SOURCE: "Pound, Vorticism and the New Esthetic," in Mosaic: A Journal of the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Vol. XVI, No. 4, Fall, 1983, pp. 83-96.

[In the following essay, Tucker studies Pound's contribution to Vorticism as well as its influence on his work.]

Groups set the tone for artistic London in the second decade of the century. The shifting alliances and aggressive posturings of the politicians became fashionable among artists, who attacked one another with a fine and contemporary disregard for their shared interests. The young Ezra Pound, appalled by the other war that first threatened and then engulfed his Europe, busied himself on the home front, stirring things up when he found them too quiet, encouraging the creative belligerence on which groups thrive.

Imagism and Vorticism were the groups to which Pound most enthusiastically committed his energies at this time. Of the two, Imagism has evoked the greater scholarly interest, in part, perhaps, because Eliot once described it as "the starting-point of modern poetry," but also because its essentially literary character has made its program more attractive and more accessible to students of literature. Furthermore, the Vorticists were rather too successful in gaining the antipathy of the artistic establishment of London, and this antipathy turned quickly from tonic hostility to a condescending disparagement which persisted for decades. As late as 1959, A Dictionary of Art and Artists could write off Vorticism as "a variety of CUBISM, exclusive to England, invented by Wyndham Lewis." Only recently, thanks to the efforts of a number of scholars, has this moment in the modernist revolt begun to receive the careful consideration it deserves.

With the revaluation of Vorticism has come a more careful examination of Pound's contribution to the movement and of its influence on his poetry. An early and sympathetic investigation of these questions by Herbert Schneidau concludes on a telling note of regret: "In summing up the effect of Vorticism on Pound's career it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Pound the Vorticist, a declared enemy to the public will, was the father of the man standing in the public dock charged with treason." A later study invites us to take a more positive view, arguing that the term Vortex should be extended to encompass the "artistic crosscurrents" set in motion in 1914 which for forty years interenergized the works of Pound, Eliot and Lewis. The more recent analysis of Ian Bell turns our attention in the opposite direction, to the origins of Pound's Vortex. "In the notion of the 'vortex'," Bell contends, Pound discovered "ancient cosmology, in the form of pre-Socratic atomism, elucidated and made new by nineteenth-century field-theory physics." Just how alive the poet was to the intricacies of this intellectual matrix must remain in doubt, yet one cannot deny its general relevance to the poetic of juxtapositions he was working out at the time.

My own concern is similarly with Pound's development as a poet, but I would argue that studies of its Vorticist phase should continue to focus on his immersion in literature's sister arts. For, if the extent of Pound's interest in music, painting and sculpture has often been remarked, the actual relevance of his extra-literary investigation to the formulation of his new poetic remains unclear. Insufficient attention has been paid, I feel, to his search for the techniques by which the new discoveries of one art might be adapted to the needs of another.

Pound's London years, during which the bulk of his criticism was written, were years of conscious self-modernization, and nothing stamped this process more indelibly than the Vortex. Pound, I would argue, invented Imagism as a device to draw attention to his friends, but he was quick to realize that he had created an unexpectedly useful propagandistic device, and he was happy, given the mood of the moment, to exploit it. His participation in Vorticism, in contrast, was more calculated. He allied himself with the "Blast group" in order to confront the developments that were taking place in the other arts and their implications for poetry. He believed, in his words, that "the spirit of a decade strikes properly upon all of the arts" and all the arts must concert their efforts if this spirit is to be advanced.

Throughout his life Pound remained convinced that, as he had put it already in The Spirit of Romance, "true poetry is in much closer relation to the best of music, of painting, and of sculpture, than to any part of literature which is not true poetry." His task in 1913-14 was to discover the best of music, of painting and of sculpture, which meant, with the appropriate avant-garde inflection, the most modern, the most Vorticist. But he needed also to identify the nature of this "closer relation" between the arts and this required, paradoxically, a clearer understanding of the differences between them. Thus, looking back to this time in Guide to Kulchur, he recalls: "My generation found criticism of the arts cluttered with work of men who persistently defined the works of one art in terms of another. For a decade or so we tried to get the arts sorted out." His difficulty was to determine which are the valid connections between the arts and which the necessary distinctions between them.

