Ezra Pound
and the Romantic Ideal
Jeffrey Side
When we consider the poetic ideas of Ezra Pound,
we can discern something of their similarity to those of William Wordsworth. Indeed, it would not be outlandish to suggest
that Pound’s poetic aesthetic is a partial reformulation of those aspects of
Wordsworth’s ideas, that are now considered as bearing some relation to
seventieth-century philosophical empiricism. Therefore, before looking at Pound’s
theories, I will examine those of Wordsworth
in order to contextualize Pound’s aesthetic more fully.
It is becoming increasingly recognized that one of the most
dominant aspects of Wordsworth’s influence is that which derives from the
philosophical empiricism upon which part of his poetic aesthetic was based. Wordsworth used this empiricism mainly as a
rationale to champion a more descriptive and discursive poetry than arguably
had been formerly the case. However,
Wordsworth is not consistently empirical in the way a philosopher might aspire
to be, and there is room within this argument for the recognition of his
transcendentalism.
The claim that Wordsworth is an “empiricist”
poet depends on selecting certain features of his work, whether ideas or
stylistic qualities, which co-exist with other features of a different
tendency, features, which, in their strongest form, merit the description
“transcendentalist”. Of course,
Wordsworth is a poet, and although he may be a philosophical poet, he is not an
academic philosopher; consequently, these two seemingly unrelated aspects in
his work might be difficult to reduce to a cohesive conceptual system. In any case, the separation between the
“empiricist” and the “transcendentalist” has long been recognised as by no
means complete. W. J. Bate, in From
Classic to Romantic, demonstrated the links between empiricist ideas and
Romantic theories of imagination not only in Wordsworth but also in Coleridge
and Keats. Consequently, all that can be
claimed for here is to recognise and isolate a tendency, rather than to make a claim about the
essential character of Wordsworth’s work. However, it remains true to say that, even
when “empiricism” ceases to have much relationship to Wordsworth’s central
purposes, he is still a poet who displays deference for things as they are, and
who is relatively opposed to the fantastic.
Before I continue, I think it necessary to
explain the way that the term “empiricism” will be used in this essay. The term is to be understood in its relation
to the philosophical empiricism of Berkeley, Locke and Hume, which can be
stated as the doctrine that all knowledge derives from experience. Anthony Easthope
defines empiricism as “the epistemological belief that the real can be
experienced and understood more or less directly by the unprejudiced observer”[1]. He identifies empiricism as functioning “in a
scenario with three terms, these governing the object, the means
of representation and the subject”[2]. He then elaborates upon each of these
terms:
(1)
The
object is assumed as existing in a real which is supposedly pregiven.
(2) In principle, discourse is transparent so
that the only problem for knowledge is, as it were, to go and look and see what
things are there.
(3) subject and object are joined reciprocally, so
that the [...] subject and the [...] real correspond to each other. In that the
[...] subject is […] not constructed but always already merely there as the
subject of or for knowledge/experience.[3]
Although
there are philosophical niceties in the work of Berkeley and Hume that might
lead one to object to the use of the word “real”, Easthope’s description is
fair to the practical affects of empiricism.
That Wordsworth is a poet in whose work visual precision
and description is of fundamental importance can no longer be held in doubt. In Wordsworth: A Philosophical Approach, Melvin Rader says of him:
His mind was distinguished
by the combination of very sharp perception and very intense subjectivity.
[…] But no less remarkable was the acuteness of his sensory perceptions. In
his old age he remarked with justifiable pride: “I have hardly ever known
anyone but myself who had a true eye for nature”. This minute accuracy of
his visual and auditory impressions was preserved by a most retentive memory.
