W. K. Rose

SOURCE: "Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: The Crucial Years," in The Southern Review, Louisiana State University, Vol. 4, Winter, 1968, pp. 72-89.

[In the following essay, Rose examines the careers and friendship of Lewis and Pound from 1910 to 1920.]

Of Ezra Pound's many and celebrated literary associations, that with Wyndham Lewis has the unique interest of showing the poet in close contact with the pictorial arts. It is special too in that Lewis, unlike Yeats or Eliot, saw a revolution in the arts as a public battle and shared the poet's zest for skirmishing. Viewed less narrowly, this relationship engages one's attention as would any other involving two dynamic human beings, both of them gifted artists and important influences in the cultural history of their epoch. For all of one's reservations about the "dangers of literary biography," of which Noel Stock warns in his book on Pound, I do not see how some observation of this pair as a pair can help but add to our understanding of their works, and of their epoch.

The epoch was, neatly, a decade, 1910-1920. Looking back, one can see it clearly—in London and New York at least—as the seed-time of the new art. What we now think of as "modern poetry," "modern art" came to fruition in the ferment of those years. They are also, not irrelevantly, I believe, the crucial years of the friendship of Lewis and Pound. After Pound left London for the Continent at the end of 1920, he saw Lewis only sporadically and there were long gaps in their correspondence. They did not meet at all during the last eighteen years of Lewis's life. Thus it was during this decade that any catalysing action took place or patterns were set, and that a bond was cemented that was to survive the storms of more than half a century.

The wonder is that these two egoists—both so intransigent, so aggressive and irascible, each exhibitionistic in his own way, one (Lewis) preternaturally suspicious, the other compulsively managerial—could become friends at all. Yet each young man was bound to recognize in the other unusual intellectual energy and artistic creativity, as well as a deep-seated iconoclasm and the iconoclast's rough humor. Moreover, when they met in London, they had already partaken for a time of the same atmosphere there—a disparate concoction of British Museum scholarship, Nietzsche, Bergson, and ninetyish aestheticism, with infusions of French neoclassicism and symbolisme. And there were less obvious points of contact. Both, for example, had inhaled enough French air—Lewis through his long apprenticeship in the studios of the Left Bank, Pound through his studies of Romance in college and university—for it to have a permanent effect on their thinking and taste. It was France that fixed them in their respect for intellectual clarity and in their preference for surfaces. Even less discernible so early on, I believe, was a common tendency to fragment, to think and create in segments. If each has produced sizeable coherent works, both have proved themselves by nature impatient, disinclined to organic structures.

The origins of these manifestations can, I think, be traced in the earlier histories of the two. Pound and Lewis (though Lewis did not reveal the fact to Pound for several years) both stemmed from American pioneer stock. Each had forebears who were entrepreneurs in the state of New York; Lewis's father died in Philadelphia, where Ezra was raised. Lewis was born in the Bay of Fundy of an American father and English mother, and he was brought up in and around London. Pound was born in Idaho, son of a Wisconsin father and a New York mother. That uprootedness was a factor in these backgrounds, though more so in Lewis's, would be clear even if Pound had not stressed it in his pieces in The New Age—"Through Alien Eyes," January-February 1913, and "The Revolt of Intelligence, V," January 8, 1920. He wrote in the latter: "I was … brought up in a district or city with which my forbears had no connection and I am therefore accustomed to being alien in one place or other."

To be sure, Pound had a more settled childhood than did Lewis, whose father defected early. But each was an only child, and each seems to have taken advantage of the fact in his educational career. Lewis was an indifferent student, frequently shifting schools, finally leaving Rugby for the Slade and the Slade for the Continent. Pound managed to go as far as an M.A., though he too moved about and, like Lewis, made an effort only when he was interested. Once finished with their educations, both young men left home for good and, for a few years anyway, changed addresses frequently. Such beginnings do not often end in membership in the establishment, literary or otherwise. Nor will they find fulfillment in works of art that exhibit conventional learning or conventional forms.

Paradoxically, we can discern in these same histories sources of stability and of capacity for feeling. For both boys grew up in environments where intimacy and affection flourished—Ezra with his parents, Percy Wyndham with his mother, grandmother, and a loyal servant. Each experienced the rich moral tone, the sentimentality, and the earnest, if limited, literacy that characterized middle-class households on both sides of the Atlantic in the eighties and nineties. As they matured, they would have something to sustain them.

Whether Pound and Lewis met in 1909 or 1910, whether through Lawrence Binyon or Ford Madox Ford, is not clear. The more likely date seems to be 1909, for it was then that Ford (then Hueffer) became editor of The English Review ("the event of 1909-1910," Pound said) and launched the two writers on the literary scene. Lewis's story "The Pole" appeared in the May number and Pound's "Sestina: Altaforte" in June. Lewis was twenty-six and Pound twenty-three. Both had already established themselves as young men of promise—Pound with three small volumes of verse, Lewis with the exhibition of some striking apprentice pictures. Yet it was not what they had done so much as what they were that caused their elders among the intelligentsia to notice them. Attractive, arrogant, manifestly gifted, individual outside and in, they were Ford's favorites among "lesjeunes."

He describes them at the time, and allowing for exaggeration, we can trust him. Pound, a "Rufous Terror, with an immense physical vigour and the restless itch of a devil, pursuing the Irritating-Beautiful—in the disguise of a cattle-hand across the Atlantic.…"

would approach with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent. He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, a single large blue earring.…his Philadelphia accent was still comprehensible if disconcerting … he was astonishingly meagre and agile. He threw himself alarmingly into frail chairs, devoured enormous quantities of your pastry, fixed his pince-nez firmly on his nose, drew out a manuscript from his pocket, threw his head back, closed his eyes to the point of invisibility and looking down his nose would chuckle like Mephistopheles and read to you a translation from Arnaut Daniel.

(Thus to Revisit and Return to Yesterday)

According to Violet Hunt, "He would wear my Connemara cloak or the editor's old Rossetti coat—any old covering—with serenity." Edgar Jepson recalls his "discussing his theories in an earnest whisper after the manner of Ford," and Lewis told the present writer that Ezra was, when they met, a ludicrous mixture of Yankee and Ford. No wonder D. H. Lawrence, down from the Midlands, found him "young, callow, swashbuckling … very affected and silly."

Lewis, Ford writes, recalling his first vision of him,

was extraordinary in appearance… He was very dark in the shadows of the stair case. He wore an immense steeple-crowned hat. Long black locks fell from it. His coat was one of those Russian looking coats that have no revers. He had also an ample black cape.… He said not a word.… I have never known anyone else whose silence was a positive rather than a negative quality.

(Return to Yesterday)

According to Douglas Jerrold, "he was dark, saturnine and gloomy." In 1935 Douglas Goldring, Ford's young secretary at the Review, recalled the two together:

Both of them … in clothes, hairdressing and manner, made no secret of their calling. Pound contrived to look "every inch a poet," while I have never seen anyone so obviously a "genius," as Wyndham Lewis.…

(Odd Man Out)

There follows the dubious tale of Lewis's first appearance at the English Review office. He is supposed to have marched unannounced to the flat above, found Ford in his bath, proclaimed himself a genius, and extracted from inside his coat a manuscript which he proceeded to read. This was "The Pole" and Ford accepted it on the spot. "If it didn't happen it ought to have," Goldring concludes. According to Lewis, he did "unexpectedly mount the stairs" but "silently left a bundle of manuscript."

One is not surprised to learn that the two "jeunes" approached one another nervously. Pound evokes the scene in Canto 80:

And also near the museum they served it mit Schlag
   in those days (pre 1914)
   the loss of that café
               meant the end of a B.M. era
                (British Museum era)
   Mr Lewis had been to Spain
      Mr Binyon's young prodigies
   pronounced the word: Penthesilea

So it is to Mr Binyon that I owe, initially,
Mr Lewis, Mr P. Wyndham Lewis. His bull-dog, me,
   as it were against old Sturge M's bull-dog.…

The cafe was the Vienna, a favorite rendezvous of the British Museum set in which Binyon and Lewis's mentor Sturge Moore were leading figures.

In Lewis's version nothing came of these Vienna encounters, and it was Ford who finally brought the young bull-dogs together. "… It was with a complete passivity on my side, tinctured with a certain mild surliness, that acquaintance with Ezra Pound was gradually effected," he writes in Blasting and Bombardiering. He ascribes his reluctance in part at least to Pound's being so evidently an outsider—"the perfect fish out of water." For one thing, his linguistic pretensions were mistrusted by the more scholarly English. For another, his lack of European reticence put one off: "… he just wanted to impress.… Pound socially was a little too much like the 'singing cowboy.' … He had rushed with all the raw solemnity of the classic Middle West into a sophisticated post-Nineties society.…" ("Ezra Pound," An Examination of Ezra Pound [edited by Peter Russell].)

Lewis may of course have been jealous of another rising star. He says that the Vienna group had it that the newcomer was a Jew, so that he "was mildly surprised to see an unmistakable 'nordic blonde,' with fierce blue eyes and a reddishly hirsute jaw," to hear this "cowboy songster" uttering the "staccato of the States." On the second occasion at the Vienna there was speculation as to the where-abouts of a missing prostitute. Pound, still a stranger to Lewis, gestured to him and said, "with a great archness, and regarding me with mischievous good will": "This young man could probably tell you!" Lewis ignored him. When under Ford's auspices they did at last converse, Lewis felt as if he were boarding a "bombastic galleon." Once there, he "discovered beneath its skull and crossbones, intertwined with fleurde lys and spattered with preposterous oddities, a heart of gold."

During the ensuing ten years Pound and Lewis were never out of touch for long, and each rose to a position of eminence, indeed dominance, among "les jeunes." The world in which they moved has been much chronicled, most recently by Patricia Hutchins in Ezra Pound's Kensington. A few of its key names and places conjure up the misenscene: the Vienna, Stulik's Eiffel Tower restaurant, Mme. Strindberg's Cabaret Theatre Club (both these last with decor by Wyndham Lewis), Hulme in Frith Street, Ford on Camden Hill, Yeats at Woburn Buildings, May Sinclair and Mrs. Shakespear (Pound's mother-in-law) and Lady Cunard, Marinetti, Monro's Poetry Bookshop, the Rebel Art Center, Gaudier-Brzeska, Epstein, Miss Weaver and The Egoist, Orage and The New Age, Eliot. London has rarely known so much excitement in the arts. One of the era's distinguishing features was the way it mixed elements—not just the foreign and the native, but the literary establishment and "les jeunes," the socialite and the Bohemian. In 1913, asking Lewis to bring Marinetti and the English Futurist Nevinson to a South Lodge evening, Ford could say that there were "generally some of the swell and wealthy, together with literary gents and picture buyers and people who help on MOVEMENTS." He also counseled sympathy for the maddening Mme. Strindberg: "She is trying to build up a palace of all the Arts with three oyster shells and stale patchouli and sawdust and creme and vers libre and champagne corks … which, is what… we are all of us trying to do in one field or the other." Even the holocaust of 1914 could not, for a time, halt their activity, though it decimated their numbers.