Although the Vorticist articles exhibit some of the impatience with linear exposition that was to become the hallmark of his criticism, the investigation they chronicle was by no means unsystematic. Carefully considered, these articles reveal that he was preoccupied during this period by a group of problems all connected to the interrelationship of the arts. Since the new poetic toward which he was moving involved precisely an increased emphasis on the musical and visual dimensions of language, it was essential that he understand the "common speech"—and the phrase is his own—through which the effects of one art might properly be transferred to another.

But before we return to this more complex question, which is indeed the ultimate concern of this study, it will be necessary to take up briefly the first of Pound's problems, the broad distinction between the new art and the old. His attitude on this basic issue reveals traces of his earlier medieval studies but also owes something to the preoccupations of his associates. In the earliest of the articles in which his growing interest in the plastic arts is displayed, "The New Sculpture," he describes a meeting of the Quest Society at which he, Hulme and Wyndham Lewis spoke. As his contribution Pound evidently argued for a division he had outlined in previous essays, that between "symptomatic" and "donative" artists or between periods that are "phantastikon-centred" or "germinal." Concerning a speech which can only have been his own he remarks: "A third speaker got himself disliked by saying that one might regard the body either as a sensitized receiver of sensations, or as an instrument for carrying out the decrees of the will (or expressioning [sic] the soul, or whatever you choose to term it). These two views are opposed and produce two totally opposed theories of aesthetic." Having in his earier poetry played the sensitized receiver, Pound the Vorticist took up the cause of the will.

Hulme's address, included in the posthumous Speculations as "Modern Art and Its Philosophy," pursues a roughly similar theme in its application of Wilhelm Worringer's thesis, Abstraktion und Ein fühlung to the contemporary avant-garde world of London. According to Worringer's theory, the works of individual artists and, more broadly, the character of particular cultures can be divided into two fundamentally different types: those which stress the empathy of the artist with the material world and the viewer with the work of art, on the one hand, and those which show the artist in conflict with the world producing works of art which resist the viewer's emotional involvement, on the other. Substituting for "empathetic" and "abstract" the terms "vital" and "geometrical," Hulme reworks Worringer's disinterested art history in programmatic form. Vital art is for him not an equally valid, but an inferior alternative, especially in the increasing debilitation it has undergone since the Renaissance.

Although Pound came to be irritated with the respect later accorded Hulme, he seems at the time to have welcomed this complementary approach. Of Hulme's presentation he remarks approvingly: "Mr. Hulme was quite right in saying that the difference between the new art and the old was not a difference in degree but a difference in kind; a difference in intention". The new art, to combine the terms of Hulme and Pound, must strive toward abstraction and it must do so by responding not to sensations but to the decrees of the will. Here surely one can find the simpliest definition of Vorticism. The Vortex symbolizes the willed focusing of creative energy that produces pattern instead of reproducing it.

But how, in the absence of any mimetic imperative, is one to evaluate the seriousness or success of Vorticist art? How can the emphasis on the creative will at the expense of external constraints—with the artistic indiscipline and self-indulgence this would seem to sanction—be reconciled with Pound's vision of the artist as a committed, skillful professional? These questions are never far from his mind. The Vorticist articles discover him searching for an answer in his idea of the integrity of the medium. The doctrine of the so-called primary pigment distills the gnomic essence of this idea.

The vorticist relies on this alone; on the primary pigment of his art, nothing else.

Every conception, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form.

He proceeds with emphatic iteration to develop the notion of primary form.

EVERY CONCEPT, EVERY EMOTION PRESENTS ITSELF TO THE VIVID CONSCIOUSNESS IN SOME PRIMARY FORM. IT BELONGS TO THE ART OF THIS FORM. IF SOUND, TO MUSIC: IF FORMED WORDS, TO LITERATURE: THE IMAGE, TO POETRY: FORM, TO DESIGN: COLOUR IN POSITION, TO PAINTING: FORM OR DESIGN IN THREE PLANES, TO SCULPTURE: MOVEMENT TO THE DANCE OR TO THE RHYTHM OF MUSIC OR OF VERSES.

