Pound's fellow imagists like Flint and Aldington, who remained labored, superficial imitators of Japanese hokku. Pound and Noguchi, by contrast, showed themselves far more capable of understanding the spirit of Japanese poetry.

V

As partly suggested in the remarks on superposition quoted above, the hokku also provided a structural model for Pound's version of imagism. Acknowledging that the Japanese had evolved this short form of poetry, Pound seized upon the unique form of "superposition" which, he observed, constitutes a hokku. To him, the hokku often consists of two disparate images in juxtaposition, and yet it appears as a single image. Lacking the copula 'is' or the preposition 'like', the image cannot be metaphoric or analogical. As Pound's account of the composition of the metro poem shows, he had no intention of likening the image of the beautiful faces in the crowd to the image of petals on a wet, black bough or of making one image suggestive or representative of the other.⁴² If one image is used to suggest another or to represent another, both images would be weakened. But if one image is used to generate or intensify another, and the other image, in turn, intensifies the first one, then the whole poem as one image would be intensified.

The key to the superpository structure of Pound's image is a coalescence of two unlike images. Such an image must be generated "in an instant of time," as Pound cautions in his essay "A Few Don'ts."⁴³ Creating such an image needs no preparations, no explanations, no qualifications; Pound calls "the 'natural course of events' the exalted moment, the vision unsought or at least the vision gained without machination."⁴⁴ In The Spirit of Japanese Poetry and The Spirit of Romance Noguchi and Pound respectively emphasized this revelatory moment when high poetry must be written. But such a parallel in their poetics does not necessitate that one's ideas came from the other's. Pound's observations might have been made independently.

It is quite possible that Pound became acquainted through other sources with many of the superpository hokku which Noguchi cited as examples in The Spirit of Japanese Poetry. In addition to Moritake's "I Thought I Saw the Fallen Leaves" and Basho's "The Old Pond," quoted earlier, Noguchi translated the following in The Spirit of Japanese Poetry: Buson's "Oh, How Cool—" (p. 47) and "Prince Young, Gallant" (p. 36), Basho's "Lying Ill on Journey" (p. 38), and Hokushi's "It Has Burned Down" (p. 27). It may be significant, however, that in another collection of critical essays Noguchi cited several of his own numerous hokku in English along with those by ancient masters. Many of Noguchi's English hokku, moreover, had been published in The Pilgrimage (1908, 1909). Pound might have acquainted himself with Noguchi's published hokku before he experimented with his version.

As Pound would account for the circumstances of his metro poem in Paris in 1912, Noguchi also narrated the experience he had had in London in 1903:

I myself was a hokku student since I was fifteen or sixteen years old; during many years of my Western life, now amid the California forest, then by the skyscrapers of New York, again in the London 'bus, I often tried to translate the hokku of our old masters but I gave up my hope when I had written the following in English:

My Love's lengthened hair
Swings o'er me from Heaven's gate:
Lo, Evening's shadow!

It was in London, to say more particularly, Hyde Park, that I wrote the above hokku in English, where I walked slowly, my mind being filled with the thought of the long hair of Rossetti's woman as I perhaps had visited Tate's Gallery that afternoon.… I exclaimed then: "What use to try the impossibility in translation, when I have a moment to feel a hokku feeling and write about it in English?"⁴⁵

Structurally, Pound's metro poem resembles Noguchi's Hyde Park hokku. As in Pound's poem where the out-ward image of the faces in the crowd is set on top of the inward image of petals on a wet, black bough, so the actual vision of an evening shadow in Noguchi's poem is juxtaposed to an envisioning of a woman's long hair. In each poem a pair of images, similar in form but different in content, coalesces into another autonomous image, which generates different meaning. The superposition of the paired images transforms into a different image in form and content, what Pound calls "the 'one image' poem" ("Vorticism," p. 467). This transformation of images retains the sensation of each separate object perceived, but it also conveys a greater sensation by uniting the two experiences.⁴⁶ For both poets, such a transformation is optimal, for they believe that images in poetry cannot and should not be divided as external and internal, physical and mental, objective and subjective.⁴⁷

To illustrate the energy latent in this transformation of images, Pound provided an anecdote: "I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch and say, 'Mamma, can I open the light?' She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art" ("Vorticism," p. 466). Although he later became interested in Fenollosa's explanation that written Chinese characters denote action, he was first attracted to the poetics of the hokku, what he called "the sense of exploration … the beauty of this sort of knowing" ("Vorticism," pp. 466-67). Noguchi expounded this poetics in terms of an intensive art by referring to Kikaku's celebrated hokku:

Autumn's full moon:
Lo, the shadows of a pine-tree
Upon the mats !

The beauty of the harvest moon is not only humanized but intensified by the shadow of a tree Kikaku saw on the tatami mats. "Really," Noguchi wrote, "it was my first opportunity to observe the full beauty of the light and shadow, more the beauty of the shadow in fact, far more luminous than the light itself, with such a decorativeness, particularly when it stamped the dustless mats as a dragon-shaped ageless pine-tree."⁴⁸ The situation here, shared by Pound and Noguchi, is one of finding, discovering, and hence of inventing the new.

As if to bear out Pound's vorticist thinking in poetry, Noguchi made a modest proposal for English poets. "I think," he wrote, "it is time for them to live more of the passive side of Life and Nature, so as to make the meaning of the whole of them perfect and clear, to value the beauty of inaction so as to emphasise action, to think of Death so as to make Life more attractive." To the Japanese mind, an intensive art can be created not from action but from inaction. Noguchi thus argued that the larger part of life "is builded upon the unreality by the strength of which the reality becomes intensified; when we sing of the beauty of night, that is to glorify, through the attitude of reverse, in the way of silence, the vigour and wonder of the day" (Spirit of Japanese Poetry, pp. 24-25).

Noguchi's paradox was echoed in Pound's statement about vorticism. To Pound, an intensive art is not an emphatic art. By an intensive art, Pound meant "one … concerned with the relative intensity, or relative significance, of different sorts of expression.… They are more dynamic. I do not mean they are more emphatic, or that they are yelled louder" ("Vorticism," p. 468).

Pound illustrated this intensive art with a hokku-like sentence in his essay "Affirmations," first published in the New Age in 1915:

The pine-tree in mist upon the far hill looks like a fragment of Japanese armour.

The images appear in simile form, but Pound has no intention of intensifying the beauty of either image by comparison to the other. "In either case," he points out, "the beauty, in so far as it is beauty of form, is the result of 'planes in relation.'… The tree and the armour are beautiful because their diverse planes overlie in a certain manner." Unlike the sculptor or the painter, the poet, who must use words to intensify his art, Pound says, "may cast on the reader's mind a more vivid image of either the armour or the pine by mentioning them close together … for he works not with planes or with colours but with the names of objects and of properties. It is his business so to use, so to arrange, these names as to cast a more definite image than the layman can cast."⁴⁹

Critics have shown over the years that Pound's idea of vorticism underlies not only his short imagistic poems but also his longer pieces such as the Cantos, Cathay, and his translations of noh plays. Noguchi, on the other hand, attempted to intensify an image in a poem longer than the hokku by endowing it with action and autonomy. "The Passing of Summer" (1909), for instance, reads:

An empty cup whence the light of passion is
drunk!—
To-day a sad rumour passes through the trees,
A chill wind is borne by the stream,
The waves shiver in pain;
Where now the cicada's song long and hot?50

Such visual images as an empty cup, the chilly wind blowing over the stream, and the shivering waves do not simply denote the passing of summer; they constitute its action. Similarly, experiences or memories of experiences like drinking "the light of passion" and hearing "the cicada's song long and hot" do not merely express the poet's nostalgia or sentiment about the summer; these images, rather than being metonymies, recreate the actions of the summer.⁵¹ In Noguchi's poetry, as in the hokku, poetry and sensation are spontaneously conjoined and intensified, to leave no room for rationalism or moralism.