[4]
This
aspect of his writing procedure is promoted in the titles of many of his poems
such as: “Suggested by the view of Lancaster Castle”, “Who fancied what a
pretty sight”, “On seeing a Needlecase in the Form of a Harp”, “When looking at
the present face of things”, and Descriptive Sketches. Indeed, it was the visual precision and
descriptiveness in Wordsworth’s poetry that so enamoured
Coleridge, in their early relationship. In
Coleridge’s Philosophy of Nature, J. A. Appleyard notes that while
listening to Wordsworth’s poetry a realisation
that occurred to Coleridge was that, “it was possible to describe nature with a
fresh simplicity and exactness that surpassed anything he had thought possible”[5]. This fidelity to nature was important to
Wordsworth because for him nature was the interface between the material world
and the spiritual, and he believed that by describing it accurately in poetry
two things would be possible. The first
would be, as Robert Langbaum says in The Modern Spirit, to “show the
spiritual significance of the world, to show that we evolve a soul or identity
through experience”[6]. The second, because the mind that perceives
nature is “itself part of the nature it perceives”, it is possible for us to
have confidence “in the reality of ourselves and the external world”[7].
These two beliefs formed the main thrust
of his poetic concerns, and much of his writing and poetry can be seen as an
apologia for them.
David Pirie, in William Wordsworth: The Poetry of Grandeur and of
Tenderness, comments that “instead of concocting imaginary worlds
for our diversion” Wordsworth “directs us back to the one world which is real”[8]. In “Techniques of Truth in the Poetry of William
Wordsworth and Ezra Pound”, Geoffrey Clifford Jaggs notes that “his interest is
not in language for itself, but as a means to an end. That end is an
irreducibly empiricist one: we are of the earth, our nature bound up in the
larger nature that sustains us”[9].
Of the poems in Lyrical Ballads
Wordsworth writes, “I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my
subject, consequently, I hope that there is in these poems little falsehood of
description”[10]. In a letter to his sister concerning Dryden
he writes:
That
his cannot be the language of imagination must have necessarily followed from
this. That there is not a single image from Nature in the whole body of his
works; and in his translation from Vergil, whenever Vergil can be fairly said
to have had his eye upon his subject, Dryden always spoils the passage.
[11]
In the dedication to Robert Jones at the beginning of Descriptive
Sketches Wordsworth writes:
You will meet
with few images without recollecting the spot where we observed them together;
consequently, whatever is feeble in my design, or spiritless in my colouring,
will be amply supplied by your memory.
[12]
The two key words here are “observed” and “memory”. For Wordsworth
memory is accurate observation replicated in the present. He calls upon Jones
to overlook any faults in the poetic structure and evocation of feeling
confident that the accurate description of the natural settings will rekindle
his memory.
The 1802 Preface and Appendix to Lyrical Ballads and
the 1798 “Advertisment” for it are pregnant with
instances of Wordsworth’s favouring of the capacity for describing things
experienced. In the Preface of 1802,
Wordsworth writes:
The principle object, then, [...] was to choose incidents and situations
from common life, and to relate or
describe them, [...] in a selection of language really used by men,
and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination,
whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect. [Emphasis added]
[13]
It is noticeable that he links the recording of
sense‑data with the act of “imagining” as if they existed in a natural
syllogistic unity. This conception of
the imagination is not what might seem to us the “common‑sense” one: that
imagination flourishes not because we have things (images, objects etc.)
presented to us phenomenologically but, rather, because of their absence which
forces us to imagine them in our mind’s eye. Here, Wordsworth is advocating the use of
imagination to shore up reality to make more explicit what has been seen. This is a form of defamiliarisation, which is
indicative of much descriptive poetry.
In The Romantic Predicament, Geoffrey
Thurley says, “In Romantic art the motifs (things, people, houses) themselves
stand forth as content: they do not ‘mean’ anything else, they are not in that
sense symbolic or allegoric”[14].
Although Thurley is correct in regarding
the paucity of connotation in Romantic semantic usage, it should not be
overlooked that Wordsworth, in particular, did indeed think of phenomena as
symbolic, in the sense that they represent objectively what exists spiritually.