The revolutionary consequences of this doctrine may not, at first sight, be apparent. In fact, the statement may seem scarcely more than a truism tricked out in the extravagant typography characteristic of Blast. But there is a shift here in the new attention to the constraints and the capacities inherent in the medium. When we examine Pound's discussion of the details of this doctrine, we become aware that its orientation is revolutionary, for the medium is no longer conceived of as a barrier that the artist must overcome, and overcome in such a way as to hide any struggle that may have taken place. The integrity of the medium must be preserved if the artist's will is to be seen interacting with something outside itself.

To work out the revolutionary consequences of the doctrine of the primary pigment, one must take up in turn Pound's comments on the visual arts and on music. Consider his remarks on painting, for example. Whistler, a favorite hero of Pound's because he "proved once and for all … that being born an American does not eternally damn a man or prevent him from the ultimate and highest achievement in the arts" and because he chose to pursue his artistic career in Europe, is the great prototype. He discerns a cultural breakthrough in Whistler's remark, quoted imperfectly from memory, "The picture is interesting not because it is Trotty Veg, but because it is an arrangement in colour." For, as Pound goes on to say, "The minute you have admitted that, you let in the jungle, you let in nature and truth and abundance and cubism and Kandinsky, and the lot of us." Actually Whistler said something rather different when he dismissed the advice of those who would have him substitute the title "Trotty Veck" for "Harmony in Grey and Gold": "I should hold it a vulgar and meretricious trick to excite people about Trotty Veck when, if they really care for pictorial art at all, they would know that the picture should have its own merit, and never depend upon dramatic, or legendary, or local interest." Pound has converted a refusal to underline the narrative dimension of a painting into a rejection of the representational imperative. Yet this alteration, although it may cause us to suspect the poet's concern for accuracy, does not invalidate his point: "The vorticist can represent or not as he likes. He depends—depends for his artistic effect—upon the arrangement of spaces and line, on the primary media of his art. A resemblance to natural forms is of no consequence one way or the other."

Interestingly enough, although Trotty "Veg" lets in Cubism and Kandinsky, Cubists and Expressionists failed, from the Vorticist point of view, to combine the essential features of the new art. The abstraction of Cubism, for instance, is the discovery of the geometrical sub-structure of natural objects or the assumption of multiple points of view, not the imposition of the creating will. In Lewis' words, "Picasso through the whole of his 'Cubist' period has always had for starting-point in his creations, however abstract, his studio-table with two apples and a mandoline, the portrait of a poet of his acquaintance, or what not. His starting-point is identical with that of Cezanne or Manet." And the Futurists simply submitted modern or moving objects to a similar, if less profound, dissection. The Expressionists, on the other hand, approach the Vorticists in resisting the role of sensitized receivers of sensations. Yet, with the exception of Kandinsky, whom Lewis in the essay just quoted dismissed as "at the best, wandering and slack", they eschewed the thoroughgoing abstraction of the Vorticists. Their preference for distortion and rejection of the conventionally beautiful depends on the existence of the naturalistic tradition whose assumptions they subvert.

But however interested Pound is in painting, sculpture is the art to which his mind most frequently returns and which provides him with the most illuminating exempla of what it means for an artist to respect his medium. Thus a characteristic remark in Gaudier-Brzeska: "The key word of vorticist art was objectivity in the sense that we insisted that the value of a piece of sculpture was dependent on its shape". The opening statements of Gaudier-Brzeska's "Vortex" recur time and again in his writing: "Sculptural feeling is the appreciation of masses in relation. Sculptural ability is the defining of these masses by planes". The interest of a sculpture must reside in the interaction of its masses and planes.

Sculpture that strives for empathetic or, in Hulme's dichotomy, vital qualities denies its own reality and becomes for Pound the caressable. Although Greek sculpture is usually considered the ideal, it suffers in Pound's opinion from this desire to achieve the caressable: "The weakness of the caressable work of art, of the work of art which depends upon the caressability of the subject, is, incidentally, that its stimulativeness diminishes as it becomes more familiar. The work which depends upon an arrangement of forms becomes more interesting with familiarity in proportion as its forms are well organized". His own experience confirmed this: "I had, for a long time, a most hideous Brzeska statue where the morning light came on it as it woke me, and because of this shifting light plane after plane, outline after expressive outline was given me day after day, emphasized, taken apart from the rest".