VI

Numerous parallels between Pound's poetics and Noguchi's do not entail the conclusion that both poets held the same principles throughout their respective careers. Much of Noguchi's art and literary criticism shows great enthusiasm at times for Yeats's mysticism and Whitman's transcendentalism.⁵² Noguchi had a taste for certain styles of poetry that Pound obviously did not. But their writings as a whole suggest that both writers, as poets and critics, agreed on the ideas of imagism during the period between 1908—when The Pilgrimage, Noguchi's fifth collection of English poems, appeared in Tokyo and London—and 1914, when Noguchi's The Spirit of Japanese Poetry was published in London. For Noguchi, this period came in the middle of his career as it coincided with Pound's early career and interest in imagism. This agreement on imagism constituted an interpenetrating relationship of Japanese poetics and Western intentions in early modernism. Pound's launching of "Imagism" in London in 1912 and 1913 with the support of T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, H.D., Richard Aldington, and others has become a legend of sorts. And much of the imagist work by various hands began to appear in Chicago in Poetry and in London in Des Imagistes and The Freewoman (later The Egoist). But the sources that Noguchi brought to Western attention as early as 1903, when From the Eastern Sea, the third collection of his English poems, was published in London, have become not only obscure but neglected.

In March 1913 Pound and his associates collectively drew up and published the three principles of their "faith." The first was "direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective." Noguchi would wholeheartedly have endorsed the formulation. The second principle called for using "absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation," and Noguchi had documented the practice of this tenet in the hokku by Japanese masters as well as in his own work. The third principle was "to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome" ("Vorticism," p. 462). Because the Japanese language radically differs from a Western language in rhythm, rhyme, stress, or tone, Noguchi would readily have assented to the proposal.

Much of Pound's early work and Noguchi's clearly reflects this accord between the imagists and Noguchi. It is true that while Pound was fascinated by Japanese poetics, he was also interested in vorticism as applied to visual arts, as his commentary on such artists as GaudierBrzeska, Brancusi, and Picasso indicates. Through the Poets' Club, Pound was also closely associated with Hulme, Flint, Aldington, Upward, and others, some of whom were initially attracted to Japanese color prints by such painters as Utamaro and Hokusai exhibited in the British Museum. There is clear evidence that Pound's associates also tried their hand at hokku with various degrees of seriousness and success. By the mid 1910s, imagism had indeed become the literary Zeitgeist, and any poet living in London would have received some influence from the Japanese sources.

To sum up, then, Noguchi's English poems had been widely circulated in London well before September 1914, when Pound's "Vorticism" essay appeared, and Noguchi's essay on hokku in Rhythm and his book The Spirit of Japanese Poetry were published in January 1913 and March 1914, respectively. The material in the essay and the book was delivered as a series of lectures during his stay in England from December 1913 to April 1914. In these circumstances, it is hardly conceivable that the imagists did not acquaint themselves with Noguchi's ideas. Even though Pound's modernist theory might partly have derived from other sources, one can scarcely overlook the direct link between Japanese poetics and Pound's imagism through Noguchi.

NOTES

¹ Ezra Pound, "Vorticism," Fortnightly Review, n.s., no. 573 (September 1, 1914): 461-71; hereafter cited as "Vorticism."

² Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (Millwood, N.Y., 1947), p. 58.

³ Earl Miner, "Pound, Haiku and the Image," Hudson Review 9 (Winter 1957): 570-84, and The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton, N.J., 1958). There is some ambiguity in Miner's chronology since, in his article, the date of Pound's joining the Poets' Club is said to be "just before the first World War," which means perhaps between 1913 and 1914 (Miner, "Pound," p. 572). There is also another ambiguity with respect to the time and circumstance of Pound's learning about "the usefulness of Japanese poetry from Flint." Flint's interest in Japanese poetry is indicated in his own account of the matter, published in The Egoist for May 1, 1915: "I had been advocating in the course of a series of articles on recent books of verse a poetry in vers libre, akin in spirit to the Japanese" (Miner, Japanese Tradition, p. 100).

⁴ For Noguchi's life and work, see Yoshinobu Hakutani, ed., Selected English Writings of Yone Noguchi: An East-West Literary Assimilation, vol. 1, Poetry (Cranbury, N.J., 1990), and vol. 2, Prose (Cranbury, N.J., 1992). For the most recent study of Noguchi's life, including an interview with his son, the late American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, see Hakutani, "Father and Son: A Conversation with Isamu Noguchi," Journal of Modern Literature (in press). For a discussion of Noguchi's English poetry and literary criticism, see Hakutani, "Yone Noguchi's Poetry: From Whitman to Zen," Comparative Literature Studies 22 (Spring 1985): 67-79.

⁵ Ezra Pound, "As for Imagisme," New Age 14 (1915): 349.

⁶ The impact of hokku on Pound was apparently greater and more beneficial than that on his fellow imagists. Regarding the form of superposition as ideal for expressing instantaneous perception, Pound wrote in a footnote: "Mr. Flint and Mr. Rodker have made longer poems depending on a similar presentation of matter. So also have Richard Aldington, in his In Via Sestina, and 'H.D.' in her Oread, which latter poems express much stronger emotions than that in my lines here given" ("Vorticism," p. 467). Pound's argument here suggests that hokku and Pound's hokku-like poems can express instantaneous and spontaneous perception better than can the longer poems and the poems with stronger emotions.

⁷ E. A. Sharp, William Sharp [Fiona Macleod]: A Memoir (London, 1910), pp. 280-81.

⁸ Yone Noguchi, "What Is a Hokku Poem?" Rhythm 11 (1913): 354-59. The essay was reprinted in Noguchi's Through the Torii (London, 1914; Boston, 1922), pp. 126-39. The page numbers cited hereafter refer to the Rhythm version.

⁹ Noguchi, "What Is a Hokku Poem?" p. 355.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ In a November 24, 1913, letter to Pound, Mary Fenollosa wrote: "I am beginning with [sic] right now, to send you material." On the following day she wrote again: "Please don't get discouraged at the ragged way this manuscript is coming to you. As I said yesterday, it will all get there in time,—which is the most important thing." See Ezra Pound and Japan: Letters and Essays, ed. Sanehide Kodama (Redding Ridge, Conn., 1987), p. 6.

¹² Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (New York, 1936), p. 8.

¹³ One of Pound's critics who acknowledge this fact, Roy E. Teele, demonstrates Fenollosa's failure to understand the Japanese language, particularly the essential rhythm of the noh text Fenollosa translated. See Roy E. Teele, "The Japanese Translations," Texas Quarterly 10 (1967): 61-66.

¹⁴ Earl Miner, who states that Pound knew nothing about Japanese poetry before 1913 or 1914, believes that Pound later learned about hokku in the writings of the French translators (Miner, "Pound," pp. 572-73).

¹⁵Ezra Pound and Japan, p. 4.

¹⁶ Yone Noguchi, Collected English Letters, ed. Ikuko Atsumi (Tokyo, 1975), pp. 210-11.

¹⁷ See Yone Noguchi, "The Everlasting Sorrow: A Japanese Noh Play," The Egoist 4 (October 1917): 141-43, and "The Japanese Noh Play," The Egoist 5 (August 1918): 99.

¹⁸ See K. L. Goodwin, The Influence of Ezra Pound (London, 1966), p. 32.

¹⁹ Noguchi first met Yeats in 1903 as indicated in a letter Noguchi wrote to Leonie Gilmour, his first wife: "I made many a nice young, lovely, kind friend among literary genius (attention!) W. B. Yeats or Laurence Binyon, Moore and Bridges. They are so good; they invite me almost every day" (Noguchi, Collected English Letters, p. 106). In 1921, Yeats in Oxford wrote to Noguchi in Tokyo: "Though I have been so long in writing[,] your 'Hiroshige' has given me the greatest pleasure. I take more and more pleasure from oriental art; find more and more that it accords with what I aim at in my own work. The European painter of the last two or three hundred years grows strange to me as I grow older, begins to speak as with a foreign tongue.… The old French poets were simple as the modern are not, & I find in Francois Villon the same thoughts, with more intellectual power, that I find in the Gaelic poet [Raftery]. I would be simple myself but I do not know how. I am always turning over pages like those you have sent me, hoping that in my old age I may discover how.… A form of beauty scarcely lasts a generation with us, but it lasts with you for centuries. You no more want to change it than a pious man wants to change the Lord's Prayer, or the Crucifix on the wall [blurred] at least not unless we have infected you with our egotism" (Noguchi, Collected English Letters, pp. 220-21).