Like Coleridge, he regards phenomena as
a veil that enshrouds a superior reality normally imperceptible. In this sense, his poetry can be seen as a
mimesis of the “unseen”. Coleridge
concedes as much in “This Lime‑Tree Bower My Prison”:
On the wide landscape, gaze
till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and
of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit,
when yet he makes
Spirits perceive his
presence.[15] (lines
40-3)
Wordsworth
is advocating, not so much to obviate the need for symbolism altogether, but a
new use for it. He wants to apply
something equivalent to the old symbology: to travel in an indirect route to
make objects emblematic. However, to do
this he has to increasingly depend upon the particular, as this is the only
gateway to the spiritual.
When we examine the critical reaction to the
Romantics in the wake of the growing acceptance of Modernism in the early
twentieth century, we find that the majority of criticism is hostile to
Wordsworth and many other romantic poets. This criticism is largely aimed at the transcendental and metaphysical aspects of
Romanticism rather than its empirical dimensions. F. R. Leavis, for instance, criticised
Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” for what he saw as its confused imagery due to
Shelley’s “weak grasp upon the actual”[16].
Edward Larrissy lists the romantic qualities deprecated by
Modernists as being “discursiveness, the emphasis on personality, the use of
the language of the emotions and the aesthetic ideal of organic form”[17].
In their place, Modernists privileged “impersonality,
directness of presentation and [...] the analogy of mechanical or sculptural
form, as opposed to organic form”[18].
Moreover, T. S. Eliot’s mentor, Irving Babbitt, saw Romanticism’s
foregrounding of the spontaneous and the individualistic, coupled with its
philosophical thought, as being negatively influential upon modern democratic
society. In Rousseau and
Romanticism, he says that these romantic principles lead “to an anarchistic
individualism that tends in turn to destroy civilisation”[19].
George Bornstein in his Introduction to Romantic
and Modern: Revaluations of
Literary Tradition explains the Modernist reaction to Romanticism
thus:
Modernist criticism
often conflated strong, early Romanticism with its later and weaker derivatives.
Early twentieth-century writers understandably attacked the debased Romanticism
around them and then read their objections to its tone, conventions, and world
view back onto the high Romantics.
[20]
The result of this was to
create a false perception among Modernist writers and critics that there was a permanent
fracture between Romanticism and Modernism. In reality, however, there was no such breach.
The actual richness of description
present in Wordsworth, for instance, was sustained through Symbolist poetry and
into Modernist poetry. Although the
ideas behind Symbolist poetry were born of mystical and spiritual concerns that
had little to do with the empiricism (if not the transcendentalism) of Wordsworth, the sensuous aspects of
Symbolist poetry itself (divorced from its theory) were much praised by
Modernists such as Ezra Pound who said, “In Rimbaud the image stands clean,
unencumbered by non-functioning words”[21].
Pound who is often
considered as important in advocating a break from the modalities of Romantic practice
in actuality was more charitable to these modes. His real focus of attack was not so much aimed at Romanticism as
at the stylistic flourishes of late Victorian poetry. Although it is
certainly true that on many occasions he was critical of the Romantics, it
should be noted that this was not because he disagreed with their poetical
ideals and practice but, rather, because they typified for him establishment
poetry. This is actually were the
radicalism of Pound finds its voice. Hugh
Witemeyer expresses this view in his essay “Walter Savage Landor and Ezra
Pound”:
Pound reacted specifically
to a late Victorian reading of the Romantics which enshrined Wordsworth and
Keats with Milton and Tennyson in a pantheon of stylistic and social respectability.
This ‘cult of the innocuous’ impeded the acceptance of the modern poetry which
Pound’s circle was creating.
[22]
Witemeyer further states:
Pound’s strategy
was to offer a deliberately subversive reading of literary history intended
to shock received opinion. […] If Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson had been
made respectable establishment figures whose influence was grown oppressive,
then they had to be undermined and blasted to make way for the new poetry.
[23]
Of Pound’s omission of any reference to
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake in his The ABC of Reading while giving
space to Browning, Crabbe, Landor and Beddoes, Witemeyer says: “this emphasis
is no mere Browningesque obsession with scriptores ignoti, the unknown
secondary artists of the period. It is a
revolutionary effort to establish a heritage for a literary counter-culture”[24].