The sculptor's basic art of respect for the integrity of his medium consists in his choice of tools. He must not employ any power-enhancing technology, for this would alter his relationship with the stone or metal and introduce an element of dishonesty into his work, which will inevitably weaken the forms that he creates. The existence of an alternative technology yields one benefit, however, for it is only when some means of circumventing this massive resistance appears that one realizes the full value of respecting it. And it is partly for this reason, I imagine, that "We have again arrived at an age when men can consider a statue as a statue. The hard stone is not the live coney. Its beauty cannot be the same beauty". This is the lesson of Gaudier-Brzeska's work: "He had given us a very definite appreciation of stone as stone; he had taught us to feel that the beauty of sculpture is inseparable from its material and that it inheres in the material."

The preservation of the integrity of the material, as opposed to "that combination of patience and trickery which can make marble chains with free links and spin out bronze until it copies the feathers on a general's hat", is vital to the projection of the drama of artistic creativity, the artist's will wrestling with reality. And it is here, I would suggest, that the human or narrative dimension of abstract art resides, in the record it preserves of the struggle involved in its creation. "Our respect is not for the subject-matter, but for the creative power of the artist". The most heroic image of the creative power of the artist is that of the sculptor: "The sculptor must add to the power of imagining form-combination the physical energy required to cut this into the unyielding medium. He must have vividness of perception, he must have this untiringness, he must, beyond that, be able to retain his main idea unwaveringly during the time (weeks or months) of the carving". Doubtless Pound admired in the sculptor just those qualities by which he himself was distinguished, the untiringness and ability to retain his main idea unwaveringly during the years of "carving" the Cantos.

During the time of his most intense Vorticist activity, Pound searched in vain to find the composer who would bring forth the new music, for England lacked avant-garde musical artists and he was ignorant or distrustful of their continental counterparts. Looking back some ten years later, he remarks: "The Vorticist Manifestos of 1913-14 left a blank space for music; there was in contemporary music, at that date, nothing corresponding to the work of Wyndham Lewis, Pablo Picasso or Gaudier-Brzeska. Strawinsky arrived as a comfort, but one could not say definitely that his composition was the new music." To supply the perceived want of adequate Vorticist models from his own time, Pound turned to the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, since in his view the nineteenth century had betrayed the true inheritance as much in music as in the other arts. And for all that it failed to materialize on schedule, a Vorticist music was as urgently needed as Vorticist painting, sculpture or verse.

Music prior to the nineteenth century is characterized for Pound by its "horizontal" construction. That is to say it depends chiefly on musical forms that exist in time: melody and rhythm. Nineteenth-century music is "vertical," dependent on chords and chordal progressions in which rhythmic vitality is sacrificed for the sake of momentary harmonic nuances. The organization of the earlier music, "pattern music" as Pound likes to call it, springs from an internal, abstract, musical logic. It is, in other words, music written to its primary pigment. The second kind of music is written for the kind of emotional response that the composer desires. And, as he explains,

It is like a drug; you must have more drug, and more noise each time, or this effect, this impression which works from the outside, in from the nerves and sensorium upon the self—is no use, its effect is constantly weaker and weaker. I do not mean that Bach is not emotional, but the early music starts with the mystery of pattern; if you like, with the vortex of pattern; with something which is, first of all, music, and which is capable of being, after that, many things. What I call emotional, or impressionist music, starts with being emotion or impression and then becomes only approximately music. It is, that is to say, something in terms of something else.

Emotional music, in other words, suffers the same attenuation of effect noted in connection with caressable sculpture, and for the same reason, because it fails to respect the integrity of the medium.

Of course, the opposition drawn up here is no discovery of Pound's. It is the substance of the musical struggle that dominated the second half of the nineteenth century, that between Wagner and Brahms, or, more bitterly, between their proponents. It is scarcely conceivable that Pound can have been unaware of this debate, however much his thoughts are advanced as personal discoveries; one imagines rather that he found in it a substantiation for his own reading of the general deterioration of the arts in the preceding period, and of the analogous changes required to correct it.