Lewis and Pound did not assuredly move in unison through the decade. Despite his success in The English Review, Lewis persisted in thinking of himself as firstly a painter; Pound's dealings in poetry were far from the center of his interests. Nor would their mercurial temperaments have permitted an unrelenting intimacy. They were frequently together, but most of the time each had companions closer to him than the other. In the years between 1913 and 1918, nevertheless, they enjoyed a kinship of feeling and a solidarity of aim that was unusual in both their lives. If Pound was the aggressor in the relationship, that was a matter of his more outgoing temperament. Lewis clearly liked him, and respected him. Eustace Mullins, whose book on Pound was written under the master's aegis, says flatly, "His closest friend during the Vorticist period was Wyndham Lewis."

Certainly there was in those days no one who came in for more of his promotional zeal. Lewis could well say later, "Ezra… has been of the most amazing use to other people." "The Egoist," he writes, "was Miss Weaver's paper, but at the period of which I speak you would rather have supposed it belonged to Ezra Pound." When Margaret Anderson asked him to become European editor of The Little Review, Pound replied, early in 1917: "…I want a place where I and T. S. Eliot can appear once a month … and where Joyce can appear when he likes, and where Wyndham Lewis can appear if he comes back from the war." Of the writing that he did not himself publish in BLAST, almost the whole of Lewis's output from 1914 to 1918 appeared in The Egoist and The Little Review. At the same time this ubiquitous agent engaged in a campaign for Lewis's pictures, notably with the American collector John Quinn. "Lewis has got Blake scotched to a finish," he wrote Quinn in 1916. Quinn bought; he also arranged for a Vorticist exhibition in New York, another of Pound's projects.

In his capacity as editor and critic, Pound puffed Lewis steadily and extravagantly in every forum at his disposal—" 'Tarr' is the most vigorous and volcanic English novel of our time." For years he was planning an illustrated book on Lewis. He arranged for the publication of Tarr by Miss Weaver and by Alfred Knopf. He proposed a "Lewis number" to The Little Review and elsewhere. When in 1914 he projected a "College of Arts," Lewis was, according to the Preliminary Announcement, to head the Atelier of Painting. On the social scene he seems to have been just as assiduous. Ford's friend Stella Bowen tells us that "Joyce and Lewis were Ezra's two gods, before whom we were bidden to bend the knees most deeply." But then, as Lewis wrote later, "there was nothing social for him that did not have a bearing on the business of writing. If it had not it would be dull."

In Rude Assignment Lewis credits Pound with presenting him to Eliot, Gaudier, and Aldington. There were dozens of other introductions, many of them less welcome. The one to Eliot in 1914 or 1915 he remembered with pleasure. It occurred, he writes in "Early London Environment," in Pound's triangular sitting room. Pound "lay flung back in typical posture of aggressive ease." "He blinked and winked with contemplative conceit and contentment, chewing a sugared and wonderfully shrunken pear …" He squinted "'granpa'-wise over the rims of his glasses … as good as saying to me in the Amos and Andy patter of his choice: 'You ole uncle Ezz is wise to wot youse thinkin.… '" Lewis could not even quarrel without Pound's intervention; writing to Quinn in 1915, Ezra said that he was "working for a reconciliation" between his friend and Epstein.

To a man of Lewis's independent spirit and sensitiveness, all this attention was bound to irritate as much as it gratified. Nor was he alone in being annoyed. J. B. Yeats wrote to Quinn: "Ezra Pound is a hairshirt of a friend to be worn near the skin." And Epstein in his autobiography recalls a day in 1913 when Pound brought Gaudier to his studio to see the Rock Drill: as Pound began to expatiate on the work, Gaudier turned to him and snapped, "Shut up, you understand nothing!" Ezra must often have been aware that he was overstepping. For example, he wrote to Lewis, around 1917, "I have constantly to approach you in the paternal admonitory, cautionary, epicenish bloodguttily INartistic angle." So Lewis was quite right when, thirty years later, he told a correspondent that this "'scolding old hen' … once wrote that certain people (meaning Eliot and myself) looked upon him as a 'bon vieux papa bourgeois': This was absurd, for it was he who insisted on looking upon himself in this way…

Lewis's reminiscences of Pound abound in references, often rancorous, to this feature of their relations. Indeed, it seems to have been the main cause of later troubles in the friendship. There is even good reason to believe that Ezra's managerial propensities lay behind Lewis's famous attack on him in Time and Western Man. There were genuine conflicts of ideas as as well, conflicts that became more noticeable as time went on—chief among them Pound's infatuation with the past vs. Lewis's impatience with it. What I would emphasize is that Lewis experienced Pound's interference as more than simply a nuisance. Egoist that he was, he felt particularly sharply the kind of nullification that is involved in such behavior.

When he writes about living people of his acquaintance … he never seems to have seen the individual at all.… there is no direct contact between Ezra and an individual person or thing. People are seen by him only as types.

(Time and Western Man)

During the years when they were young and often together, when Ezra's genuine bonhomie could be felt, one could usually joke away one's irritation. After 1920 Lewis was more apt to take a negative view.

The names of Pound and Lewis are coupled most often in reference to Vorticism. Contemplating all that has been written of this shortlived, not very productive movement, one is tempted to quote Lewis in one of his latest letters: "Vorticism. This name is an invention of Ezra Pound.… What does this word mean? I do not know." Earlier he had called Vorticist activities "publicist experiments—inseparable from things done just for the day, and regarded as of no more consequence than handbills, and possibly rockets and squibs." An exaggeration no doubt, but not wider of the mark, I think, than some recent scholarly disquisitions on "the Vorticist aesthetic" that miss the fun and haphazardness of the original. Even Pound, writing in 1914, Vorticism's big year, defined it to Harriet Monroe simply as "the generic term now used on all branches of the new art, sculpture, painting, poetry." And decades later he recalled that as Amy was ruining Imagism, "it was opportune to get another lable [sic] for vitality in the arts." One need not underestimate the impact of the activity or its importance as a symptom of change in order to caution against the "reconstruction" of systems that never were.

As a chapter in the history of Pound and Lewis, Vorticism marks a high point in the rapprochement of plastic and literary art, and thus in the proximity of these two artists. In Time and Western Man Lewis noisily denied this, declaring that "Pound supplied the Chinese Crackers and a trayful of mild jokes … also much ingenious support in the… press," but his verse was insufficiently experimental, "a series of pastiches of old french or italian poetry … Its novelty consisted largely in the distance it went back, not forward.…" A look at BLAST, "Review of the Great English Vortex," gives him the lie. Lewis's other statements over the years to the effect that Pound had nothing to do with Vorticism—"Vorticism … was what I, personally, did, and said, at a certain period"—must also be qualified in view of the facts.

Yet there is a good deal of truth in these assertions about Pound's role in the movement, or the role that has been repeatedly assigned to him. Lewis did, as he wrote in 1949, have "the not very original idea of founding an art paper, to advertise and popularize a movement in the visual arts which I had initiated." Nor has Ezra ever disputed that fact. Lewis "made vorticism," he has written. Even if he hadn't said it, there is the evidence of a letter to Joyce, written early in 1914: "Lewis is starting a new Futurist, Cubist, Imagiste Quarterly … it is mostly a painters' magazine with me to do the poems." And of another, from St. Elizabeth's asking "Old Vort" just a few months before his death: "… do you remember yr/first cheery invitation, to provide you with 'something nasty for BLAST'."

What Pound has claimed—rightly, I think—is that (1) before Lewis got things going, he was having some parallel thoughts about the arts, and (2) that he became the movement's chief theorist. Thus, reviewing an exhibition of the new art in March 1914, he could honestly say he found it hard to speak of the paintings because they were "perhaps so close to one's poetic habit of creation." In his article on Vorticism in the Fortnightly Review, he expatiated, asserting that "the work of the vorticists and the 'feelings of the inner need' existed before the general noise about vorticism," that the artists in various media came separately to their underlying agreement. He made it clear too that it was "vorticist poetry" with which he was "most intimately connected. If, though, one regards Vorticism as "purely a painters' affair," as Lewis had at the beginning anyway, then it was largely what he, Lewis, did and said.

The historical facts, at least, are reasonably simple. Lewis, a painter who was also a writer, wanted to start a movement and a review. During the early phase (1913) he enlisted several friends, mostly visual artists, in the project. Pound, a poet with a passion for Lewis's drawings and Gaudier's sculptures, was one of these friends. Once he had come in, some kind of literary-visual amalgam was assured. The presence of Hulme, a philosopher cum artcritic (he later withdrew), and Gaudier, a sculptor-writer, strengthened the dual aspect. As Ford wrote, "… for a moment in the just-before-the-war days, the Fine, the Plastic and the Literary Arts touched hands with an unusual intimacy and what is called oneness of purpose." In his Egoist review of the Goupil exhibition, Pound emphasized, as he always did, the distinctiveness of the arts and thereby disqualified himself as a serious art critic. At the same time he found his appreciation of the new sculpture and painting worth communicating. Was not his one "surest critic … a contemporary painter who knows my good work from my bad—NOT by a critical process, at least not by a technical process"? "It indicates," he continued, "a 'life' or a sameness somewhere that we are both trying with our imperfect means to get at." He was still marvelling at the phenomenon forty years later, when he wrote to Lewis: "I dunno whether you note convergence (from two quite distinct angles) on agreement of 1913 or whenever. At any rate there was a convergence not merely a connexion." Certainly he had done more than anyone to enunciate and elaborate the themes of the conjunction.

I have suggested the folly of trying to reduce Vorticism to a coherent aesthetic, as one might perhaps do with Pre-Raphaelitism. The dispersion, even possible contradiction, of its ideas would seem to result as much from the different casts of mind of Pound and Lewis as from the effort to speak in the same breath of two media. As a programmist Lewis is at once the more adventurous and the more worldly of the two. On the one hand, he wanted to hack out some area in the visual arts wherein his movement would be distinct from impressionism, cubism, and futurism. On the other, that he was feeling his way towards some mystique of energy and form is clear from his drawings and paintings of the period and from writings like the BLAST manifestoes and the play Enemy of the Stars. "You think of a whirlpool," he said to Violet Hunt. "At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated. And there, at the point of concentration, is the Vorticist."