That Witemeyer’s analysis is reasonable
is supported by Pound’s respect for Wordsworth’s poetic empiricism. Herbert
N. Schneidau says that Pound, despite his, “dismissal of Wordsworth as a
‘silly old sheep’” still grudgingly
ascribed to him “an unquestionable genius, […] for presentation of natural
detail”[25].
Moreover, that Pound not
only shared Wordsworth’s fascination with objects but also his partiality
towards prose as superior to poetic artifice is illustrated in the following: “In
a curious extension of their parallel attacks on ‘poetic diction’, each [he and
Wordsworth] offered prose as a model for good poetry”[26].
Schneidau then quotes the following
lines from Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads: “There neither
is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and
metrical composition […] some of the
most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the
language of prose when prose is well written”[27]. He then comments, “With this we may compare
Pound’s belief in the ‘prose tradition in verse’, his dictum that poetry must be ‘as well written as
prose’, and so on”[28]. Indeed, Pound’s comment in a letter
dated 4 February 1913 to Alice Corbin
Henderson (the Associate Editor of Poetry) on one of her poems is, “Your
most obvious superficial fault is that you invert, and in various ways disturb
the natural prose order of the words”[29]. Adding, “Every alteration of this sort, that
is not made for definite and worthy reason weakens the impact”[30]. Moreover, to William Carlos Williams on the
19 December 1913 with regard to Williams’s poem “La Flor” he warns, “Your
syntax still strays occasionally from the simple order of natural speech”[31]. In a Preface (dated 1914) for Lionel
Johnson’s Poetical Works Pound writes:
Now Lionel Johnson cannot be shown to be
in accord with our present doctrines and ambitions. His language is a bookish
dialect, or rather it is not a dialect, it is a curial speech, and our aim
is natural speech, the language as spoken. We desire the words of poetry to
follow the natural order. We would write nothing that we might not say actually
in life—under emotion.
[32]
This advocacy of a style
stripped of late Victorian artifice and geared towards a communicative
functionality is similar to Wordsworth’s plea for a plainer poetic language. Moreover, in his essay “A Retrospect”, Pound
echoes Wordsworth further, advising aspiring poets to: “Use no superfluous
word, no adjective which does not reveal something. Don’t use such expressions
as ‘dim lands of peace’. It dulls
the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the
writer’s not realising that the natural object is always the adequate
symbol”[33]. Even W. B. Yeats saw some value in this approach
when he said that Pound “helps me to get back to the definite and concrete,
away from modern abstractions”[34].
In “How to Read”, Pound
laments the advent of “the loose use of words”[35]
that appeared during the Renaissance and which replaced what he saw as the more
precise language of the medieval period:
What the renaissance gained in direct examination
of natural phenomena, it in part lost in losing the feel and desire for exact
descriptive terms. I mean that the medieval mind had little but words to deal
with, and it was more careful in its definitions and verbiage. It did not
define a gun in terms that would just as well define an explosion, nor explosions
in terms that would define triggers.
[36]
Furthermore, in the same
essay, he writes:
One “moves” the reader only by clarity. In
depicting the motions of the “human heart” the durability of the writing depends
on the exactitude. […] It is as important for the purpose of thought to keep
language efficient as it is in surgery to keep tetanus bacilli out of one’s
bandages.
[37]
In The A B C of
Reading, he writes: “Good writers are those who keep the language
efficient. That is to say, keep it
accurate, keep it clear”[38].
In addition, in the same book he praises
Homer’s descriptive verity: “The sheer literary qualities in Homer are such
that a physician has written a book to prove that Homer must have been an army
doctor. (When he describes certain blows and their effect, the wounds are said
to be accurate, and the descriptions fit for coroner’s inquest.)”[39]. Additionally, he says that Catullus is in some
ways better than Sappho is “for his economy of words”[40]. Whilst admitting Ovid’s unevenness as a
writer Pound, nevertheless, recognises that: “He is clear. His
verse is as lucid as prose”[41]. In “A Retrospect”, the first two of Pound’s
three principles of poetry are:
1. Direct treatment of the
“thing” whether subjective of objective.