Pound did not discover anyone undertaking the necessary corrections until he met George Antheil in 1923 and produced in Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony the completion of his Vorticist propaganda. His choice of Antheil to bear the Vorticist banner into the musical arena, like his earlier failure to recognize the revolutionary import of musical modernists such as Stravinsky and Schoenberg, must remain something of a puzzle, considering his usual cultural acuity. Even Antheil, as his autobiography makes clear, felt a certain supercilious bemusement: "In the 1923 that I speak of, Ezra still hovered there in artistic space, apparently fighting for me but in reality fighting for himself. He seemed like nothing so much as a ridiculous Don Quixote standing there, shouting all over the battlefield from which the opposing armies had not only long ago gone home, but upon which even the monuments of victory were decaying."

But the ungracious recollections of the self-declared Bad Boy of Music bespeak the callow prodigy of twenty-two that he was at the time—not one of Pound's more successful talent-spotting ventures.

Despite its tardy appearance and its imperfections, the study of Vorticist music did allow Pound to round out his esthetic. The core of Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony is contained in an apothegmatic statement calculated to match Gaudier-Brzeska's statements on sculpture, or his own on the primary pigment: "A SOUND OF ANY PITCH or ANY COMBINATION OF SUCH SOUNDS, MAY BE FOLLOWED BY A SOUND OF ANY OTHER PITCH, OR ANY COMBINATION OF SUCH SOUNDS, providing the time interval between them is properly gauged; and this is true for ANY SERIES OF SOUNDS, CHORDS OR ARPEGGIOS".

The difference between this principle and that followed by the impressionist musicians whom he abhorred resides, to exaggerate very slightly, only in the rider attached to the opening proposition: "providing the time interval between them is properly gauged." The chromaticism of the impressionists justified its departure from the classic rules of harmony by the claim that melodic and harmonic liberties could not be faulted providing, as it were, the emotional effect was properly gauged. The difference, however, is a crucial one, for it represents an attempt on Pound's part to reinstate a purely musical logic in conformity with his demands for the primary pigment but without a return to the traditional harmonic system.

That he should have chosen to emphasize the temporal element reflects his own intense concern for rhythm, understandable enough in a poet, reinforced by Antheil's "time-space" theory. It is perhaps not the most helpful way of describing the needed change, but such pronunciamentos disdain lengthy explanations to achieve the desired impact. The program defined is revolutionary for the very reasons that Lewis' painting and Gaudier-Brzeska's sculpture are, because it respects the integrity of the medium and dismisses the "false" constraints of convention.

If this survey has succeeded in capturing the energy and novelty of Pound's inquiry into painting, sculpture and music, the theoretical and historical interest of his analysis should, I trust, be apparent. Perhaps less obvious, however, will be the relevance of such an inquiry to his search for a new poetic. What, to return to the question with which we began, did the poet learn through his association with the Vorticist artists and his search for a Vorticist music? As it happens, he himself raised the same question in Gaudier-Brzeska: "Roughly: What have they done for me these vorticist artists?" And he offers the following provisional answer:

They have awakened my sense of form, or they "have given me a new sense of form," or what you will.…

These new men have made me see form, have made me more conscious of the appearance of the sky where it juts down between houses, of the bright pattern of sunlight which the bath water throws up on the ceiling, of the Great "V's" of light that dart through the chinks over the curtain rings, all these are new chords, new keys of design.

As an example of a poem built around these "new chords, new keys of design," "The Game of Chess," which appeared in Blast I, might come to mind. Consider its opening and closing lines:

Red knights, brown bishops, bright queens,
Striking the board, falling in strong "L's of colour.
Reaching and striking in angles,
holding lines in one colour.…
"Y pawns, cleaving, embanking!
Whirl! Centripetal! Mate! King down in the vortex,
Clash leaping of bands, straight strips of hard colour,
Block lights working in. Escapes. Renewal of contest.

A pleasant enough poem, to be sure, but it is hardly the breakthrough for which we had been hoping. This is not mature Pound but an experiment in communicating a new sense of visual form without a really new poetic form. Still, it is to be observed that the use of a new subject matter does mark a choice with its own consequences. Although the poem lacks the elliptical density of Pound's mature work, it stakes out new territory for poetry.