Pound's approach was more aesthetic and more passive. He is much occupied with defining the relations of the arts in this new scheme and speaks of "forms about one as a source of 'form-motifs.'" Whereas Lewis's chief aim is to use the imagination to make new forms, Pound seems more concerned to apprehend and organize those that have become available to him. "Vorticism, especially that part of vorticism having to do with form—to wit, vorticist painting and sculpture—has brought me a new series of apperceptions." By the time he had become the movement's leading propagandist, however, Pound could sound Lewis's note interchangeably with his own. "Vorticism is the use of, or the belief in the use of, THE PRIMARY PIGMENT," he announced in his New Age "Affirmation" of January, 1915, and went on to declare that "an organization of forms is a confluence of forces." His "Vorticism means that one is interested in the creative faculty as opposed to the mimetic" simply generalizes Lewis's artist "in his studio … imagining form" and able to "transmit the substance and logic of his invention to another man." Confronted with one of Lewis's vorticist designs, or rather with the task of selling some to Quinn, Ezra could even approximate the thunder of Wyndham's self-styled Lewis gun: "beauty, heaven, hell, sarcasm, every kind of whirlwind of force and emotion. Vortex."

In a later "Affirmation" Pound took it upon himself to assign, in a rather impressionistic fashion, roles to his favorite rebels. Lewis he credits with "a great faculty of design, synthesis of modern art movements, the sense of emotion in abstract design.… A sense of dynamics." His own contribution he sees as purely literary—"an active sense… of the need for a uniform criticism of excellence based on world poetry.… The quantitative analysis in literature … The Image." Elsewhere he said of Vorticism "that Lewis supplied the volcanic force, Brzeska the animal energy, and perhaps that I had contributed a certain Confucian calm and reserve." If so, it was a Vorticist sort of calm, the stillness at the eye of the hurricane. For having christened the movement, he plunged into its activities with his usual elan. He signed all the manifestoes, wrote his own Vortex and poems for BLAST No. 1, and sold copies of the "puce monster" from his flat in Holland Place Chambers. Of cource he publicized wherever he could, and when Lewis opened the Rebel Art Center in Great Ormond Street in the spring of 1914, he became an habitue. Miss Kate Lechmere, who sponsored the center, recalls an occasion when, to Lewis's annoyance, he put up a sign there reading "End of Christian Era." A month before Lewis's death, Pound reminded him of a day when two Russians came to the center and went away saying, "But you are individualists." That summer of 1914 he wrote to Joyce: "We have been having Vorticist and Imagist dinners, haciendo politicos etc. God save all poor sailors from la vie litteraire."

Douglas Goldring desribes a tea party to inaugurate BLAST at Lewis's studio in Fitzroy Street:

Lewis and Ezra Pound presided over it jointly, the guests were the oddest collection of rapins in black hats, girls from the Slade, poets and journalists. We solemnly compiled lists of persons who should be blasted and of others who should be blessed. I have often wondered what Pound and Lewis, who occasionally exchanged meaning glances, really thought of their disciples.

(Odd Man Out)

There was another occasion at Kensington Town Hall, when Hulme and Lewis were to speak. Neither man being effective on a platform, it looked like being a fiasco when Pound stood up in his poet's garb and "halo of fiery hair." He talked wittily and recited his verse, to the delight it seems of almost everyone. "It's rather a joke hearing poetry read by an American," Lewis muttered to Miss Lechmere. Even more colorful, though less trustworthy, is Ford's anecdote about a walk down Holland Street with Ezra talking "incessantly on one side of me in his incomprehensible Philadelphian which was already ageing," while Lewis, on the other side, "dark, a little less hirsute but more and more like a conspirator went on and on in a vitriolic murmur": "Tu sais, tu es fofitu! Foatul Finished!… Your generation has gone.… I… I … I … The Vortex. Blast all the rest."

From the middle of 1915 to the middle of 1918 the two saw less of one another, Lewis first suffering a long illness and then going into the army. The separation and, undoubtedly the stress of the times, brought an unaccustomed ease to the friendship. The tone of their correspondence, with Lewis in training camp or at the front, is one of affectionate camaraderie. Lewis recounts the inanities and vicissitudes of military life; Pound, now completely in charge of his friend's creative output, reports on his progress with Quinn, Miss Weaver, et al. He contemplates a new number of BLAST, he offers medical advice! He works to get the Bombardier a commission; he worries over his safety—"I wish you would get a decent and convenient wound. Say the left buttock." Lewis, by now convinced that Ezra was a friend to be trusted, asked him to be his executor.

This was the time of the "Imaginary Letters," with the questionable exception of BLAST No. 1, the only instance of literary collaboration between them. Writing as William Bland Burn, Lewis began the series, evidently with no idea of its being a joint venture. Pound published these first three letters in The Little Review (May-July, 1917). Then in August he wrote to Lewis: "Mr. Villerant [Burn's friend in Lewis's first letters] … has written some letters … to keep their 'reader' in mind of the existence of the Burn family. The literary rape and adultery is most underhanded and scandalous." Lewis seems not to have minded; he contributed two more letters the following year, and Pound concluded the series in November, 1918. The letters themselves are informal essays that move casually among the interests of the authors: the artist's relation to his public, Russian literature, poetry, etc. Reading them en bloc one is struck by the independence of the two correspondents. Villerant addresses himself to Burn's wife and takes cues from Burn, but develops his ideas without regard to Burn's. In his later contributions Burn ignores even Villerant's existence. As Pound wrote to Lewis, Villerant would perhaps "provide Burn with Aunt Sally's. He is not controversing with Burn but discussing matters other, and of interest to his effete and over civilized organism."

The war ended and Lewis having survived the flu epidemic, the two were once more together in London, living near one another in Kensington. Herbert Read, a callow but observant young soldier, saw them there in the fall of 1918. Lewis he regarded as "the ringleader of 'les jeunes.'" Ezra he found "very nice after all. As you would not expect he speaks in a quiet soft voice and though affected in appearance ['his side whiskers, dainty beard, Byronic collar and hugh square blue buttons seem rather absurd'] is delightfully normal in manner… He is certainly a sincere artist and no fool." Lewis "is not half so ferocious as you might imagine," though "rather brusque"; perhaps not so loveable as the Pounds, but "very energetic, quite normal in appearance and a good talker." At the end of October, Read had decided that "Lewis and Eliot are by far the most important figures. They have strength.… Pound is a curious mixture. He makes his undoubted talent less effective by his personal expression of it. He does not allow his brains frank egress."

A few months later Ben Hecht reported comically on the pair, still very much d deux, to a New York art magazine called Playboy! In "Ben Hecht on Lit'ry London"—"written to Henry Blackman Sell of the Chicago Daily News"—he tells of a conversation in Pound's Triangular room, furnished with "two purple and three orange cushions, a clavichord made by Dolmetsch and a dining table fourteen feet long and one foot wide." He mentions Pound's "earrings and his lapis lazuli overcoat buttons," his red hair, and the embarrassing fact that "he is a doting monogamist." Of Lewis he says only that he "has black hair." But Hecht is too lively to paraphrase.

Previous to the conversation proper, Mr. Lewis had just received word that his father had died in the states. T. S. Elliot [sic], the poet, had also just received a cablegram announcing the death of his father. This caused Mr. Elliot to absent himself, Mr. Lewis apologizing for his seeming callousness with the fact that he had not seen his parent for some twenty years, allowed the death of his father as a strange coincidence, it coming simultaneously with the death of Mr. Elliot's father, and remained behind to assist at the merry prattle.…

MR. LEWIS—Do you think, Hecht, I could make any money by lecturing in America?

MR. POUND—Nonsense, Lewis. You'd be a dismal sort of failure. Unless you went in your soldier suit and—

MR. LEWIS—I would like to deliver some lectures on painting and make enough money to live on for several years. Do you think it's possible, Hecht?

MR. POUND—Absolutely no. I am the sort of person who could make a fortune at the trick. You see, I am deliciously disliked in the states and would therefore attract a crowd. If I could get a good manager to advertise me and spread broadcast the information that I will appear in blue earrings and that I own the only overcoat that has four lapis lazuli buttons I would really be an astounding success.

MR. LEWIS—If I could clean up enough cash in a year it would be just the thing I want.

MR. POUND—Hecht will tell you that you've no chance. You remember the time you spoke at Hume's [sic] lecture? The audience left to a man right in the midst of your eloquence. You're utterly incoherent, Lewis, as a talker, and your intelligence unfits you absolutely as a lecturer.… By the way, Hecht, what sort of man is Knopf?

MR. LEWIS—Is Margaret Anderson light or dark?

MR. POUND—I could bring my Dolmetsch clavichord along and deliver the lectures sitting down, or, in fact, from a recumbent position.

We have, unfortunately, only photographs and Iris Barry's description of the painting Lewis did of Pound in 1919; but the several drawings that survive from this time make a strong impression, both of the sitter and of the artist. Vorticism was of course dead; in his reminiscence of 1949, Lewis recalls that "by the time of Pavannes" his old friend had "grown into a sort of prickly, aloof, rebel mandarin."

The effects on each man of their association during these crucial years should be discernible in this brief history. Some have ascribed significant direct influences. Lewis, for example, made his sole excursion into abstract painting during the time of his closest contact with Pound, though Geoffrey Wagner sees Hulme as the chief influence in this. And a very great deal has been made in recent years of the impact of Vorticism on Pound's poetry. Many critics, going as far back as Jean de Bosschere in 1917, have noticed a change to harder outlines and more contemporary interests after Ripostes. It has been argued that the scheme of The Cantos is Vorticist, and Donald Davie's recent book on Pound is subtitled "Poet as Sculptor." Yet Noel Stock, in Poet in Exile, informs us that "Pound himself was under the impression—in later years at any rate—that he first learned to appreciate these qualities while studying Martial and Catullus in the U.S."

The principals seem to have thought, in retrospect, mainly about their differences. Pound did, as we have seen, attest to Vorticist influence. In 1916 he wrote: "They have given me a new sense of form … new chords, new keys of design." And he has persisted in taking this line, disclaiming in his Paris Review interview of 1962, for example, any influence of Gaudier or Lewis on his writing, at the same time acknowledging that "Vorticism from my angle was a renewal of the sense of construction … an attempt to revive the sense of form." Most of his statements have nevertheless been uttered as disclaimers. In 1929 he wrote to a friend: "How the hell many points of agreement do you suppose there were between Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Eliot and yours truly in 1917; or between Gaudier and Lewis in 1913 … ?" And in 1951 he rather plaintively asked a mutual friend "WHEN, at what date IF ever W.L. ever started thinking about ANY thing I said to him?? Unlikely before 1920, as he was then so headed wrong." And while Lewis allows in Blasting and Bombardiering that Pound "did succeed in giving a handful of disparate and unassimiliable people the appearance of a Bewegung," he too asserts that "four people more dissimilar in every respect … it would be difficult to find."

They protest too much. Clearly there were shared ideas—notably their beliefs in the aristocracy of art and mind, in the poverty of bourgeois values, and in the beauty of external arrangements, beliefs that paved the way for authoritarian politics. More important, I think, something of the tone and temper of one 'jeune" rubbed off on the other, often reinforcing what was already there. The result in later life was visible in certain affinities of style, of renegade stance. One might go so far as to claim that each was the more his own man because he had been for a time almost the other's.