²⁰ Goodwin, p. 32.

²¹ See William Pratt, The Imagist Poem (New York, 1963), pp. 14-15; J. B. Harmer, Victory in Limbo: Imagism 1908-1917 (New York, 1975), p. 17; Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Boston, 1988), p. 115.

²² It is speculative, of course, but quite possible that Aldington, fascinated by Japanese visual arts, might have read the three articles Noguchi published about the subject in this period: "Utamaro," Rhythm 11, no. 10 (1912): 257-60, "Koyetsu," Rhythm 11, no. 11 (1912): 302-5, "The Last Master [Yoshitoshi] of the Ukiyoye School," Transactions of the Japan Society of London 12 (1914): 144-56. Moreover, Yone Noguchi, The Spirit of Japanese Art (London, 1915) includes chapters on major Japanese painters such as Koyetsu, Kenzan, Kyosai, and Busho Hara, besides Utamaro and Hiroshige. If Aldington had read these essays, he would very well have been acquainted with Noguchi's writings about Japanese poetics.

²³ Aldington's poem reads:

The apparition of these poems in a crowd: White faces in a black dead faint.

See Aldington, "Penultimate Poetry," The Egoist (January 15, 1915). This poem sounds more like senryu, a humorous haiku, than the hokku Pound was advocating.

²⁴ Donald Davie, Ezra Pound (New York, 1975), p. 42; Carpenter, p. 247.

²⁵ Compare Harmer, p. 38.

²⁶ Miner, "Pound" (n. 3 above), p. 572.

²⁷ See Usaburo Toyama, ed., Essays on Yone Noguchi (Tokyo, 1975), 1:327. (The text is mostly in Japanese.) Toyama, an art historian, was married to Noguchi's daughter Hifumi.

²⁸ A. R. Jones, The Life and Opinions of Thomas Ernest Hulme (Boston, 1960), p. 122. Neither Noel Stock, in Poet in Exile: Ezra Pound (Manchester, 1964), nor Humphrey Carpenter in A Serious Character mentions Pound's activities at the Quest Society, let alone Pound's possible interactions with Noguchi.

²⁹ See T. S. Eliot, ed. and introduction, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (Norfolk, Conn., 1954), p. 23.

³⁰ Noguchi, "What Is a Hokku Poem?" (n. 8 above), p. 355.

³¹ About this time Noguchi also wrote an essay entitled "A Japanese Note on Yeats," included in Through the Torii (n. 8 above), pp. 110-17.

³² Noguchi's "Tell Me the Street to Heaven" was first published in his essay, "What Is a Hokku Poem?" (p. 358) and reprinted in Through the Torii. "Is It, Oh, List" was also included in the same issue and reprinted in Through the Torii with a change in the third line: "So runs Thames, so runs my Life" (p. 136).

³³ Ezra Pound, Personae (New York, 1926), p. 109.

³⁴ Ibid., pp. 109-11.

³⁵ Eliot, ed., p. 4.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ See T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (New York, 1932), pp. 8-10.

³⁸ Noguchi, Through the Torii, p. 159.

³⁹ The original in Japanese reads "Hiya hiya to / Kabe wo fumaete / Hirune kana." See Harold G. Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku (Garden City, N.Y., 1958), p. 49. The English translation of this hokku is mine.

⁴⁰ Pound, Personae, p. 100.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 108.

⁴² Alan Durant tries to show that Pound's metro poem contains a number of metaphors and associations, and that it is not as imagistic as critics say. While Durant's interpretation holds insofar as the various elements in the poem appear to the reader as metaphors and associations, Pound's intention does differ from the emphases of such an interpretation. The same thing may occur in the interpretation of a Japanese hokku, but traditionally the language of the hokku, as Noguchi demonstrates throughout The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (London, 1914), shuns metaphor and symbolism. See Alan Durant, "Pound, Modernism and Literary Criticism: A Reply to Donald Davie," Critical Quarterly 28 (1986): 154-66.

⁴³ Eliot, ed. (n. 29 above), p. 4.

⁴⁴ Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (London, 1910; reprint, New York, 1968), p. 97.

⁴⁵ Noguchi, "Again on Hokku," in Through the Torii (n. 8 above), pp. 140-46. A verbatim account is given in the introduction to his Japanese Hokkus (Boston, 1920), pp. 22-23. For Noguchi's London experiences, see "My First London Experience (1903)," and "Again in London (1913-14)," in The Story of Yone Noguchi Told by Him-self (London, 1914), pp. 119-65.

⁴⁶ The union of different experiences is reminiscent of T. S. Eliot's statement about an amalgamation. In reference to John Donne's poetry, Eliot writes, "When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes" {Selected Essays, p. 247).

⁴⁷ In The Spirit of Japanese Poetry, Noguchi wrote, "As the so-called literary expression is a secondary matter in the realm of poetry, there is no strict boundary between the domains generally called subjective and objective; while some Hokku poems appear to be objective, those poems are again by turns quite subjective through the great virtue of the writers having the fullest identification with the matter written on. You might call such collation poetical trespassing; but it is the very point whence the Japanese poetry gains unusual freedom; that freedom makes us join at once with the soul of Nature" (pp. 43-44).

⁴⁸ Noguchi, "What Is a Hokku Poem?" p. 357.

⁴⁹ Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (London, 1916; reprint, New York, 1970), pp. 120-21.

⁵⁰ Yone Noguchi, The Pilgrimage (London, 1908), 1:68.

⁵¹ To the Japanese, such expressions as "the light of passion" and "the cicada's song" immediately evoke images of hot summer. These phrases in Japanese are attributed to or closely associated with summer.

⁵² For Whitman's influence on Noguchi, see Hakutani, "Yone Noguchi's Poetry: From Whitman to Zen" (n. 4 above): "Like Whitman, Noguchi believes in monism, and his ultimate goal in writing poetry is to achieve the ecstasies of the self in nature.… Though he became a different kind of nature poet after he returned to Japan, his later poems still bear out Whitman's influence" (p. 69).

Milton A. Cohen

[In the following essay, Cohen draws parallels between Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste" (1913) and the principles outlined by the Austrian-born American composer Arnold Schoenberg in Theory of Harmony (1911), placing both in the destructive phase of the development of new art forms.]

SOURCE: "Subversive Pedagogies: Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony and Pound's 'A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste'," in Mosaic, Vol. 24, No. 1, Winter, 1988, pp. 49-65.

"The urge for destruction is also a creative urge!"

—Mikhail Bakunin, 1842

"To destroy is always the first step in any creation."

—E.E. Cummings, 1922

The quotations above bracket eighty years of almost continuous upheaval in the arts—battles in which innovative artists challenged the repositories of stifling tradition: the academies, the conservative critics, the bourgeois public. Seen from a historical perspective that has vindicated the avant-garde, these struggles acquire the trappings of heroic myth. Indeed, popular histories of Modernism invest these struggles with a "moral" sanctity, as witness John Russell's use of the term to describe Impressionist painting (18).

"Moral" or not, the struggle against prevailing tradition defines the discourse of both general survey and specialized study alike. "There is … almost no avant-garde manifestation," writes Renato Poggioli, "which is not a new variation on the attitude defined by Apollinaire as 'antitradition'" (53). The precise nature of this oppositional stance, however, is problematic. For one thing, there is the cheerful paradox that artists destroy by creating. An artist's weapon, after all, is his art: even the most calculated slap at academic tradition and bourgeois propriety—say, the urinal that Duchamp submitted to the 1917 Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists as a "Fountain" by "R. Mutt"—acquires, willy-nilly, the privileged status (and price tag) of objet d'art. How much more so with "serious" compositions that scandalized the public and subverted the traditions. Historians and critics celebrate a Le Döjeuner sur l'Herbe or Le Sacre du Printemps not merely as the torpedo that sank an outworn tradition, but as the birth-cry of a new esthetics, "a beginning from ground zero," as Rosalind Krauss observes (157). Perhaps the German Expressionist painter Franz Marc expressed as well as anyone the intertwined acts of destroying and creating: "In this time of great struggle for a new art, we fight like disorganized 'savages' against an old, established power. The battle seems to be unequal, but spiritual matters are never decided by numbers, only by the power of ideas. The dreaded weapons of the 'savages' are their new ideas. New ideas kill better than steel and destroy what was thought to be indestructible" (61).