2. To use absolutely no word
that does not contribute to the presentation.[42]
These principles are echoed
in his letters such as the one to publisher Harriet Monroe in October 1912: “This
is the sort of American stuff that I can show here and in
However, it was not
always this way with Pound, as the following passage from Paul Smith’s Pound
Revised makes clear:
What I think principally emanates from late-nineteenth-century
verse, and what Pound’s early work reduplicates, is precisely a concern for
the artifice of poetic production and an ensuing respect for the autonomy
of the language of poetry: both of these elements enter Pound’s writing in
a much more solid and formative manner than do any of the superficial elements
that the critics point to. Whereas these early stylistic and thematic influences
have most often been extirpated (or considerably refined) by the time of the
Cantos, what does remain as an upshot for Pound’s entire creative output
is the question of the condition and status of autonomous poetic language.
[48]
And he cites Pound’s “Cino”
as “a poem overtly concerned with the terms of its own production”
[49]
saying that the poem’s language, “is allowed to be aware
of itself and of its many layers and registers within the poem’s genesis—aware,
indeed, of its whole role in the production of meanings”
[50]
. Smith points out that Swinburne’s “refusal to
allow writing to be subservient to the expression of poetic reflection and
impression”
[51]
was influential on early Pound:
What the young Pound learned from him, then,
can be said to lie precisely in this trenchant attitude to the very materiality
of writing, its activity.
[52]
Pound’s lesson
from Swinburne, then, far from being an overt thematic one, resides in the
recognition of the materiality of language and its tendency to break the
barriers of that view of poetry which wishes to see language as simply a
vehicle.[53]
The reflexive strain in his early writings
lays great emphasis on the particular qualities of poetic language and poetic
technique—on the materiality of language and general poetic procedures.[54]
Smith’s general contention is that by 1915 Pound
suppressed his “recognition of the primacy of poetic materiality”,[55]
preferring instead to redevelop “a notion of the master craftsman (with both
words of the phrase carrying their weight) in order to defuse the power of
poetic materiality”[56] Smith says: “It is with the distinctions that
this new category allows him that Pound begins to redefine poetry so that
materiality will finally not distort substance—in other words, to build a
stronger vehicle for whatever substance the poet might wish to communicate”[57]. Smith explains this sea change in the
following way:
The early poems had obviously served as an
arena for experimentation […] But the fate of most of this early work was
excision from the canon, on the grounds that such writing can say “nothing
in particular”. […] And so in his Imagist and Vorticist periods he embarks
upon a programme designed to efface the power of the signifier and replace
it with a controlled and mastered language—one which supposedly can come into
unambiguous contact with the truth of the world.
[58]
In conclusion,
he says:
Pound’s Imagism, then, relies on a belief
that a certain technique in language will allow language to embody the world
and become efficiently denotative, capable of reproducing an external origin quite simply. As David Simpson
puts it, this involves a “realist” poetry which “stands in an authoritarian
relationship to its readers. It demands reception, it does not invite or necessitate
interpretation.”
[59]
It would appear, then, according to Smith, that
Pound’s participation in “the revolution of the word” was motivated by a desire
for his poetry to be accepted within the traditional literary canon of the day.
Consequently, he abandoned his earlier mode of writing in favour of that which
he recognised as more acceptable to this literary establishment. Any such writing, of course, would have to
deny the materiality of language, preferring instead to focus on language’s
denotative aspect—an aspect that, as Simpson infers, results in a poetics
grounded in an autocratic denial of hermeneutic plurality.