William C. Wees

SOURCE: "Ezra Pound as a Vorticist," in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. VI, No. 1, Winter-Spring, 1965, pp. 56-72.

[In the following essay, Wees analyses Pound's role in the development of Vorticism.]

Vorticism stands at the center of Ezra Pound's twelve-year stay in London (1908-1920), and it represents his fullest commitment to the attitudes, the activities, and the art of London's avant-garde artists. Although this commitment came during the crucial years in Pound's development as a poet and polemicist, it has yet to be fully described, and its consequences evaluated. In the following pages, then, I will examine, first, the reasons for Pound's desertion of Imagism for Vorticism; second, Pound's contribution to the formation of the Vorticist group and the publication of the Vorticists' magazine, Blast; third, the nature of Vorticism, itself, as it is revealed in Blast; fourth, Pound's personal efforts to promote and perpetuate the Vorticist movement after the publication of Blast; and fifth, the effect Vorticism had on Pound's theory and practice of poetry.

To keep the proper perspective on Pound's place in the Vorticist movement, we should remember that Vorticism was part of a much larger movement that was revolutionizing Western art and letters. As Pound's fellow-Vorticist, Wyndham Lewis, said, "We were not the only people with something to be proud about at that time. Europe was full of titanic stirrings and snortings—a new art coming to flower to celebrate or to announce a 'new age.'" But, Vorticism was the only movement in pre-war England to fully and enthusiastically catch the spirit of the "new age," and at that time Pound was fully and enthusiastically a Vorticist.

He had become a Vorticist while still an Imagist, though he did not "officially" break with Imagism until midsummer 1914, when he was confronted by Amy Lowell's plan to use a "democratized committee" to select poems for an Imagist anthology. Pound was certain that a committee could not uphold the high standards he believed Imagism represented: "Imagism stands, or I should like it to stand for hard, light, clear edges," he told Amy Lowell. He could not force his standards on the group, and since he had no money to back an anthology of his own, he could only withdraw from the whole scheme, which meant withdrawing from Imagism. Pound said later that Imagism had been simply "a point on the curve of my development.… I moved on." By midsummer 1914 he had moved on to Vorticism; indeed, he had begun the move almost simultaneously with the publication of Des Imagistes in February 1914.

By that time his own standards were changing in accord with his changing poetic ambitions. He began to break the cool, decorous serenity of the Image and its "hard light, clear edges," by developing a new, more violent mode of expression. This new violence was apparent in his prose as well as his poetry. "To the present condition of things," Pound wrote in the Egoist in February 1914, "we have nothing to say but 'merde'.…" In June he announced, "We will sweep out the past century as surely as Attila swept across Europe," and in the same article: "Damn the man in the street, once and for all, damn the man in the street who is only in the street because he hasn't intelligence enough to be let in anywhere else.…" This new tone of belligerence and verbal violence also appeared in Pound's view of the artist. Instead of the craftsman of language, the careful observer who transforms what he sees into precise Images, the artist is a "savage" who "must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods."

This violence becomes part of a new Poundian persona—a combined enfant terrible and moral satirist—through which Pound speaks in such poems as "Salutation the Second," which concludes,

Ruffle the skirts of prudes
    speak of their knees and ankles.
But, above all, go to practical people—
    go! jangle their door-bells!
Say that you do no work
    and that you will live forever,…

and "Pax Saturni," in which Pound sneers,

Call this a time of peace,
Speak well of amateur harlots,
Speak well of distinguished procurers,
Speak well of employers of women …

and "Commission," in which Pound reveals his satirical purpose by commanding his "songs" to "go like a blight upon the dullness of the world." All three poems appeared in a group called "Contemporania," which Pound published in Poetry (Chicago) on April 1, 1914. In October of the same year, Pound wrote to Alice Corbin Henderson, Harriet Monroe's close friend and associate on Poetry, "I wonder if Poetry really dares to devote a number to my new work. There'll be a howl. They won't like it. It's absolutely the last obsequies of the Victorian period.… It's not futurism and it's not postimpressionism, but it's work contemporary with those schools and to my mind the most significant that I have yet brought off." It was not Imagism, either, but presumably the sort of work that appeared in Blast: such poems as "Fratres Minores" (which even Blast did not dare to print without blacking out three of its lines) and the snarling, Juvenalian "Salutation the Third," which begins, "Let us deride the smugness of 'The Times':/ GUFFAW!" and goes on to attack conservative literary critics in the lines,

You slut-bellied obstructionist,
   You sworn foe to free speech and good letters,
You fungus, you continuous gangrene,

and concludes,

HERE is the taste of my BOOT,
   CARESS it, lick off the BLACKING.

The dry, hard, Imagist decorum is gone; a totally new tone, sometimes angry and moralizing, sometimes satirical, but certainly more declamatory, more "rhetorical" than Imagist doctrine allowed, has taken over.

Pound's rejection of Amy Lowell's "democratized committee" and his development of a more violent poetic expression were less important in his turn to Vorticism than was his involvement in the activities of the avant-garde painters and sculptors of London. Here Pound discovered a reforming fervor equal to his own and new artistic forms that were far more revolutionary in painting and sculpture than Imagism was in poetry. This group, generally labeled "English Cubists" at the time, included Wyndharn Lewis, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Jacob Epstein, Edward Wadsworth, C. R. W. Nevinson, Frederick Etchells, Jessie Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton, William Roberts, David Bomberg, Helen Saunders and Jessie Dismorr. All of these artists were part of what Sir John Rothenstein calls "the international Cubist movement," but the work of Gaudier-Brzeska and Lewis particularly attracted Pound's attention.

In fact, Pound's admiration for Gaudier-Brzeska and Lewis was virtually unbounded. "Have just bought two statuettes from the coming sculptor, Gaudier-Brzeska," Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams in December 1913. "I like him very much," he added. After Gaudier went to the front with the French army, Pound wrote in the New Age, "And if the accursed Germans succeed in damaging Gaudier-Brzeska they will have done more harm to art than they have by the destruction of Rheims Cathedral.…" Gaudier was killed at St. Vaast on June 15, 1915, and in "Canto XVI" Pound memorialized his friend's death:

And Henri Gaudier went to it
   and they killed him,
And killed a good deal of sculpture.…

Gaudier's white marble "hieratic head" of Pound, which Pound has with him at Brunnenburg today, is a monument to their friendship. Although Pound's enthusiasm for Lewis' work was not as spontaneous as it had been for Gaudier's, it eventually became greater. In June 1914 he told the Egoist's readers that Lewis was "the most articulate voice" of the new age, and by March 1916 he was writing to John Quinn, "The vitality, the fullness of the man! … Lewis has got Blake scotched to a finish. He's got so much more in him than Gaudier… It is not merely knowledge of technique, or skill, it is intelligence and knowledge of life.…"

Both Lewis and Gaudier had moved from a romanticrealist style in their earlier work to a predominately geometrical-abstract style in their work produced around 1914. Gaudier, as R. H. Wilenski has pointed out, had gone even further than Brancusi in the "geometricization" of sculptural forms, and Lewis was creating completely abstract designs based on complex relationships between light and dark shafts or bands combined with sharp-edged, geometrical blocks. An admiration of sharp, geometrical forms appears in the writings as well as the art of both men. Speaking of himself and a few other modern sculptors, Gaudier wrote in Blast No. 1, "We have crystallized the sphere into the cube … ", and elsewhere he praised "sharpness and rigidity" in art. Lewis, writing about the work of a group of "English Cubists," including himself, said, "The work of this group of artists for the most part underlines the geometrical bases and structures of life … All revolutionary painting today has in common the rigid reflections of steel and stone in the spirit of the artist…" In common with most of the advanced artists of the day, Lewis and Gaudier concentrated on abstract relationships of line, color, planes, and masses, and set aside any extended consideration of "subject" or "meaning" in art. Their theorizing as well as their actual work made a strong impression on Pound and, as we shall see, helped lead him out of the narrow limits of Imagism to the much broader, all-inclusive aesthetic of Vorticism.

Pound's friendship with Gaudier and Lewis, and his interest in their work, was only one way he became involved in the London art world. He also frequented the galleries and exhibitions; he was a friend of Jacob Epstein and a great admirer of his sculpture, some of which was called "Vorticist" at the time; he attended T. E. Hulme's Tuesday evening salon, where talk of the new painting and sculpture often dominated the conversation, and where Hulme expounded many of the ideas on art he later printed in his New Age articles; he was a mainstay of the cafésalon bohemia of London, and joined in its endless discussions of Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, and the leading experimental artists of England and the Continent; he supported Lewis' Rebel Art Centre, the short-lived headquarters of the "English Cubists," where he gave a lecture on Vorticism; and he signed an anti-Futurist pronouncement circulated by Lewis and the Rebel Art Centre group. It is not surprising, then, to find Pound proclaiming in "Et Faim Sallir Le Loup Des Boys" in Blast No. 2,

Say I believe in Lewis, spit out [sic] the later Rodin,
Say that Epstein can carve in stone,
That Brzeska can use the chisel,
Or Wadsworth paint.…

Pound makes no mention, one notices, of H. D. or Aldington; his new allegiances clearly show that he had "moved on" from Imagism. If any doubts remained, his involvement in Blast dispelled them.

II

When Wyndham Lewis and C. R. W. Nevinson originally conceived of Blast late in 1913, they intended it to be merely a magazine for promoting the new Cubist art in England. As the planning continued, however, and the date for releasing the first issue was set back from April to June 18 to June 20 to July 2, the magazine took on a special character of its own. After some feuding with Nevinson, who had given his allegiance to F. T. Marinetti and Futurism, Lewis became sole editor, though he received assistance from Edward Wadsworth and Pound (who sent out advertisements for Blast and provided Lewis with a long list of potential subscribers). Lewis decided to repudiate Cubism, as well as Futurism, and to establish a new movement for himself and his fellow English artists. Joined by Pound, he held a meeting that brought London's avant-garde bohemians into the planning of Blast. Douglas Goldring has preserved that meeting for posterity:

The ceremony took the form of a tea party in a studio which Wyndham Lewis then occupied in Fitzroy Street. Lewis and Pound presided over it jointly, and the guests were the oddest collection of rapins in black hats, girls from the Slade, poets and journalists. We solemnly compiled lists of persons who should be blasted and of others who should be blessed. I have often wondered what Pound and Lewis thought of their disciples. I know what I thought of them! The proceedings terminated with a quarrel between Lewis and C. R. W. Nevinson, I fancy on the subject of Futurism.

What Pound's and Lewis' movement still lacked was a focus, or, at least, a device to distinguish it from Futurism, Cubism, and other contemporary isms. Here Pound made his most important contribution to the new movement and its magazine by hitting upon a symbol—the Vortex.