"New ideas," however, may not always suffice. The dominance of the "old, established power" may be so pervasive and entrenched as to require a direct attack on the sources of its legitimacy—its theoretical underpinnings, its conventions, its prestige—so as to clear the way for constructive innovation or to legitimize innovations already present. Thus, if artists destroy by creating, they must also at times create by destroying.

Two forms of destructive attack are well known: the satire or caricature and the manifesto. Although the Modernist period is not especially known for its satire, a sizable number of painters and writers earned their bread this way (Shapiro 32-35). The avant-garde's preferred form of assault, the manifesto, interwines constructive and destructive ends as it declares a movement's programme while it condemns prevailing ideas. The Futurist painters, for example, aimed much of their "Technical Manifesto" at imitation, harmony, good taste, art critics, "bituminous tints," archaicism, and especially the nude: "We demand for ten years, the total suppression of the nude in painting" (Taylor 126-27).

A third mode of attack, however, has gone virtually un-noticed: pedagogy. Where it is considered, teaching is typically treated as a conservative act—what "schools" do to maintain the old ways. Thus Poggioli: "The school does not aim to discuss; it intends to teach. In place of proclamations and programs, manifestos and reviews … the school prefers to create new variants of traditional poetics and rhetoric, normative or didactic simply by nature" (24). Poggioli's contrast quickly falls apart, however, when one considers that two prime movers of Modernism, Ezra Pound and Arnold Schoenberg, were both committed teachers who put their pedagogy in the service of their radical esthetics. Schoenberg's teaching, especially of his two famous disciples Berg and Webern, is well known. Pound, though stymied in an academic career, was nontheless a born teacher—a "village explainer" in Stein's unkind phrase.

Although spread over a lifetime, Pound's and Schoenberg's influence as teachers arguably reached its zenith in two contemporaneous works: Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony (1911),¹ often ranked among the two or three major treatises on music theory in the twentieth century, and Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste" (1913), which, with its companion-piece, "Imagisme," formally launched the Imagist movement in Poetry magazine. On first glance, the two tracts seem scarcely comparable. Pound's "Don'ts," clearly intended as part of a propaganda blitz, runs to six short pages of aphoristic advice to the prospective poet. Schoenberg's massive textbook weighs in at over 400 densely-packed pages, footnoted and profusely illustrated with musical examples. Its style is more discursive and "teacherly" than the terse "Don'ts": Schoenberg analyzes, discusses, illustrates, repeats himself, and above all seeks to persuade his student-reader; Pound commands and virtually browbeats his reader to obey. The two tracts are also separate in lacking any personal or intellectual discourse between their authors:

Pound and Schoenberg never met in those years, and although Pound may have been familiar with Theory of Harmony and may have attended the London premiere of Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra in 1912, he does not mention Schoenberg's theories until several years later and then without enthusiasm (Schafer 506-07, 33).

Yet, for all their differences in size, scope and provenance, Theory of Harmony and "A Few Don'ts" play such similar roles within their respective arts as to merit a comparative study of their ideas and influence. Contrary to Poggioli, these tracts were penned not by conservative pedagogues but by teacher-artists as they were restructuring music and poetry. Each author, moreover, was the galvanizing force of a small group of like-minded artists—the Schoenberg-Berg-Webern triad and "Les Imagistes" (Pound, Aldington and H.D.)—who were then evolving a new style: Pantanal Expressionism and Imagism, respectively.² Within these emerging styles Theory of Harmony and "A Few Don'ts" play several overlapping roles: as theoretical rationales for the innovative work of their authors, as stated or implied manifestos of two burgeoning styles, as destroyers of established esthetics and conventional practice, and as pedagogies that promote their ideas by teaching future composers and poets. These tracts thus occupy parallel positions within the destructive phase of two avant-garde movements and achieve their subversions through pedagogy. Their comparison, in turn, reveals congruent strengths and weaknesses in the styles they influenced.

Published amidst a welter of artistic movements, creeds and manifestos, these two tracts owe at least part of their inspiration to the declamatory Zeitgeist of pre-war Europe. The author of "Imagisme" acknowledges this militant milieu even as he tries to distinguish Imagism from it: "The imagistes admitted that they were contemporaries of the Post Impressionists and the Futurists; but they had nothing in common with these schools. They had not published a manifesto. They were not a revolutionary school" (199). Pound's disclaimer, however, is disingenuous, for his two articles, following so soon after the Futurist exhibition, manifesto and lectures in London, are Imagism's first manifesto; and the practices advocated in "A Few Don'ts" are indeed "revolutionary." Schoenberg's bulky textbook certainly does not look like an incendiary manifesto: it offers no program and speaks, explicitly at least, for no group. Indeed, its ostensible purpose is to instruct students in the "handicraft of harmony," the conventions "necessary for complying with the major-minor system" (396, 48). Yet, interlaced with its dry, orderly presentation of harmonic combinations is a subversive subtext: commentaries in which Schoenberg switches hats from upholder of the rules to intelligent skeptic who asks "whether they need be so"—questions, that is, their very authority (Carter xiv). Similarly, although Schoenberg writes in the singular, his questions, like Pound's "Don'ts," reflect the current thinking and most recent innovations of an avant-garde group.

By 1913, Pound had associated with the Hulme circle for four years, absorbing those aspects of Hulme's poetics that corresponded with his own reformist ideas, and sharing in the group's experiments in proto-Imagist and Haiku poems (Stock 63-64). Schoenberg and his two student-disciples had achieved comparatively more when Theory appeared, composing major works in the PantonalExpressionist style since about 1908. As Schoenberg acknowledges, the ideas that his text advances by questioning assumptions of the prevailing system reflect "that which the art has already achieved" (386) and thus provide a theoretical rationale for techniques that had come to him through "musical intuition" rather than through "deliberation" (410).

If these tracts rationalize what their authors were achieving in practice and formalize the ideas of a group—function, that is, as either open or implied manifestos—they also promulgate their ideas by teaching their student-readers which esthetic theories are no longer valid, which artistic practices are outworn, and which models are still worth emulating. This pedagogic intent is self-evident and primary in Theory of Harmony. In the Imagist articles, however, pedagogy at first seems only a narrative stratagem, as the author of "Imagisme" adopts the persona of an "approaching poetaster" taken in hand by the new movement. Yet in "A Few Don'ts" Pound is emphatically pedagogic in reversing the perspective and addressing his readers as students: "The immediate necessity is to tabulate A LIST OF DON'TS for those beginning to write verses" (201). What Theory and "Don'ts" offer their student-readers is a decidedly negative attack on the prevailing esthetics of their day, Schoenberg by deflating "false theories," by identifying "inadequacies of the tonal system" (12, 330) and Pound by proscribing outworn practices of Victorian poetics. Both writers, interestingly, acknowledge their negativism. Pound refers sardonically to the "Mosaic negatives" of his "Don'ts"; Schoenberg concedes that his ideas "even if they are negative, even if they do not themselves lay any foundations, are all the same no less fruitful than positive principles … they have at least cleared the ground for a foundation" (386). Such clearing, however, amounts here to nothing less than an esthetic coup d'état.

That these subversions should come from two artists who understood and respected their artistic forbears as well as did Pound and Schoenberg is more than ironic, and their complex attitudes toward tradition should be distinguished from the generalized hostility that Poggioli describes above. Pound's complete and simultaneous immersion in several poetic traditions virtually defines his early work and fueled his rancor against what he considered the flaccid poetics of his age. His Imagist principles thus embody the other meaning of "revolutionary": a circular return to the great epochs of the past to rejuvenate a desiccated present. The Imagists sought "to write in accordance with the best tradition, as they found it in the best writers of all time—in Sappho, Catullus, Villon" (Flint 199). To "break with tradition" meant for Pound to "desert the more obvious imbecilities of one's immediate elders" ("Notes" 227).