"The Game of Chess" allows us to see how Pound has developed from the earlier schools which anticipated and influenced his concern for, respectively, visual and musical values in poetry, namely the Pre-Raphaelites and the Symbolists. The Pre-Raphaelites had, as we know, devoted themselves to extraordinarily pictorial verse when they were not engaged in creating paintings of, conversely, extreme literalness. Their paintings are both avowedly mimetic in technique and narrative in organization and their poetry is visual in the extreme. It was natural that Pound's early efforts to achieve visual richness in his poetry should have led him into Pre-Raphaelite imitations. But his recognition, in the doctrine of the primary pigment, that one thing ought not to be said in terms of another, brought him soon enough to reject this model.

Similarly the Symbolists were notably aural poets whose chief aim was "reprendre d la Musique, leur bien." This notion, of course, accords well with Pound's own notion of his art: "Poetry is a composition of words set to music. Most other definitions of it are indefensible, or metaphysical. The proportion or quality of the music may, and does, vary; but poetry withers and 'dries out' when it leaves music, or, at least an imagined music, too far behind it".

But the music from which the Symbolists wished to take back their own was of a kind that Pound despised: specifically, Wagnerian or post-Wagnerian music. Music, in brief, in which the impressionist, emotional or narrative qualities predominate. In contrast, Pound, although he admits the suggestive power of music, is opposed to its use to create a receptive mood in the audience. The idea of working backward from the desired emotional effect is no more appropriate to the musical dimension of poetry than it is to music itself.

Pound's ability, in other words, to redefine what the new poetry should be trying to do depended to a large extent on his increasing understanding of what the new painting, sculpture and music were or should be trying to do. But the achievement of the new poetry required a greater capacity to assimilate the developments in related arts into his writing. The well-known tripartite division of poetry into phanopoeia, melopoeia and logopoeia, which reaches its complete articulation in the later How to Read, is intended to facilitate this assimilation. Phanopoeia, "a casting of images upon the visual imagination," is the dimension of poetry which overlaps with the visual arts. Pound's study of painting and sculpture is part of a larger effort to increase the effectiveness of the phanopoeic element in his poetry. In melopoeia, "words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning." The relevance of Pound's work in music, both critical and creative, to this aspect of poetry goes without saying. Logopoeia, "the dance of the intellect among words," which might be thought to be the primary pigment of poetry is rather that of prose and therefore of only marginal interest to him.

The transformation of Pound into a modernist poet was not effected overnight. Clearly Wyndham Lewis, though typically ungentle, was not unjust in his assessment of Pound the Vorticist: "his fire-eating propagandist utterances were not accompanied by any very experimental efforts in his particular medium." Lewis might be faulted for his assumption that revolutionary art should try to keep up with its propaganda, but it is an assumption which, with certain modifications, he shared with Pound. Pound, that is, allowed for a certain lag between advances in the theory and changes in the practice of an art when he remarked of criticism that "it tries to forerun composition, to serve as gunsight". The Vorticist phase was preeminently a period of critical forerunning; range-finding shots might be fired but they reached their marks by accident. Thus the poem quoted presents a conventionally mimetic and syntactic treatment of a vaguely Vorticist visual experience. Its procedure is imitative, not analogical. Yet the judgment, ascribed by Lewis to "the more fanatical of the group," that Pound's poetry "was a series of pastiches of old french or old italian poetry, and could lay no claim to participate in the new burst of art in progress," seems not merely dismissive but inaccurate.

It is odd that Lewis, the contemporary and ally, should reveal himself in remarks such as these to have been so insensitive to the evolution through which Pound was passing, for the poet seems never to have lost his respect for the painter and believed always that they were working through the transition together. One finds Pound commenting, for example, "It interests me to find that my surest critic is a contemporary painter who knows my good work from my bad—NOT by a critical process, at least not by a technical process." And he offers his own opinions on painting with a reciprocal assurance. Referring more generally to this phenomenon he draws the natural conclusion: "Certain artists working in different media have managed to understand each other. They know the good and bad in each other's work, which they could not know unless there were a common speech".