Pound had first used the term Vortex in a letter to William Carlos Williams in December 1913 to describe the general literary-art scene of London, but he soon applied it to the particular kind of art that Gaudier-Brzeska, Lewis and the "cubists" of the Rebel Art Centre were creating. In this more restricted context, the Vortex takes on special meanings. "You think of a whirlpool," Lewis explained to Violet Hunt. "At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated. And there at the point of concentration is The Vorticist." Pound, describing the special quality of Lewis' drawing to John Quinn, wrote, "It is every kind of whirlwind of force and emotion. Vortex. That is the right word, if I did find it myself." To the readers of the Fortnightly Review Pound explained that even the Image is "a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing. In decency one can only call it a VORTEX."

The magic of a word! Once "Vortex" had been hit upon, the vague impulses of the movement could be defined in terms of a whirlpool, a whirlwind, a Vortex that unites rushing force and stillness to create a perpetually self-renewing expression of energy. Now Pound and Gaudier could write artistic pronouncements under the same title, "Vortex"; Lewis could make the mise en scene of his closet drama, The Enemy of the Stars, a Vortex, and give a focus to the magazine's manifesto. Now Blast, which in an advertisement in the Egoist of April 1, 1914, promised rather vaguely a "Discussion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and All Vital Forms of Modern Art," could become "The Review of the Great English Vortex," and out of the London world of avant-garde art could appear a new ism, Vorticism.

With a brilliant heliotrope cover and the single word, Blast, in huge block letters slashing diagonally across the front and back covers, the Vorticists' magazine was intended, first of all, to make the new movement noticed. "The large type and the flaring cover are merely bright plumage," said Pound. "They are the gay petals which lure." They lured the reader to a long, loud Vorticist manifesto, to Lewis' The Enemy of the Stars and "Vortices and Notes," to Pound's poetry and "Vortex" essay and to another "Vortex" essay by Gaudier-Brzeska, to stories by Rebecca West and Ford Madox Ford, a review of Kandinsky's Ueber das Geistige in der Kunst by Wadsworth, and twenty-three half-tone reproductions of art works, all of which (except for two by Spencer Gore) could be called Vorticist. Although Lewis, who wanted to make the magazine "a battering ram that was all of one metal," felt that some of the contents were "soft and highly impure," the magazine was sufficiently unified to indicate what the Vorticists were getting at.

Drawing primarily upon the manifesto, The Enemy of the Stars, "Vortices and Notes," and the essays of Pound and Gaudier, one can make a fairly accurate summary of the Vorticists' position. The Vorticists consistently attack mildness, softness, compromise, nature, the nineteenth century, education, democracy, curves, soft lines, mingling colors, and what, in general, they call "Romanticism." In contrast, they admire harshness, extremes, violence, the present, machinery, and rigid, sharp, metallic forms that prevent things from moving, changing place, blending and equalizing. This doctrine is emphasized in the Vorticists' writing by innumerable images of violence, rigidity and geometrical precision. For instance, there is the violent imagery of the manifesto's proclamation: "We only want tragedy if it can clench its side-muscles like hands on it's [sic] belly, and bring to the surface a laugh like a bomb", and the description of the characters in The Enemy of the Stars: "Enormous youngsters, bursting everywhere through heavy tight clothes, laboured in by dull explosive muscles.…" The rigid, geometrical quality of Vorticism appears in the manifesto's "blessing" of lighthouses "blazing through the frosty starlight, cutting the storm like a cake", and of the hairdresser, who "trims aimless and retrograde growths into CLEAN ARCHED SHAPES and ANGULAR PLOTS".

To reinforce their ideas and images, the Vorticists use visual effects created by special typography and layout. Most notable for its manipulation of typography is the first part of the Vorticist manifesto, where a kind of prose fibre appears in patterns of large, heavy type carefully arranged on the large pages. In effect, the words create abstract Vorticist designs with lines and blocks of black on planes of white. Complementing the pictorial typography and increasing the visual impact of the magazine are the reproductions of Vorticist art work by Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, Wadsworth, Roberts, Etchells, Hamilton and Epstein. In almost every case, the designs are composed of sharply defined, geometrical patterns, and with their conflicting forms locked together by intersecting lines and planes, they suggest a frozen, Vorticist violence. Blast expresses visually, in its typography, layout and illustrations, the same attitudes it presents in words. With its garish color, over-sized type, and pugnacious tone, Blast is, in itself, a Vorticist work of art, perhaps the most successful of all Vorticist works of art.

The reception of Blast varied from easy, Philistine dismissal in such places as the London Morning Post, the New York Times, and Stephen Philip's Poetry Review, to serious, but puzzled admiration in Poetry, the Little Review, and the Egoist. Pound proclaimed in the second issue of Blast:

  OYEZ       OYEZ       OYEZ
  Throughout the length and breadth of England
and through three continents Blast has been REVILED
by all save the intelligent.

                             WHY?
  Because Blast alone has dared to show modernity
its face in an honest glass.

Certainly Blast was widely discussed, and the Vorticists had some fleeting fame. But with the coming of war, real blasting drowned out the Vorticists, who, nevertheless, tried for a while to keep their movement alive. In March 1915, they appeared together in the London Group exhibition at the Goupil Gallery, and in June they presented their own "First Vorticist Exhibition" at the Doré Gallery. In July they issued a second Blast, a "War Number," thinner and tamer than the first Blast. Pound's contribution was limited to several poems and a brief commentary entitled "Chronicles." By this time Gaudier-Brzeska had been killed in action; Lewis was finishing his novel, Tarr, and preparing to go into the army. Only Pound tried to keep Vorticism going.

He kept Vorticism before the public in a series of articles: a discussion of Edward Wadsworth in the Egoist of August 15, 1914; an elaboration of his Rebel Art Centre talk on Vorticism for the Fortnightly Review of September 1, 1914; an explanation of Vorticism for the New Age of January 14, 1915; and a discussion of Gaudier-Brzeska in the same magazine of February 4, 1915. Pound's most important contribution to publicizing Vorticism, however, was his Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, published in 1916 by John Lane, which brought together photographs of Gaudier's sculpture, reproductions of his drawings, and reprints of his published writings along with some of his letters written from the front and Pound's somewhat rambling text, composed of previously published essays and some new comments on Gaudier and art in general. After he had finished the Gaudier book, Pound wrote to John Quinn, "I have certainly GOT to do a Lewis book to match the Brzeska. Or perhaps a 'Vorticists' (being ninetenths Lewis …)." As late as January 1917, Pound was still writing to Quinn about the projected book on Lewis, but it never appeared.

Besides acting as promoter of Vorticism, Pound became guardian of a good many Vorticist art works. After Gaudier's death, he fell heir to the "debris of Gaudier's studio," which included sculpture, sketches, paintings and pastels; before Lewis joined the Royal Artillery in March 1916, he turned over to Pound some forty-five of his drawings (with their prices indicated) and a large body of manuscript material. Pound sold several of Lewis' and Gaudier's works to John Quinn, whose interest in the Vorticists was due solely to Pound's efforts.

Continuing his work in behalf of the Vorticists, Pound got together a collection of Vorticist works, and with £ 65 from John Quinn to cover costs, he shipped it to New York in March 1916. In August he remarked in a letter to Iris Barry, "I have just rec'd four large cheques for vorticist pictures sold in America … and shall have to turn them over to the artists!!!!!!!!!!!" A Vorticist exhibition, including work by Lewis, Gaudier, Wadsworth, Etchells, and Roberts, was held at the Penguin Club in New York during the winter of 1916-1917. At about the same time, Pound worked with the American photographer, Alvin Langdon Coburn, to create "vortographs" by means of the "vortescope," a camera-attachment designed to allow the photographer to make "any arrangement of purely abstract forms. The present machine happens to be rectilinear," Pound explained to John Quinn, "but I can make one that will do any sort of curve, quite easily." The vortographs, Pound thought, were "perhaps as interesting as Wadsworth's woodcuts, perhaps not quite as interesting." Their main value was to "upset the muckers who are already crowing about the death of vorticism."

"The Death of Vorticism" was the title of an article Pound wrote for the Little Review early in 1919. He had become a regular contributor to Margaret Anderson's magazine as a covert means of continuing to promote Vorticism. "My corner of the paper is Blast," he wrote to Edgar Jepson, "but Blast covered with ice.…" In his article on Vorticism, Pound argued that the movement was not dead, and for proof he pointed to a memorial exhibition of Gaudier's work, which had been held at the Leicester Gallery in May and June 1918; to the war paintings of Lewis and Roberts, both of whom had been made official war artists; and to the assignment of a "vorticist lieutenant" (Edward Wadsworth) to be in charge of naval camouflage. But Gaudier was dead; the war paintings of Lewis and Roberts were not done in the Vorticist manner, and naval camouflage is not a very stable basis for a flourishing art movement. Only a renewed effort by Lewis and his fellow Vorticist painters could have revived Vorticism, but that effort was not forthcoming.

When Wyndham Lewis returned to London after the war, he saw more clearly than Pound that the war had usurped Vorticism's raison detre by bringing into life what the Vorticists had represented in art and theory: the violence, the blasting, the destruction of the "old world." After a half-hearted attempt to publish a third Blast (without even including Pound), Lewis published The Caliph's Design. Architectsl Where is Your Vortex? in 1919, which weakly echoed some of the ideas in Blast, but had none of the prewar flare and noisy rebelliousness. He then joined with a group of painters, including Etchells, Roberts, Wadsworth and Jessie Dismorr from the old Vorticist group, to form "Group X," which disintegrated after one exhibition at the Mansard Gallery in March and April 1920. Vorticism had dwindled to an "X"—the eviscerated remains of an exhausted Vortex.

Pound's Little Review article was his last attempt to resuscitate Vorticism. In 1919 he made a trip to Paris and wrote in the summer issue of Frank Rutter's Art and Letters, "… I am out of the whirlpool, and have had a few weeks' rest from all sort of aesthetic percussions… "This can be taken as Pound's farewell to the "whirlpool" of the Vortex and the "aesthetic percussions" of Blast. In 1920 he returned to Venice, whence he had come to London in 1908. Symbolically, he was starting over again, and this time he rejected London for Paris, and group movements for individual development.

Because Pound had been involved in the Vorticist movement from its inception, and was its only supporter during the war years, some of his contemporaries and later commentators have thought of Pound as the leading Vorticist. May Sinclair called him the "sponsor for Vorticism"; Margaret Anderson, ignoring Lewis' position as Blast's editor, wrote that Pound "issued the first number of Blast"; Richard Aldington said that Pound, in 1914, "was busy patenting a new movement, Vorticism"; Malcolm Cowley said Pound "assembled the Vorticists"; and more recently Eustace Mullins has called Vorticism the "Poundian successor" to Imagism. Pound, however, stated plainly in a letter to Reedy's Mirror in 1916, "I am not the 'head of the Vorticist movement.'" The pleasure of being a Vorticist, he said, was "to find oneself at last inter pares," and with some irony, he went on, "as an active and informal association it might be said that Lewis supplied the volcanic force, Brzeska the animal energy, and perhaps that I had contributed a certain Confucian calm and reserve." Obviously, Pound contributed more time, energy, and enthusiasm than that comment indicates, but what is more important, finally, is what Vorticism contributed to Pound.