Schoenberg, too, revered his tradition, as the breadth of his citations in Theory of Harmony and his essays on and transcriptions of Bach and Brahms amply testify. "No one," he writes, "loves his predecessors more deeply, more fervently, more respectfully, than the artist who gives us something truly new" (Theory 401). Uneasy about being branded a radical, he claims that his ideas are evolutionary, that the older music "is not at all under attack" (Theory 408). He is correct in the sense that the principles he questions—central tonality, resolved dissonances and "non-harmonic tones"—had in practice steadily eroded through the nineteenth century and into the first years of the twentieth with his own post-romantic compositions. "Tonality," he recalls later, "was already dethroned in practice, if not in theory" ("Composition" 216-17). As his questioning in Theory formalizes these tendencies and extends them to their logical conclusions, however, the tottering tonal system collapses. Put another way, his critique so expands the harmonic possibilities within the tonal system as to remove its last distinguishing features as a system.

Having shorn music and poetry of outworn or insupportable principles of organization, both tracts are reluctant to posit new ones—another major parallel linking them. Schoenberg concedes that his critique does not "lay any [new] foundation" in the sense of offering a new "system" or specific, constructive procedures. Pound's "Don'ts" are similarly bereft of new organizing principles: even the affirmative rules of "Imagisme" touch on form only glancingly when they tie composition to "the sequence of the musical phrase" rather than to that of the metronome.

This absence of new structures to replace the discredited ones produces in Imagist and Pantonal-Expressionist works a curious kind of esthetic entropy, in which potential energy (possibilities of direction and force) that once inhered in the formal conventions of diatonic tonality and regularly rhymed and metered verse now devolve to what both artists considered the irreducible denominator of their arts, the tone and image. The resulting structures of these works, determined only by the artist's emotion and sense of organicism, were tightly compressed and highly charged juxtapositions of these tones and images. Indeed, so truncated is the typical structure of these works that both Pound and Schoenberg tend to describe them in the spatial terminology of painting as much as in the temporal diction of literature and music. Perhaps more than any other cause, the formal instabilities of these compressed structures—their inability to support long, complex works and (in Pound's subsequent view) Imagism's tendency toward rhythmic flabbiness—led both artists in a very few years to take similar corrective measures: to assert the constructive organizing principles that are so notably absent in Theory of Harmony and "A Few Don'ts," principles codified in Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Method and Pound's "rhyme and regular strophes."

The neophytes who read Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste" in 1913 were no doubt startled (as they were intended to be) not only by Pound's dictatorial tone but also by his highly negative advice. For "A Few Don'ts" is far more definite about what new poets should avoid than about what they should embrace. Indeed, two of the three "rules" in "Imagisme" are couched at least partly in the negative:

2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.

3. As regarding rhythm to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

(199, emphasis mine)

Moreover, apart from the demand for concision in rule two, the "constructive" rules and definition of the image in the Poetry articles are notoriously vague. What constitutes a "direct" treatment of the thing? How large is a "complex": as small as a petal? As large as Paradiso?³ What is "the sequence of the musical phrase"? Although pound would later clarify some of these ambiguities, his student-readers would likely have looked to the more specific "Don'ts" article for immediate answers—and there find a barrage of proscriptions.

Some of the "Don'ts" simply restate the second rule about avoiding prolixity (201, 202, 205). Other "Don'ts" fan out over several aspects of poetry. They caution against using synesthesia and sloppy diction (206), against using abstractions (201), against philosophizing and against describing as opposed to presenting (203).

Certain practices Pound does not ban outright, but he carefully qualifies their use. A rhyme, for example, "must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure; it need not be bizarre or curious, but it must be used well if used at all" (205). His advice about rhythm and meter is particularly noteworthy in its failure to explain what "the sequence of the musical phrase" means. Instead, it attacks the regularity of metrical verse and of end-stopped lines. Once again, his advice is essentially negative and general: "Your rhythmic structure should not destroy the shape of your words, or their natural sound, or their meaning" (204).

The broadest "Don'ts" address the craft and profession of poetry. They urge a dedication and seriousness comparable to those of the composer, the scientist, the prose stylist. Even these, however, are couched in the negative: "Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music … " (203). So pervasive is Pound's urge to proscribe that it carries even to the disclaimer prefacing the "Don'ts"—"never consider anything as dogma"—a statement that self-destructs with "never."

Against this fearsome array of negatives, Pound's prescriptions are vague—commonplace, really—and decidedly conservative. They fall into roughly two categories: models to emulate (Dante, Sappho, Catullus, Villon, etc.) and techniques to master. The latter amount to little more than variations on the theme "learn your craft": the novice should learn "the finest cadences" (202); should master "assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic" (203); should practice translating and writing good prose for their salutary discipline (203, 205). About the only two declarative statements that a neophyte could apply directly are: "Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave" ([204], i.e., enjambement is acceptable) and "the natural object is always the adequate symbol" (201)—a variant of "Direct treatment of the thing itself."

The striking contrast between Pound's specific "Don'ts" and his vague, general "Do's" leaves little doubt about his esthetic purposes. First, of course, he wants to purge poetry of "poetic dilettantism" (200)—thus, his compari-sons to the professional rigors of music and science. It is significant, however, that of the models he cites as worthy, not one comes from the Victorians and only one (heavily qualified) from the English Romantics. The omissions are not accidental, for the practices that Pound forbids are a laundry list of Victorian esthetics: Tennysonian prolixity, philosophizing and abstractions; narrative description; fixed patterns of rhythm and structure; and images used as "ornaments" (à la Swinburne) rather than as "the speech itself." If Pound's "Don'ts" subvert the substance and structure of Victorian poetry, they offer the novice precious few constructive practices. From his other essays ("Prolegomena" 9; "Affirmations" 375; "Status" 39), it is clear that Pound felt that the "musical phrase" should correspond organically to a particular emotion. Lacking such glosses, however, the Poetry credo simply frees the novice of metronomic dependence and opens the way to free verse—without providing a road map.

Schoenberg's attack on nineteenth-century esthetics differs. from Pound's in that the composer attacks principles and, with one exception, does not bother to forbid practices resulting from those principles. His targets are the very pillars of the major-minor system, the first of which is central tonality as an organizing force. Tonality, he declares often, "is no natural law of music, eternally valid" (9, 127-28, 369) because "nothing is definitive in culture; everything is only a preparation for a higher stage of development" (97). The diatonic scale, therefore, is "not … the ultimate goal of music but rather a provisional stopping place. The overtone series which led the ear to it, still contains many problems that will have to be faced … and the ear will have to attack the problems because it is so disposed" (25). This evolutionary view itself justifies studying the tonal system to understand both how it evolved and how it must be superseded: "Let the pupil learn the laws and effect of tonality just as if they still prevailed, but let him know of the tendencies that are leading to their annulment. Let him know that the conditions leading to the dissolution of the system are inherent in the conditions upon which it is established" (29).

Of the "tendencies" and "conditions" that guarantee the dissolution of tonality, the principle of modulation encompasses them all: "Every chord that is set beside the principal tone has at least as much tendency to lead away from it [modulation] as to return to it [cadence]. And if … a work of art is to emerge we must have this movement-generating conflict. The tonality must be placed in danger of losing its sovereignty; the modulation's appetites for independence and the tendencies toward mutiny must be given opportunities to activate themselves" (151). The "danger" arises when the excursions outward become so extensive as to weaken the pull of the tonic center and ultimately to efface its existence. As the tonic atrophies and distant keys acquire increasing independence, the very hierarchy that subordinates remote keys to a central tonic itself begins to crumble. What replaces this tonal hierarchy is an egalitarian concept of interchangeability, in which "each degree of the scale governing a work can become a fundamental or at least … gain a more significant position in another district" (151). Freed of subservience to a tonic, "every chord can be connected with every other" (241); "all chords can be vagrant" (387); and "any triad can follow any other triad" (165).