Perhaps Pound’s rejection of poetic
artifice was also due to his reading of Ernest Fenollosa’s Essay on the
Chinese Written Character.[60] In The A B C of Reading, Pound
says that Fenollosa was attempting to ‘explain the Chinese ideograph [ideogram]
as a means of transmission and registration of thought’.[61] In doing so he, “got to the root of the
matter, to the root of the difference between what is valid in Chinese thinking
and invalid or misleading in a great deal of European thinking and language”[62].
Pound expresses European thinking as
follows: “In
In contrast to this, “Fenollosa emphasises the
method of science, ‘which is the method of poetry’, as distinct from that of
‘philosophic discussion’, and is the way the Chinese go about it in their
ideograph or abbreviated picture writing”[64]. The Chinese ideograph unlike the Egyptian
method of using “abbreviated pictures to represent sounds”[65]
uses
abbreviated pictures AS pictures, that is
to say, Chinese ideogram does not try to be the picture of a sound, or to
be a written sign recalling a sound, but it is still the picture of a thing;
of a thing in a given position or relation, or of a combination of things.
It means the thing or the action or the situation, or quality germane
to the several things that it pictures.
[66]
In this way
Fenollosa, “was telling how and why a language written in this way simply HAD
TO STAY POETIC; simply couldn’t help being and staying poetic in a way that a
column of English type might very well not stay poetic”[67]. An obvious objection to Fenollosa’s theory is
that it is truer of visual art than literature. Pound unwittingly hints at this when he
writes: “This is nevertheless the
Language for [Pound] has the innate ability
to close the gap between its signifier and its signified and so refer directly
to the referent […] the fundamental Poundian metaphor […] assumes that language
is co-extensive, analogous and co-operative with the natural world. This […]
is thereby reductive of language and/or the natural world to a tautology:
the signifier is limited, chained not to another signifier but to the functional
expression of the natural world.
[69]
In light of the foregoing examination of Pound’s poetic
aesthetic, it is reasonable to suggest that Pound rather than being a
progressive force in poetry was in actuality a rather conservative figure. This can be seen further if we look at his
connection to the Edwardian poet Edward Thomas. Andrew Motion in The Poetry of Edward
Thomas views Thomas’s as foreshadowing in a more discreet manner
innovations made more explicit in
Modernist works.[70] Motion
sees Thomas as writing, “slightly to the left of centre—drawing much from the
Georgians but also anticipating the Modernists in several important respects”[71]. He argues that, “the Imagists’ juxtaposition
of miniature fragments, and the Modernists’ generous use of collage and
montage, both find their discreet counterpart in his [Thomas’s] poems”[72]. Motion
then analyses Thomas’s poem “The Long Small Room”, saying that it is “typical of the way in which he [Thomas] refers to a variety
of objects with such quick clarity that orthodox pictorial and narrative
techniques are replaced by what one of his earliest reviewers called “disconnected
impressions”[73]
Here is the poem:
The long small room that showed willows in
the west
Narrowed up to the end the fireplace filled,
Although not wide. I liked it. No one guessed
What need or accident made them so build.
Only the moon, the mouse, and the sparrow peeped
In from the ivy round the casement thick.
Of all they saw and heard there they shall keep
The tale for the old ivy and older brick.
When I look back I am like moon, sparrow, and mouse
That witnessed what they could never understand
Or alter or prevent in the dark house.
One thing remains the same – this is my right hand
Crawling crab-like over the clean white page,
Resting awhile each morning on the pillow,
Then once more starting to crawl on towards age.
The hundred last leaves stream upon the willow.[74]
Motion notes that “the
sense of insecurity and isolation conveyed here [in this poem] in visual terms
appears elsewhere [in other poems] in linguistic ones”[75]. That the visual is foregrounded in this poem
is obvious but he fails to direct us to examples of the latter (the linguistic
terms) in Thomas’s other poems.
He also acknowledges the
retrograde tendencies inherent in Modernist poetry—tendencies that arguably
have their genesis in Romantic roots.