III

"Roughly: What have they done for me these vorticist artists?" Pound asked rhetorically in his memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska, and answered, "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." Elsewhere Pound said that most people do not really look at things, but that he had "on occasion seen more than was meant for me, or even, in the case of Gaudier's sculpture and Wyndham Lewis' drawings back in 1911 to 1914 more than some others did." To see more or to see in a different way was what Pound gained as a Vorticist, and this new way of seeing or new sense of form came to him through the visual arts.

Pound's one clearly Vorticist work, the poem "Dogmatic Statement on the Game and Play of Chess (Theme for a Series of Pictures)" in Blast No. 2, "shows the effect of modern abstract art," Pound has said. The poem, like a Vorticist painting, is an abstract composition based on line, color, and pattern; it also presents a Vortex of violent energy held under control by the rigid regularity of the chess board. The chessmen hit the board "in strong 'L's' of colour":

Reaching and striking in angles,
    holding lines in one colour.
The board is alive with light.…

The moves of the chessmen "break and reform the pattern," working toward a climax:

Whirl, centripetal, mate, King down in the vortex:
Clash, leaping bands, straight strips of hard colour,
Blocked lights working in, escapes, renewing of contes[t.]

The abstract patterns of line and color with interstices of light and space, and the in-turning, self-perpetuating energy at the end (the contest is renewed), make this an interesting Vorticist poem-picture. Pound did not, however, develop these techniques into a full body of Vorticist poetry, but, as we shall see, the "new sense of form" that the Vorticists gave him and that this poem illustrates, did become an important part of Pound's poetics.

The point to be stressed is that the "new form" Pound discovered in his fellow Vorticists' work was visual form. Pound called it "planes in relation" and to illustrate it he wrote,

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

The beauty of this pine-tree in the mist is not caused by its resemblance to the plates of the armour.

The armour, if it be beautiful at all, is not beautiful because of its resemblance to the pine in the mist.

In either case 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.

Through his strong sense of visual form, Pound could even bring Imagism onto a common ground with Vorticism. Imagism, Pound argued in his Fortnightly article on Vorticism, is poetry "where painting or sculpture seems as if it were 'just coming over into speech,'" and in so far as a poem is Imagist, it "falls in with the new pictures and the new sculpture."

In turning to the visual arts and visual form for his aesthetic touchstones, Pound was simply following out the logical consequences of his earlier, Imagist doctrine, which, as Joseph Frank has shown, rested upon a spatial rather than a temporal concept of poetry. Such a concept encouraged Pound to find in the spatial (i.e., visual) arts his basic sense of form. He was also responding to a general tendency of the times, which Margaret Anderson described by adapting Pater's famous dictum to the new conditions: "All the arts were striving to approach the condition of painting." Certainly Vorticism fits this description with its emphasis on the visual in the typography of the Vorticist manifesto, in The Enemy of the Stars, which, Lewis said, was written to show how the "visual revolution" could be incorporated into writing prose, and in Pound's "Game and Play of Chess." By looking at Vorticist sculpture and painting, Pound was able to develop a sense of visual form that his own inclinations and the tendency of the times were urging him towards.

He did not, however, construct a comprehensive aesthetic based on visual or spatial form, even to the extent that Wyndham Lewis did in Time and Western Man, nor did he explore the possibilities of the visual use of words in poetry as did Apollinaire in his "calligrammes" or the Futurists in their "parole in liberta" poems. Instead, Pound applied his new feeling for visual form to the study of the Chinese written character. His beginning work on Fenollosa's manuscripts coincided with his transition from Imagism to Vorticism, and both involved understanding things in a new, visual way. The "pictorial elements" of a single Chinese character come from the arrangement of the radicals, which are extremely simplified abstract pictures of natural forms. A series of characters, said Fenollosa, is like "a continuous moving picture," and poetry composed in characters "speaks at once with the vividness of painting, and with the mobility of sounds." It is exactly this emphasis on the visual basis of communication that Pound also felt in the Vorticists' abstract art.

In the Cantos, Chinese characters serve as abstract illustrations for the written text, and one of Pound's favorite characters, chung ("middle" or "axis" or "pivot"), is, in effect, the equivalent of the Vortex, not only in meaning, but pictorially as well. The effect of visual form on the Cantos is not limited to the presence of Chinese characters, however. The innumerable disparate elements that make up the Cantos can be thought of as "planes in relation," as "diverse planes" that, like fragments of Japanese armor, "overlie in a certain manner," and are united visually, or spatially, in the same manner as a Lewis painting or a Gaudier carving. To the extent that Vorticism was responsible for this concept of form in Pound's work, it had a profound impact on all his later poetry.

Vorticism came at the crucial point in Pound's development as a poet. "The difference in style between a poem by Pound written in 1907 and one written in 1917," Peter Russell points out, "is the easiest thing in the world to spot, but if one compares a Canto written in 1920 with one written in 1945, a gap of 25 years, it is not possible to observe any change in style." Another critic calls Pound's poetry of 1913-1915 the "breakthrough in modern poetry." To what extent Pound's change in style and the consequent "breakthrough" would have occurred had there been no Vorticist movement, one cannot say. But the fact that Pound not only left Imagism to join Vorticism, but also worked hard to keep the Vorticist movement alive after its initial burst of glory in Blast No. 1, indicates that in Vorticism he felt the kind of inspiration he needed at that time. In the Vorticists' art he found not only a new way of seeing things, but, as the Cantos have proven, a new way of saying things, as well.

William C. Lipke and Bernard W. Rozran

SOURCE: "Ezra Pound and Vorticism: A Polite Blast," in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. VII, No. 2, Summer, 1966, pp. 201-10.

[In the following essay, Lipke and Rozran criticize William Wees's definition of Vorticism.]

I

In Who's Who (London) for the years 1915 through 1918, Ezra Pound contributed the following entry: "EZRA POUND, M.A. vorticist… Recreations: fencing, tennis, searching the Times for evidences of almost incredible stupidity." William C. Wees, in an article entitled "Ezra Pound as a Vorticist," described Pound's brief career as a vorticist, his influence on the movement, and its influence on him. Mr. Wees's presentation of the facts of Pound's participation in the vorticist movement is welcome, but Pound's affiliation with vorticism might be clarified if vorticism itself were more clearly understood. As Mr. Wees indicates, vorticism was primarily a movement in the visual arts. The following remarks are aimed not at disputing Mr. Wees's interpretation of the facts of the movement, but at suggesting a more precise meaning of vorticism.

What are the characteristics of vorticism as a visual style? If we examine Mr. Wees's article we have little to go on. He cites, for instance, the first issue of the vorticist magazine Blast and notes that all of the illustrations "(except for two by Spencer Gore) could be called Vorticist." We are not told why they are "Vorticist," or on what basis we can call any work of art "Vorticist." Further, Mr. Wees presents some suggestions when he refers to Pound's poem "Dogmatic Statement" as being like a vorticist painting which "is an abstract composition based on line, color, and pattern." This description could apply to the work of Kandinsky or Picasso—in fact to most of the paintings created between 1907 and 1915 by the avant-garde.

While it is true that Pound coined the term in late 1913, the works executed by the vorticist artist prior to this date can be seen as a logical development of the nonrepresentational vorticist style labeled by Pound. T. E. Hulme, writing on "Modern Art" in the New Age in 1914, attempted to unravel the complex styles practiced by the more avant-garde English artists since 1905. All of these works were, according to Hulme, part of the "modern movement." This "modern movement" in English painting was characterized by three stylistic phases: post-impressionism, analytical cubism (which Hulme considered the basis of the abstract phase of vorticism), and finally, a "new constructive geometric art" which he found best typified in the work of David Bomberg and Jacob Epstein. This last phase of the "modern movement" was distinct from vorticism, Hulme claimed, because it was more original and less derivative than the vorticist work.

What was the "history" of vorticism and what were the styles within the developing movement? The cubist and futurist inspired experiments of a group of English painters and sculptors executed between 1911 and 1920 are part of a larger and more comprehensive view of the vorticist movement. Three stylistic phases can be distinguished in the decade of vorticism, and all of them can be seen in the illustrations to the first issue of Blast. The first phase could be called "primitive cubism." Much of the stimulus of the first phase derives from certain drawings of the cubists and futurists. There are certain works of Picasso and Herbin where emphasis upon the hard-edged line tends to create planes of form rather than a more naturalistic delineation of the object's contour line. This phase is, nevertheless, representational and is inspired primarily by the rediscovery of "primitive sculpture." A related source for this first phase can be found in the vorticists' admiration of Jacob Epstein's growing collection of primitive sculpture. The second phase of vorticism, the style to which I think Hulme was referring when he used the term "analytical cubism," is in fact a rather naive interpretation of what the vorticists thought analytical cubism intended to present. Its characteristics are the stick figures applied to the surface of the canvas, figures which are reminiscent of certain paintings of Picabia and Severini executed between 1910 and 1912. Hulme claimed that this vorticist style was distinguishable from its source ("analytical cubism") in that the English artists made use of mechanical forms. While the first phase, "primitive cubism," dates from as early as 1909 and continues to 1914, the second phase of the vorticist style exists between 1912 and 1915. It appears in some of the war drawings and paintings of the vorticists and reappears after the war. The third phase was essentially less derivative and was non-representational. Growing in part out of the 1913 experiments done at Roger Fry's Omega Workshops, it was the logical termination of experimenting with the previous two phases. This style became fully developed in 1914 and 1915 and reappeared in late 1919 and 1920. It is distinct from other work done in England or on the continent at the time. Angular lines expanding sequentially rather than logically are its characteristics. The scheme is usually worked around an unconventional "unbalanced" composition based on the contrast between open volumes and tightly enclosed spaces. This phase of vorticism is thus distinct from futurism in its repudiation of the painterly technique, its insistence upon the nonfigurative motif, and its avoidance of the principle of simultaneous vision.

These stylistic considerations indicate the inaccuracy of some of Mr. Wees's examples of visual vorticism. He claims that "Blast is in itself, a Vorticist work of art, perhaps the most successful of all Vorticist works of art," because of its "garish color, over-sized type, and pugnacious tone." Similarly, it is difficult to conceive of the vorticist manifesto which appeared in the first issue of Blast as suggesting any of the stylistic phases of vorticism which we have outlined. The manifesto, according to Mr. Wees is "a kind of prose libre … in patterns of large, heavy type carefully arranged on the large pages. In effect, the words create abstract Vorticist designs with lines and blocks of black on planes of white." IT IS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE ANY SENTENCE AS AN EXAMPLE OF THE VORTICIST STYLE, or any visual style in painting. Such an interpretation may be tempting, but it hardly does justice to vorticist artists or to the styles they had created.