Given this inevitable civil strife between the tonic and its outlying keys, Schoenberg foresees two possible outcomes: either the tonic is made to prevail via cadences at crucial junctures, or it is "superceded" (370). He leaves no doubt about which solution he rejects: "that one can create tonality, I consider possible. Only, whether one must still work for it, indeed whether one ought to work for it any more at all, I doubt" (394n)—particularly when maintaining the tonal center seems more a traditional obeisance than a "structural necessity" (28).

Schoenberg's second target was the traditional distinction between dissonance and consonance and the practice of requiring that a dissonance be preceded by and resolved into a consonance. He argues that "the distinction between them is only a matter of degree, not of kind." Because dissonances appear in the "remote overtones" of the fundamental (while consonances appear in closer overtones), dissonances are therefore nothing more than "remote consonances" (21). Just as his finely-honed sense of tonal relationships permits him to see that "even excursions into the most remote regions of tonality may be organic to the fundamental" and are thus permissible, so Schoenberg's encompassing concept that dissonance is organically related to the fundamental leads him to conclude that "any simultaneous combination of sounds, any progression is possible" (70). Rather than carefully resolve a dissonance into a consonance, a composer may simply "skip away from the dissonance" (140)—a freedom Schoenberg calls "the emancipation of the dissonance." Noting how the parameters of consonance have constantly expanded, he confidently predicts that "what today is harmonically remote can tomorrow be close at hand.… It all simply depends on the growing ability of the analyzing ear to familiarize itself with remote over-tones, thereby expanding the conception of what is euphonious, suitable for art, so that it embraces the whole natural phenomenon" (21). His critique of non-harmonic tones is similar: "There are … no non-harmonic tones, no tones foreign to harmony, but merely tones foreign to the harmonic system" (317, 321).

Just as Pound's "Don'ts" defer all constructive decisions to the poet's sensibility, so Schoenberg's compositional conclusions theoretically give the novice virtual carte blanche: "There are no limits to the possibilities of tones sounding together, to harmonic possibilities; [the limits are] at most the possibilities of fitting the harmonies into a system that will establish their esthetic value" (322, Carter's interpolation). Without a "system" to judge admissibility, "any material can be suitable for art" (26). Similarly, just as Pound's constructive "Do's" are vague, so Schoenberg becomes evasive and at times even contradictory about new structures to accommodate the compositional freedom resulting from his critiques. He disclaims any intent to "formulate" a new system or "to set up new eternal laws" (12). Logically, he cannot do so, since he argues that all manmade "systems" are inherently flawed. Anticipating the criticism that this reluctance leaves the student to face "without preparation a freedom he cannot cope with" (328), he simply ducks the issue:

Only a pedagogical consideration keeps me from giving the pupil a completely free hand with these chords. Up to now I have told him exactly when he can rely upon this or that harmony to be effective according to traditional experience; and I should like to continue that way. But there are no traditional experiences upon which to base the free use of these chords.… Consequently, I will take the … position that the master is free; but the pupil stays under restriction until he has become free." (331)

And when will the pupil become free? Why, when he is no longer a pupil: "One does not give freedom; the other takes it. And only the master can take it: one, that is, who has it anyhow" (329). Still less satisfying to the pupil is Schoenberg's guidance in using "non-harmonic" tones: "the simplest way is the one patterned after the historical evolution, but the as yet non-historical future will bring something different" (331).

If he skirts the "errors" of past theorists—those of systematizing and of composing rules based on that system—Schoenberg still cannot resist one prescriptive caution. Discussing how the chromatic scale "justifies" dissonant progressions, he notes that "tone doublings, octaves, seldom appear [in these chromatic progressions]. The explanation for that is, perhaps, that the tone doubled would acquire a predominance over the others and would thereby turn into a kind of root, which it should scarcely be" (420, emphasis mine). These roots are undesirable, he concludes, because the "traditional chords" they form are out of place ("too cold, too dry, expressionless") in a dissonant, chromatic environment. Without quite forbidding tone doubling—a basic method of establishing a central tonality—he emphasizes its inappropriateness to the chromatic scale. Young composers could thus draw their own conclusions about using any means to establish a tonal center.

Schoenberg is similarly teasing in predicting what the "something different" will be that supplants the major-minor system. Without developing or defending his ideas, he casually considers fluctuating or suspended tonality, the chromatic scale, the whole-tone scale, quartal harmonies, and a "new epoch of polyphonic style" (389). Except for the whole-tone scale, he finds them all attractive possibilities. Suspended tonality can be as "intelligible" as central tonality: "nothing is lost from the impression of completeness if the tonality is merely hinted at, yes, even if it is erased" (128). "Anarchy would not ensue under these conditions but rather a new form of order" because "the discarding of the tonal bond could favor the self-directed functioning of other bonds" (152). Quartal harmonies can accommodate "all phenomena of harmony" (407). As for basing "our thought, not on the seven tones of the major scale, but rather on the twelve tones of the chromatic scale," Schoenberg predicts in his 1911 edition: "A future theory will undoubtedly follow that course; it would thereby reach the only correct solution to this otherwise difficult problem" (387n). Twelve years would pass before he fulfilled this prophecy with his "Twelve-Tone Method."

About the only new constructive ideas Schoenberg proffers assertively are Klangfarbenmelodie (tone-color melodies) and expression as a guide through uncharted terrain. To end a 400-page book on harmony with paean to a different tonal property, timbre, is provocative. Still more so is the assertion that

the tone becomes perceptible by virtue of tone color, of which one dimension is pitch. Tone color is, thus, the main topic, pitch a subdivision.… Now, if it is possible to create patterns out of tone colors that are differentiated according to pitch, patterns we call "melodies" … then it must also be possible to make such progressions out of the tone colors of the other dimensions, out of that which we call simply "tone color," progressions whose relations to one another work with a kind of logic entirely equivalent to that logic which satisfies us in the melody of pitches." (421)

Acknowledging that such speculations may be no more than a "futuristic fantasy," he nevertheless devotes his closing sentences to predicting their realization and promise: "Tone-color melodies! How acute the senses that would be able to perceive them! How high the development of spirit that could find pleasure in such subtle things" (422). Just as Pound observes that expressive emotion is the generating force in Imagist poetry, so Schoenberg notes that "in composing I make decisions only according to feeling, according to the feeling for form.… Every chord I put down corresponds to a necessity … o f my urge to expression" (417). While the object of this expression is formal, its workings are "instinctive. Consciousness has little influence on it" (416). Tracing the creative urge to subliminal feeling may seem surprising coming from one so analytical as Schoenberg, until we recall that he comes out of the Austro-German romantic tradition and that when he wrote Theory of Harmony he was painting and associating with the German Expressionist painters of The Blue Rider.

Schoenberg's two affirmative ideas—Klangfarbenmelodie and expression as creative impetus—imply structural consequences parallel to Pound's constructive ideas in the Imagist articles. Tone-color melodies direct the composer's attention away from large, abstract structures and toward the timbre and texture of the individual tone as a self-sufficient unit of meaning. A microcosmic structure, tone-color melody tends to be aphoristically short and to change, chameleon-like, as instrumentation changes. Expression and instinct are appropriate guides to form if older organizing principles no longer obtain and all combinations are possible: "Only the ear may take the lead, the ear, sensitivity to tone, the creative urge, the imagination, nothing else; never mathematics, calculation, aesthetics" (331). Analogously, Pound's dismantling of Victorian rhetoric and his emphasis on the image concentrate poetic structure in the microcosmic "one-image poem." As both writers negate the organizing principles of nineteenth-century form, they come to rely on the individual emotion, the "urge for expression" to generate form. Moreover, in scaling down the formal denominator to the individual tone and image, both artists gravitate away from a sequential concept of music and poetry unfolding in time and toward a spatial, painterly one of the tone and image existing in self-sufficient instantaneity. Although not a painter himself like Schoenberg (though he associated with them), Pound spoke in painterly terms about composing his most famous Imagist poem, "In a Station of the Metro": "I found suddenly the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation … not in speech, but in little splotches of colour. It was just that—a 'pattern', or hardly a pattern, if by 'pattern' you mean something with a 'repeat' in it. But it was a word, the beginning for me of language in colour" (Gaudier-Brzeska 87). To see how these processes work, however, we must look at two representative works of Pantonal-Expressionism and Imagism.