The idea of a speech common to the arts, if we regard it as more than simply a nice image, seems to me immensely suggestive. Should such a language exist, it must be possible to isolate its common features. And Pound attempts to do just this. His discovery is not that, in some general way, all the arts are coloristic, emotional, narrative or whatever. His Vorticist investigations brought him rather to the conclusion that arts are alike with respect to their minimal unit of meaning, a unit he might today have called—had he uncharacteristically chosen to follow the fashion of the time—an aestheme. This minimal unit of artistic meaning is created by the conjunction of two minimal units of form—of the primary form, that is, as this was defined by the doctrine of the primary pigment.

Throughout Pound's scattered discussion of it, this fundamental unit appears in many guises. But his favorite image is probably the equation, which occurs in his criticism as early as The Spirit of Romance. In this work he comments: "Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but equations for the human emotions". In search of an analogy to explain the four levels of allegory that Dante claims for his Commedia he returns to the equation. And "Vorticism" takes up the same image to a somewhat different purpose. In the latter work Pound again presents four different manifestations of the equation a2 + b2 = c2. To summarize: first, 32 + 42 = 52 is a simple statement of fact; second, a2 + b2 = c2 is an abstract expression of an algebraic relation and most like a philosophical proposition; third, a2 + b2 = c2 describes the ratio of the sides of a right-angled triangle and could be compared to a critical comment; fourth, (x-a)2 + (y-b)2 = d2, in analytical geometry, generates the infinite series of right-angled triangles whose apexes will describe a circle if the diameter is their common hypotenuse. Because this last equation can be said "actually to create" the circle, it is for Pound the important one. It represents not the creative act of the artist but the generation of meaning by the work of art itself.

This is the way in which the Vorticist painting creates meaning, by the relationship between its lines and its blocks of color. And the Vorticist sculpture similarly works through the relation of its masses as defined by the disposition of its planes. In both cases it is the interaction of at least two components that yields the emotional effect. In music, as he was later able to show, the same rule applies. The focus of the pronunciamento quoted above is the sequence of two sounds and the time governing their relation. As he goes on in the same place to argue: "The limits for the practical purposes of music depend solely on our capacity to produce a sound that will last long enough, i.e. remain audible long enough, for the succeeding sound or sounds to catch up, traverse, intersect it." The meaning resides precisely in the catching up, traversing and intersecting.

Poetry also is built up of minimal units of this kind. The well-known "In a Station of the Metro," which consists of one such unit, may stand as a paradigm here, especially since Pound himself presents it as a model for the new poetry:

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

We might think that the poem comprises two images, but Pound does not. As he remarks of it, "The 'one image poem' is a form of superposition, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another". To return to his discussion of the fourth kind of equation, that of analytical geometry: "By the 'image' I mean such an equation; not an equation of mathematics, not something about a, b, and c, having something to do with form, but about sea, cliffs, night, having something to do with mood. The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX". This many-titled vortex, equation, image or gist is also known as the ideogram. The belief that such minimal units of juxtaposition can generate meaning is the basis of the ideogrammic method. The Cantos are only the haiku writ large—very large.

Such then is the significance of the Vorticist esthetic. It is an esthetic conceived in opposition to the previously dominant one in its assertion of geometrical as opposed to plastic or empathetic values. In moving against conventions, representational or tonal, it shifts major responsibility to the expression of the artist's will and to the preservation of the integrity of the medium. Individual elements in the esthetic may be enunciated to resolve specific problems raised by each of the arts, but in Pound's words, "What I have said of one vorticist art can be transposed for another vorticist art"—which, for his own purposes, means that all may be transposed for poetry. The discovery that the minimal units of visual art and of music are the same as those of poetry proves to be of crucial importance to Pound, for it allows him to place very heavy demands on the phanopoeic and melopoeic dimensions of his poetry, even when the syntax and structure of the poetry is broken into fragments.

Pound joined the Vorticists and wrote the Vorticist articles because the natural forces of cultural osmosis or the Zeitgeist, which normally ensure roughly contemporary analogical development in the arts, did not answer his urgent needs. He could not begin his endless poem until his poetic had been worked out. As he explains in "If This Be Treason … ": "Same way for a masterpiece of lit. new pt. of view shd BE either before a man starts his paintin: his recordin contempory Anschauung, contemporary disposition to life, or AFTER he is thru his portrayin." And no poetic, least of all one involving the high levels of phanopoeia and melopoeia characteristic of Pound's work, can be considered stable if it takes no account of contemporary developments in related arts.