Since he has not accurately identified visual vorticism, it is surprising that Mr. Wees should be prepared to claim that "Vorticism was the only movement in pre-war England to fully and enthusiastically catch the spirit of the 'new age.'" Hulme and his "constructive-geometricists," Fry and his Omega Workshops, "The British Fauves," and others also enthusiastically caught the spirit and figure very importantly in this decade of British art. It is an oversimplification to state that Ezra Pound was the only person who kept vorticism alive during the war. While he was one of the key figures who helped to sell much of the vorticists' work to the American patron John Quinn, the stimulus for pushing the work of William Roberts, Edward Wadsworth, Jessica Dismorr, and Helen Saunders came from Wyndham Lewis. It was Lewis, not Pound, who had the idea of staging the vorticist show at the Penguin Club in New York, for Pound originally intended Quinn to give a large show of Lewis's works. Horace Brodzky, secretary of the Penguin Club at that time and an earlier pre-war friend of the vorticists, also was instrumental in persuading Quinn to stage a vorticist exhibition.

What then was Pound's contribution to vorticism as a movement in the visual arts? Clearly, Mr. Wees is correct in asserting the importance of the label "vorticism" which was Pound's coinage. But it is certain that the style existed, that the "vortex" was already being depicted before the name was attached to "le mouvement." Pound's contribution of the label and his concommitant insistence upon the value of non-representational painting may have helped to push the vorticist artists from the more representational derivative experiments to the non-representational stage of vorticism. One must not forget, however, that the aesthetic theories of Kandinsky, Worringer, and Hulme also figured as sources for the non-representational phase of vorticism. Perhaps Pound's greatest achievement in the history of vorticism as a visual movement was the conversion of the successful photographer, Alvin Langdon Coburn, to this abstract third phase of vorticism. For while vorticism as a movement in the visual arts has yet to be appreciated, Coburn's vortographs have long been recognized by historians of photography as the first abstract photographs preceding the dadaist photographic experiments of Christian Schad, Man Ray, and Moholy-Nagy. But what did vorticism do for Pound, and can we speak of a "vorticist poetry"?

II

To manipulate a poet's development by progressing him from "ism" to "ism" neglects a simple truth: the source for establishing this development in his poems. The biographical history of Ezra Pound's London years prior to World War I includes his affiliation with the Poet's Club, as well as afternoons with Ford Madox Hueffer and evenings with Yeats, and such influences may be looked to legitimately as the birthplace of the changes in tone, subject matter, word choice, metrics, and visual arrangement of phrases and lines—all facets that emerged in those poems Pound classified as experiments "in building the new art of metrics and of words." To examine carefully the occurrence and contents of these "experiment" poems within the corpus of Pound's poems published after Ripostes will focus a critical aspect on evidence from which to justifiably conclude that the poet had (or had not) "moved on."

In the case of early Pound the above approach is essential, for otherwise demonstrable distinctions between "Imagist" and "Vorticist" are blurred or ignored, with the result that a useful descriptive "rubric" is made into an inappropriate label. Whereas Pound's "Imagist" phase has been told and retold, and articles on his "Vorticism" begin to proliferate, the comments to follow intend rather to provoke some questions as to the accuracy of certain boundaries, the validity of existing special categories.

In August 1912, Pound accepted Harriet Monroe's request that he assume the duties of "foreign correspondent" for Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. In subsequent contributions to Poetry there is a tone of irreverence, sharp and caustic, and in "Salutation" and "Salutation the Second," Pound modulates neither word choice nor meters for the delicate or decorous of the Chicago audience; instead he proclaims his intent to "rejuvenate things." It is language of bombast, of insult; the brazen, haughty tones of sarcasm later to explode on the pages of Blast—forceful, vivid language, devoid of rhyme or set meter; vers libre close to an everyday speech, into which comes the occasional vulgarity, the occasional pornographic allusion.

These few selections from "Contemporania" have the multitude of characteristics all too frequently delegated only to Pound's later "Vorticist" phase. In fact, this voice of the polemical satirist is clearly one aspect of 1912-1913 poems which, at the same time, contain many examples of the "dry, hard Imagist decorum." Even more surprising, Pound was involved in still another direction, which will be dealt with later on.

Mr. Wees contends that by February 1914 with the publication of Des Imagistes, Ezra Pound had "moved on to Vorticism, … and its 'hard light, clear edges,' by developing a new, more violent mode of expression." Several comments by Mr. Wees do aid one to construct the Pound milieu, especially after the formal announcement of Vorticism. Unfortunately for the strength of Mr. Wees's presentation, he cites certain poems as evidence of "violence that become part of a new Poundian personae—a combined enfant terrible and moral satirist." Namely: "Salutation the Second" and "Pax Saturni." These two poems were not published in Poetry "on April 1, 1914," as Mr. Wees contends, but one year earlier. How then can we accept Mr. Wees's assumption that the contents of these two poems, along with "Commission," indicate that "by midsummer 1914 he [Pound] had moved on to Vorticism"? Surely the mistake in dating would be insignificant, except for an essential point that in the spring of 1913 Pound is claimed by the numerous recorders of "Imagism" as its staunch supporter, having printed in the March 1913 issue of Poetry his oft-quoted "A Few Don'ts by an Imagist." In fact, several of the other poems in "Contemporania" (e.g. "The Garret") indicate Pound's continued experimenting with clearly Imagist potentialities. Since those separate harsher qualities claimed by Wees to delineate Pound's "new" Vorticist phase are actually poems undisputedly Imagist, is one to assume that by spring of 1913 Pound was both Imagist and Vorticist? The question becomes ludicrous when one recalls that the first proclamation of "A Great English Vortex" in Blast No. 1 did not announce "Vorticism" until June 1914. That "Salutation the Third" in Blast No. 1 repeats this "Juvenalian snarling," only enforces this writer's contention that Pound's "Vorticism" consists of other factors. First, "Salutation the Third" originally was intended as a part of the earlier "Contemporania" series of April 1913, thereby contradicting Mr. Wees's point that this poem illustrates "a totally new tone, … more declamatory … [the] development of a more violent poetic expression." Pound's polemical declamations are, then, one aspect of his early poems; but if Vorticism is to represent some "new" aspect, one must look elsewhere. In fact, one needs to look again at "Contemporania," for in that selection the last poem indicates a form of experiment excitingly original and more visually operative: "In a Station of the Metro"—the two-line "hokku" familiar to the casual reader and to the Pound devotée. And yet how curious that its printed form—the word arrangement—as it appears in Poetry for April 1913 has nowhere been repeated. Especially when the directions for spacing are in a letter to Harriet Monroe: "In the METRO hokku, I was careful, I think to indicate spaces between the rhythmic units, and I want them observed." The spacings were observed and the poem appears:

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

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

How interesting to consider these "spaces between rhythmic units" and to recall the third "rule" of the Imagistes: "3. As regards rhythm, to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome." "Metro" was not a single instance of experimenting with this emphasis on the visual arrangement of phrases and lines. One section of "The Garret" presents an "image" as clear, hard, and precise as any by Hulme or H. D., but which is constructed visually as well:

Dawn enters with little feet
                like a gilded Pavlova.

Pound's explanation for the visual emphasis indicates his concern for precise effect: "I'm deluded enough to think there is a rhythmic system in the d stuff, and I believe I was careful to type it as I wanted it written, i.e. as to line ends and breaking and capitals. Certainly I want the line you give, written just as it is."

A special consideration for rhythm accomplished by selective spacing between words and phrases: precisely the aspect of a unity possible between musical harmony and the harmony of design; the possibility of a visual design in a poem to complement the avant-garde geometric school of English "Cubists." Here was an experiment in the "paradigms of form," for in "METRO" the superposition technique of hokku presents in its one, unified image "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." Second, "METRO" reflects Pound's interest in the intriguing arrangements of colors and mass in Japanese prints, and the use of just these elements in paintings by a fellow expatriate, James McNeill Whistler. This ever-present awareness and appreciation for dynamic intensities in painting and sculpture of the avant-garde began to be recorded, as in "Les Millwins," by mid 1913:

The mauve and greenish souls of the
                       little Millwins
Were seen lying along the upper seats
Like so many unused boas

With arms exalted, with Fore-arms
Crossed in the great futuristic X's,
                  the art students
Exalted.

The bright vibrance of Fauve colors, as well as suggestion for a pictorial composition in diagonals, this section of the poem sketches a design that thematically foreshadows the later "Dogmatic Statement on the Games and Play of Chess (Theme for a Series of Pictures)" in Blast No. 2 (1915), with its "strong L's of colour" which "break and reform the pattern." Why not believe the analysis by Pound himself? The Game of Chess poem shows the effect of modern abstract art, but Vorticism from my angle was a renewal of the sense of construction … was an attempt to revive the sense of form.

Pound's enthusiastic response to the geometric sculpture of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein, and to the designs of Wyndham Lewis and Edward Wadsworth—this fact along with his translations from the Fenollosa manuscripts add to the rare richness of his imagination's sources towards the end of 1913.

A magnificent variety of techniques and subject matters, of tones, meters and verse theories were continually exercised, criticized, modulated, even fused, as Pound sought by experiments in verse to "teach the American poet that poetry is an art, an art with a technique, with media, an art that must be in constant flux, a constant change of manner, if it is to live." In the multiplicity of his interests, capabilities, affiliations, preferences and compositions, one finds a man dedicated to his craft; if this multiplicity is to be separated into neat distinctions, then facts must be accurate and the view clear before attaching to Ezra Pound some "'appropriate' ism."

III

Perhaps the influence of vorticism on Pound should be sought not in the poet's style but in his attitude. Babette Deutsch noted in 1917 that Pound was "a modern of moderns, whose credo it is that a study of comparative literature of so many epochs and races is essential to that keen critical faculty which is part of the artist's equipment." Pound is a vorticist, Miss Deutsch claimed, "from whom and through whom and into whom ideas are constantly rushing." Just as Gaudier-Brzeska's "Vortex" was written to show that the sculptor now stood at the center of artistic endeavors of the last two thousand years, and his work paraphrased that of Rodin, Archipenko, Archaic Greek, and Pre-Columbian sculpture; so Ezra Pound's vorticism can be seen in his approach to poetry, in his drawing upon the Chinese, the work of Guido Cavalcanti, the ballads of Provence, and the classical Noh drama. Like Gaudier, Pound preferred a paraphrase rather than a literal translation of his sources. It was an attitude which Pound cultivated at this time to give his work a greater "adaptability of metre to mood," as T. S. Eliot phrased it. Vorticism as a visual movement was sustained through the efforts of the poet, but Pound's own vorticism is as elusive to define as Rilke's "impressionism." For as Wellek and Warren have noted:

Only when we have evolved a successful system of terms for the analysis of literary works of art can we delimit literary periods, not as metaphysical entities dominated by a "time spirit." Having established such outlines of strictly literary evolution, we then can ask the question whether this evolution is, in some way, similar to the similarly established evolution of the other arts. The answer will be, as we can see, not a flat "yes" or "no." It will take the form of an intricate pattern of coincidence and divergences rather than parallel lines.