Composed two years before Theory of Harmony, Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909) was undoubtedly one of the works that occasioned the textbook's theoretical rationale—"that which the art has already achieved." Like so many other "Pieces" written in the Pantonal-Expressionist style, this title accurately conveys the work's brevity and fragmentation. The score runs to 416 measures and requires about fifteen minutes to perform. Of the five pieces, the fourth (which Schoenberg entitled "Peripetia") is the shortest, lasting less than two minutes.

Within its scant 65 measures, however, "Peripetia" shifts its meter seven times among 3/4, 2/4 and 4/4; it changes tempo five times, from agitated molto allegro to moody meno mosso, and closes with a steadily accelerating crescendo that trails off "pp" in the winds and horns. Within a given tempo, moreover, the dynamics oscillate abruptly between extremes of molto piano and fortissimo. For example, in the 15 bars marked meno mosso (bars 308-23), the dynamics lurch between "pp" and "fff five times, sometimes over a single measure (e.g., bars 312-13). These abrupt shifts of meter, tempo and dynamics result in a disjointed, agitated forward motion.

The aphoristic motifs of this movement intensify its fragmentation. The primary motif opens the piece "f" on a rising crescendo. It recurs often in different guises, e.g., as an expressive clarinet passage (274-77), as a Scriabinesque condensation for trumpets (284-85), and later as an inverted expressivo passage for cellos (309-10). Although Schoenberg identifies a "secondary voice" in bar 293, the motif is barely audible amidst a thick-textured counterpoint. Finally, two other discernible motifs should be noted: an ostinato rhythm in the horns that immediately follows the opening statement (267-69) and recurs several times thereafter, and an emphatic descending figure in the tuba that occurs near the close of the "ff"' middle section (296-97) and again as the culminating and most discernible motif of the final crescendo (327).

The interwoven repetition of these motifs may suggest—on paper—a discernible structure to "Peripetia": a rough sonata form, in which the themes expand contrapuntally in the "ff" development (283-98) and, following a slow recapitulation (beginning at bars 299-301), accelerate again for the coda (323-30). Several factors, however, impede the listener from hearing this form. First, the motifs are so brief and vanish so quickly that they do not establish themselves as easily recognizable components of a fixed structure. Rather, they seem discrete and autonomous fragments that follow in a simple sequence of contrasts (fast and slow, loud and soft). Second, just as Schoenberg later predicts in Theory of Harmony, he develops these motifs contrapuntally rather than harmonically. Thus, several "principal" motifs, each lasting no more than a measure or two, interweave and overlap, as in bars 287-91 of the Tempo Imo section. Following the thread of one motif, therefore, is virtually impossible; one can only sense the fragments of several.

Tonality provides no help in finding the "center," since the piece bears no key signature, and the opening motif spans two octaves (from low D in the tenor clef to high B in the treble clef). Dissonances abound; for example, in the concluding chord of the first motif, A in the clarinets clashes with A# in the bass clarinet, while G in the cellos rubs against A^b in the basses. In sum, the motifs of this short piece flare up suddenly, crunch against each other in jarring juxtapositions and dissonant harmonies, and fade evanescently, leaving the listener with a recollection of seemingly disconnected episodes, fragmentary moments, clashing tone-colors.

Juxtaposed colors are also the subject of the Imagist poem that Pound published in Lustra (1916), though he obviously wrote it much earlier:

L'ART, 1910
Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.

As his title reveals immediately, the "art" of 1910 for Pound is Modernist. 1910 was the year of London's first taste of Modernist painting, via Roger Fry's Post-Impressionist Exhibition in November. Although Pound was not around to see it, he doubtless learned of its impact from his London friends. Moreover, he was briefly in Paris in late March of 1910 and may well have feasted his own eyes at the spring Salon des Independents or Bernheim-Jeune.

If critical comments on this poem are reliable, Pound did not much like what he saw and satirized it—a reading based on the ugly images of the first line and the potentially ironic hyperbole of the exclamation mark and "feast." Yet several features of the poem work against this satirical reading, even apart from the biographical fact that Pound strongly sympathized with Modernist painting at this time. Certainly, the first line, riding on the ugly verb "smeared," evokes multiple unpleasantries. Arsenic, the pigment base of emerald (or "Paris") green, also denotes its more deadly meaning, as it poisons the "egg-white" canvas cloth; "smeared" is doubly nauseating, since it can adhere to egg-white, as well as to "arsenic." Yet the line closes with a comma—not with the original colon (or in later editions semi-colon) of "In a Station of the Metro"—which suggests that "Crushed strawberries" is not an ironic metaphor for the entire first line, but rather an imagistic metaphor for the next major color the speaker sees. And what a contrast! The bright red juice of those crushed berries exactly complements the emerald green, just as its life-sustaining sweetness provides the antidote to the bitter, deadly arsenic. The exclamation mark thus suggests the speaker's surprise and sensuous delight, not simply in the strawberry red itself, but in its jarring juxtaposition to emerald green. "Feast" intensifies his gormandizing joy, until "eyes" returns the image to metaphor (albeit a clichéd one), inviting us to see as deeply as we would taste the piquant savor of these opposites. If the art of 1910 thus dares to juxtapose bright complementary colors—a technique that intensifies each color and exactly corresponds to the strident dissonances Schoenberg was then legitimizing—so Pound strives for the same intensity of perceptual experience in his two-line structure by juxtaposing bright green and red, bitterness and sweetness, poison and sustenance, nausea and feasting—a structure, in short, that objectifies the intense pleasure-pain the speaker feels standing before "L'ART, 1910."

The parallel relations of "Peripetia" and "L'ART, 1910" to the pedagogical subversions of Theory of Harmony and "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste" should now be clear. As the tracts undermine key features of nineteenth-century structure (a theme clearly centered and extensively developed via smooth transitions into a regular pattern), so the works reflecting these subversions are marked by the antitheses of these features: motifs that are highly compressed and fragmented to convey a sense of instantaneity and flickering change; contrasting elements that are abruptly juxtaposed (complementary images, dissonant harmonies, etc.) to produce a heightened intensity of expression.

As the styles reflecting the negative esthetics of Theory of Harmony and "A Few Don'ts" continued into the war years, they testify to the potency of these tracts in "clearing the ground" of nineteenth-century music theory and poetic practice. Increasingly, however, Schoenberg and Pound chafed under the structural deficiencies of these "negativist" styles and set about to rectify them.

Almost as soon as "A Few Don'ts" appeared, Pound recognized flaws in Imagist theory and practice that impelled him—fully as much as did his personal feud with Amy Lowell—to move beyond the Poetry statements. As he later acknowledged, these flaws stemmed from the laconic vagueness of the Poetry doctrine—misconstrued and abused by vers libre poets: "The defect of earlier imagist propaganda was not in misstatement but in incomplete statement. The diluters took the handiest and easiest meaning, and thought only of the STATIONARY image. If you can't think of imagism or phanopoeia as including the moving image, you will have to make a really needless division of fixed image and praxis or action" (ABC 52). As numerous critics have observed, the static Imagist poem skimps on verbs; indeed, Pound's famous "In a Station of the Metro" lacks them altogether. His move into Vorticism in 1914-15 aimed to restore this dynamism by redefining the image: "The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is … a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing" (Gaudier-Brzeska 89).

This more dynamic conception of the image addresses a second problem of the Poetry statements. In scaling Imagist presentation to "an instant of time," Pound constricts the poem's essential structure to a single juxtaposition; as he describes it in Gaudier-Brzeska: "the 'one-image' poem is a form of superposition, that is to say, it is one image set on top of another" (89). This spatial conception, as John Gage argues, precludes a temporal basis for developing the image sequentially into a significant order. Longer Imagist poems simply amplify the core structure in "accumulative" strings that lack transitions and thus lack "a sense of necessity compelling a conclusion" (108-14).

A dynamic conception of the image, by contrast, permitted Pound to see it (in Herbert Schneidau's phrase) as "a body of potentialities" that can metamorphose and develop (88). In 1915, Pound writes: "The undeniable tradition of metamorphoses teaches us that things do not remain always the same. They become other things by swift and unanalysable process." In the same essay, his definition of myth as "a work of art" virtually restates Imagist process: "an impersonal or objective story woven out of [the myth-maker's] own emotion, as the nearest equation that he was capable of putting into words" ("Dolmetsch" 431). Pound's promotion of Joyce and Eliot in 1916-18 doubtless intensified his interest in the metamorphic image within a mythic structure. As Schneidau argues, he applied his concept of the "luminous detail" to the "Joycean lesson that great art consisted of the universal in the particular, here, the permanence in the detail" (117). Pound's 1917 review-essay on Eliot—a major statement of his revised esthetics—corroborates this view: "Art does not avoid universals, it strikes at them all the harder in that it strikes through particulars" (420). Having once defined poetic structure, the image now functions as "luminous detail," metamorphosing and developing to evoke universals of space and time in an evolving structure sufficiently large and loose to accommodate an "endless poem of no known category.… all about everything" that Pound was then writing: the Cantos (qtd. in Schneidau 145n).

As he drifted from an exclusively visual and spatial conception of the image, embodied in phanopoeia, Pound moved toward two other kinds of poetry that he later defined as logopoeia, "the dance of the intellect among words," and melopoeia, the "musical property which directs the bearing or trend of meaning" ("How" 25). The ironic word-play of logopoeia, he concludes in 1917, is not especially suited for free verse, for it "demands a set form used with irreproachable skill. Satire needs, usually, the form of cutting rhymes to drive it home" ("Irony" 283, emphasis mine). Melopoeia always occupied a high niche in Pound's poetics, but his writings from 1915-18 show that his increasing concern about its abuse in free verse led him to the same structural conclusions that he reached regarding logopoeia. The source of this abuse can be traced directly to the vague injunctions in the Poetry articles to "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase" and to "behave as … a good musician." Pound's other statements then and later show that, far from advocating rhythmic anarchy, he called for a flexible and organic relation between rhythm and the individual "creative emotion" (as opposed to the mechanical measure) that generates it: "I do not believe that Chopin wrote to a metronome. There is undoubtedly a sense of music that takes count of the 'shape' of the rhythm in a melody, rather than of bar division.… The creation of such shapes is part of thematic invention. Some musicians have the faculty of invention, rhythmic, melodic. Likewise, some poets" ("Eliot" 421).

Some poets, however, lack this faculty: namely, the vers libre poets who misconstrued Pound's advice in Poetry, to his steadily increasing vexation. In 1915, he complains that "bad free verse" is "made by those who have not sufficient skill to make words move in rhythm of the creative emotion" ("Affirmations" 376). A year later, he rails at the Imagist's "sloppiness" ("Status" 39), at their "looseness, lack of rhythmical construction and intensity" ("Correspondence" 323). Still later, he fumes to Harriet Monroe that "the vers libre public are probably by now as stone blind to the vocal or oral properties of a poem as the 'sonnet' public was five or seven years ago to the actual language" (Letters 127). Finally, in his 1917 essay on the musical theorist, Arnold Dolmetsch, he concludes: "Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.… Vers libre has become a pest.… It is too late to prevent it. It is here. There is too much of it. One might, conceivably, improve it.… and one stop at least a little of the idiotic and narrow discussion based on an ignorance of music" ("Verse" 42).

In fact, Pound was working then to "improve" contemporary verse by restoring its musical vigor. Yet his rhythmic and formal prescriptions drastically curtail and even reverse his earlier support of free verse: "Unless a man can put some thematic invention into vers libre, he would do well to stick to 'regular' metres, which have certain chances of being musical from their form, and certain other chances of being musical through his failure of fitting the form" ("Eliot" 422). Recalling his (and Eliot's) reformist efforts in this period, he summarized: "at a particular date in a particular room, two authors … decided that the dilutation of vers libre, Amygism, Lee Masterism, general floppiness had gone too far and that some counter-current must be set going.… Remedy prescribed.… Rhyme and regular strophes" ("Monroe" 14). In his own verse, he took a healthy dose of his medicine, not only by seeking "to resurrect the art of the lyric, I mean words to be sung," but also in pursuing the structural implications of his renewed interest in logopoeia and melopoeia: the "rhyme and regular strophes" of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Letters 128).

In the same year that Pound published his revised views of rhyme and metrics in "T.S. Eliot," Schoenberg was working on his own structural reforms in the large oratorio, Jacob's Ladder. His impetus paralleled Pound's in two respects. First, Schoenberg perceived serious structural limitations of the Pantonal-Expressionist style—limitations implicit in the theoretical subversions of Theory of Harmony. Like Pound's call for "rhyme and regular strophes," Schoenberg strove to rationalize, unify and systematize structural decisions that had been largely "subconscious" and disconnected in Pantonal works by prescribing a specific method of composition.

In "Composition with Twelve Tones (1)," Schoenberg recalls that the foremost characteristics of these Pantonal pieces were "their extreme expressiveness and their extraordinary brevity. At that time [1908-11], neither I nor my pupils were conscious of the reasons for these features.… Thus, subconsciously, consequences were drawn from an innovation which, like every innovation, destroys while it produces. New colourful harmony was offered; but much was lost" (217). Chief among those losses was a harmonic structure sufficient for mounting large, complex works. As Schoenberg notes, the structural function of harmony—its role in "distinguishing the features of form.… comparable to the effect of punctuation in the construction of sentences, of subdivision into paragraphs, and of fusion into chapters—could scarcely be assured with chords whose constructive values had not as yet been explored. Hence, it seemed impossible to compose pieces of complicated organization or of great length" (217).

For a time, Schoenberg sidestepped the problem of size by following a text in larger Pantonal works such as Pierrot Lunaire and Erwartung. Yet the need remained for a "comprehensible" method of unifying horizontal and vertical space to sustain large works. Likewise, "the desire for a conscious control of the new means and forms will arise in every artist's mind; and he will wish to know consciously the laws and rules which govern the form which he has conceived 'as in a dream"' ("Composition" 218). In Jacob's Ladder, this control began to take shape, both thematically and structurally, in a principle Schoenberg later formulated: "the unity of musical space demands an absolute and unitary perception. In this space … there is no absolute down, no right or left, forward or backward. Every musical configuration, every movement of tones has to be comprehended primarily as a mutual relation of sounds … appearing at different places and times" ("Composition" 223).

It would take Schoenberg another four years to realize this principle in a set of compositional procedures that restore to the composer "conscious control" over his material and the structural means to sustain large-scale works: the "Method of Composing with Twelve Tones Which are Related Only with One Another."

The constructive "rules" that Pound and Schoenberg devised in these years point up the structural shortcomings of their major theoretical statements, Theory of Harmony and "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste"—deficiencies that resulted from their predominantly negative orientation, from their subversive intent. Yet, measured by that intent, each tract was remarkably successful. Theory of Harmony provided young composers a theoretical rationale for abandoning central tonality and for leaving dissonances unresolved. "A Few Don'ts" offered "poetasters" tips to rid their work of Victorian prolixity, sentimentality and prosody and to concentrate their expression into potent images. In their ability to influence young Turks of the next generation—Anton Webern and Alban Berg, E.E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams—and at the same time to represent major statements of Modernist innovators and avant-garde movements, these tracts demonstrate the contribution of pedagogy to the avant-garde's ascendence and remind us that for a new esthetics to be established, an old one must be destroyed.

NOTES

¹ The Carter translation of Harmonielehre is based on the third edition (1922), but it clearly indicates where and how this edition diverges from the original 1911 version that I shall consider.

² In deference to Schoenberg, who objected to the term "atonal" as nonsensical, I use "Pantonal" (the term he preferred) to indicate compositions not organized around a single tonal center.

³ The problem of scale appears in Gaudier-Brzeska where Pound refers to Dante's Paradiso as "the most wonderful image" and to the whole Japanese Noh play as "one image" in a chapter that stresses, the painterly instantaneity of the "one-image poem" (86-94).

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