William C. Wees

SOURCE: "Pound's Vorticism: Some New Evidence and Further Comments," in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. VII, No. 2, Summer, 1966, pp. 211-16.

[In the following essay, Wees debates Lipke and Rozran's critique of his definition of Vorticism.]

As late as 1956 Ezra Pound was still trying to make people understand what Vorticism was. In a letter dated November 13, 1956, written to the English artist Gladys Hynes, Pound wrote:

W[yndham] L[ewis] certainly made vorticism. To him alone we owe the existence of BLAST. It is true that he started by wanting a forum for the several ACTIVE varieties of CONTEMPORARY art/cub/expressionist/post-imp etc.

BUT in conversation with E. P. there emerged the idea of defining what WE wanted/ & having a name for it.

Ultimately Gaudier for sculpture, E. P. for poetry, and W. L., the main mover, set down their personal requirements.

I dont know that the ten signers of the manifesto did more than add signatures to oblige.

I cannot recall that [William] Roberts or anyone else contributed to the ideology.

Bobbie [Roberts] was regarded as a whim of W. L.'s. Only verbal manifestation recorded in the oral tradition is that Yakob [Epstein] tried to overawe him Bobbie with question:

"Well, Bobbie, how's vorticism?"

and Mr. Roberts replied: "It's buddin'."

Apart from Gaudier's two "Vortices," all the stimulating criticism of specifically the visual arts came from W. L.

chiefly stating what he found wanting in the continental schools. An individualist and national movement.

As what H. D. termed the "Hippopoetess," Miss Lowell was trying to break down the definition of Imagism by omitting the most vital proposition in the original definition, it was opportune to get another label for vitality in the arts.

BUT W. L. was certainly in charge of the visual arts with Gaudier partly dissenting and partly hunting for something we were agreed on.

I would like to draw upon this brief, general characterization of Vorticism in commenting on what seem to be basically different assumptions underlying the essay written by William C. Lipke and Bernard W. Rozran and the essay they choose to blast politely.

By emphasizing the first person plural—"defining what WE wanted"—Pound touches upon one of the basic assumptions in my first essay: that Vorticism was a group movement. It seemed to me that Vorticism should be approached in the spirit of Pound's definition of a "school" and an "art movement": "A school exists when two or three young men agree, more or less, to call certain things good.… ""The term 'art movement' usually refers to something immobile. It refers to a point or an intersection or a declaration of conclusions arrived at." I assumed, in other words, that Vorticism was the group effort of several young artists, that it represented a "point" or "intersection" of the sort Pound describes, and that Blast was its "declaration of conclusions arrived at," as well as an illustration of just what sort of art—both literary and visual—those conclusions led to. Lipke and Rozran, on the other hand, think of Vorticism as simply a "visual style."

Furthermore, when Pound points out that although Vorticism began as a "forum" for painting, it eventually became a meeting point for sculpture, painting, and poetry, he is confirming another assumption underlying my first essay: that Vorticism was a movement for the literary, as well as the visual and plastic arts. Pound wrote in his memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska, "We wished a designation that would be equally applicable to a certain basis for all the arts. Obviously you cannot have 'cubist' poetry or 'imagist' painting." Presumably Pound believed you could have Vorticist poetry and Vorticist painting. He remarked in his Fortnightly article Vorticism, "What I have said for one Vorticist art can be transposed for another Vorticist art." Wyndham Lewis agreed that Vorticism "affected equally the images which issued from its visual inspiration, and likewise the rather less evident literary sources of its ebullience." I assumed, then, that Vorticism and Blast reflected an attempt to establish, in Pound's phrase, "the common ground of the arts." Lipke and Rozran do not seem to be willing to grant this point: hence their refusal to entertain the notion that typography, page layout, prose diction, painting, sculpture, and poetry can be talked about in the same terms.

By assuming that Vorticism was a movement that sought out "the common ground of the arts," I was able to argue that Pound contributed certain things to the movement and gained certain things from it. But Lipke and Rozran call into question any meaningful relationship between Pound and Vorticism. Pound did not paint, and so could not express the Vorticist "visual style," and it is extremely doubtful that he "helped to push" the Vorticist painters "to the non-representational stage of vorticism." If anything, it was the other way around: the Vorticist art of Lewis, Wadsworth, and the others helped Pound develop his sense of abstract form. Since Pound did not contribute to Vorticist "visual style" either as artist or theorist, then by the logic of Lipke's and Rozran's argument, Pound was not a Vorticist.

In fact, only by shifting from the visual arts to poetry can Lipke and Rozran find a way of discussing Pound at any length. But this very shift emphasizes a division between the visual arts and Pound's literary interests, while it seemed to me that Pound was drawn to Vorticism for the very reason that it helped him draw upon the visual arts to develop his own poetic theory and practice.

Since I assumed that one could describe the nature of Vorticism in fairly specific terms, I was able to talk in fairly specific terms about the place Vorticism held in Pound's attitudes, activities, and poetic development at the time. Lipke and Rozran, on the other hand, say, "Pound's vorticism can be seen in his approach to poetry, in his drawing upon the Chinese, the work of Guido Cavalcanti, the ballads of Provence, and the classical Noh drama." If this is true, then the term "Vorticism" stands for virtually everything Pound was interested in at the time, and consequently it can no longer be used to describe one facet of Pound's many-faceted career in London.

Because our assumptions and conclusions are so far apart—even contradictory in places—I see little point in attempting a point-by-point rebuttal. However, there are a few divergences of fact and opinion that call for brief comment.

1. Lipke and Rozran are wrong when they say that my essay offers no "basis" for calling a work of art "Vorticist." A summary of the Vorticists' general doctrine appears [in Wees's essay, excerpted above] and a specific characterization of the Vorticist style of art appears [in Wees's essay above]: "designs … composed of sharply defined geometrical patterns … conflicting forms locked together by intersecting lines and planes [suggesting] a frozen, Vorticist violence." Lipke and Rozran may, if they wish, designate three styles produced over a ten year period as "Vorticist," but they do not prove that theirs is a better way of defining Vorticist style—it is simply a different way. As a matter of fact, it even differs from the way Lipke, himself, in an earlier essay in the Arts Review defined Vorticism. In that essay Lipke said, "Vorticism can be defined as an attitude of English literary and visual artists based in part on a subtle blend of futurist cant about machinery, Pound's belief in the efficacy of the 'primary pigment,' and Kandinsky's philosophy of aesthetics." As for Vorticist "visual style": only the work of the "second phase," says Lipke, exhibits what can be "properly called 'Vorticist style' …" In the light of these comments by Lipke, one is not likely to feel that Lipke's and Rozran's present definition of Vorticism is definitive.
2. I do not claim, as Lipke and Rozran seem to think, that Pound's Imagist and Vorticist phases were mutually exclusive and followed in absolute chronological order. In fact, my whole argument about Pound's shift from Imagism to Vorticism is distorted in Lipke's and Rozran's essay, as anyone who looks back at … my first essay will see. For instance, in the sentence, "Mr. Wees contends that by February 1914 with the publication of Des Imagistes, Ezra Pound had 'moved on to Vorticism,'… and its 'hard light, clear edges,' by developing a new, more violent mode of expression," Lipke and Rozran make four mistakes. (1) I said Pound had begun to move on to Vorticism, not had moved on, by February 1914. (2) I said Pound had begun to move "almost simultaneously with the publication of Des Imagistes," which means not "as exhibited by" Des Imagistes (as Lipke's and Rozran's use of the word "with" would imply), but "at the time of." (3) The phrase "hard light, clear edges" is applied by me, as it was by Pound, to Imagism, not Vorticism—and it is used to make exactly the same point Pound makes in his passage on Amy Lowell in the letter to Gladys Hynes. (4) I do not argue that Pound's "developing a new, more violent mode of expression" made him a Vorticist, but that it was one of the indications of a frame of mind that would only get its full expression in the iconoclasm of Blast.
3. "Salutation the Second" and "Pax Saturni" were indeed published in 1913, not 1914, and I am glad someone spotted a typographical error that slipped past me in both typescript and proofs. However, my argument is not damaged, since my point was to show that before Vorticism came on the scene, Pound had begun to write outside the Imagist mode, and that one reason he became a Vorticist was to have a different, non-Imagist context for his non-Imagist poetry.
4. And finally, one minor point of fact: Pound was not as instrumental in producing vortographs as his letter to John Quinn had led me—and Lipke and Rozran—to believe. According to Alvin Langdon Coburn, with whom I talked last summer, the original idea for making abstract photographs and the actual means of producing them (photographing reflected images in mirrors joined at varying angles) came from Coburn. Pound simply encouraged Coburn to work on abstract photographs and suggested he call them "vortographs." Pound, in fact, did not rate vortographs very high. "Vortography stands below the other vorticist arts," he wrote in a preface to the catalogue for Coburn's exhibition of vortographs in 1917, "in that it is an art of the eye, not of the eye and hand together." Damning with faint praise, Pound wrote of one of the vortographs, "It is an excellent arrangement of shapes and more interesting than most of the works of Picabia or of the bad imitators of Lewis."

If there is more to be said on the subject of Pound and Vorticism, I think it lies in the direction suggested by the following quotations from Pound's later writing: "If I am introducing anybody to Kulchur, let 'em take the two phases, the nineteen teens, Gaudier, Wyndham L. and I as we were in Blast, and the next phase, the 1920's." "And that [Vorticist] manifesto was the best we could then do toward assertin what has now become known to the world, or at least to the European continent as the crisis OF the system." Blast was a "harbinger," a sign that "SOMETHING was going on,… the end of the materialist Era/the end of that particularly dirty Anschauung." Perhaps this is not Vorticism as it was, but as Pound wished it had been. Perhaps it is sheer coincidence that one of Pound's favorite Chinese characters in the later cantos, chung ("middle," "axis," "pivot,"), bears a strong resemblance, both pictorially and intellectually—one might say "culturally"—to the Vortex.…

At least, there can be no doubt that for Pound Vorticism has become an aesthetic not limited to art, an artistic frame of reference on which to build the economics, politics, and general view of "kulchur" we find in the later essays and cantos. Until the consequences of that frame of reference have been fully explored, we will not have exhausted the subject of Ezra Pound as a Vorticist.