Quoting Amy Lowell’s six attributes of Imagist poetry, listed in her
anthology Some Imagist Poets, Motion writes:
The fact that
these aims are sufficiently indeterminate to describe not only Thomas but
a wide variety of authors suggests that strict Imagists were not espousing
entirely new principles, but isolating a number of old ones and thereby making
them seem unfamiliar. Imagism, in other words, is a matter of selection and
amplification. The same can also be said of full-fledged Modernism, which
shares many of its strategies.
[76]
Indeed, Thomas approved of Pound’s Personae
because unlike the florid style of the late Victorians it contained “no golden
words shot with meaning; a temperate use of images and none far fetched”[77]. Thomas’s praise for what can only be
described as a Wordsworthian plainness of speech contributes to a confirmation of the largely unbroken
link between the old and the “new” poetic, which Pound and Lowell failed to
recognise. It is appropriate that such
praise should come from a poet whose poetic aesthetic prompted him to write in
defence of it: “A poem of the old kind has a simple fundamental meaning which
every sane reader can agree upon; above and beyond this each one builds as he
can or must”.[78] As we have seen, Pound would have agreed with
such a view.
In this essay I have attempted to show that the poetic ideas
of Ezra Pound have similarities to the poetic ideas of William Wordsworth,
especially with regard to Wordsworth’s advocating a naturalistic and
descriptive mode of poetic writing that became the principal style of poetry
for the rest of the nineteenth century and the greater part of the
twentieth. Additionally, the essay has
argued that the received opinion that Pound’s poetical radicalism was largely
motivated by his antipathy to Romantic poetry is somewhat exaggerated. Rather his radicalism was the result of his
reaction to the stylistic excesses of late Victorian poetry, and as such can be
paralleled with Wordsworth’s reaction to the stylistic excesses of late seventeenth
century poetry. To this extent, Pound’s
poetic ideas can be seen as a
continuation of certain Romantic ideals in poetry; ideals primarily articulated
by Wordsworth, having been developed from seventeenth century empiricist
philosophy.
[5] J. A. Appleyard, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Literature: The
Development of a Concept of Poetry (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,
1965), p.67.
[6] Robert Langbaum, The Modern Spirit: Essays on the Continuity of
Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970),
p.18.
[8] David B. Pirie, William Wordsworth: The Poetry of Grandeur and
Tenderness (London: Methuen,1982), p.1.
[9] Geoffrey Clifford Jaggs, ‘Techniques of Truth in the
Poetry of William Wordsworth and Ezra Pound’ (unpublished doctoral thesis,
[10] Preface to Lyrical Ballads, ed. by R. L. Brett and A. R.
Jones (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 245.
[11] The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. by E. de
Selincourt, 2nd edn, rev. by C. L. Shaver, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1935-1939), p.641.
[12] The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by T. Hutchinson and E. de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1936),
Wordsworth Editions 1994, p.10.
[13] The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by W. J. B. Owen
and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), I, p.123.
[15] The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by J. D. Campbell (London:
Macmillan, 1938), p.93.
[16]
F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English
Poetry (London: Chatto
& Windus, 1956), p.206.
[17]
Edward Larrissy, ‘Modernism and Postmodernity’, in Romanticism: An Oxford
Guide, ed. by Nicholas Roe (
[19]
Irving Babbitt, Rousseau & Romanticism (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1919, 1947, 1977) p.280.
[20]
George Bornstein, Romantic and Modern: Revaluations of Literary Tradition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), p.8.
[22] Hugh Witemeyer, ‘Walter Savage Landor and Ezra Pound’, in Romantic
and Modern: Revaluations of Literary Tradition, ed. by George
Bornstein (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), pp.147-63
(p.147).
[25] Herbert N. Schneidau, ‘Pound and Wordsworth on Poetry and Prose’,
in Bornstein, Romantic and Modern, pp.133-45 (p.134).
[29] The Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson, ed. by
Ira B. Nadel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), p.29.
[31] The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941, ed.
by D. D. Page (London: Faber and Faber,
1982), p.28.
[32] Quoted in Herbert Read, The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in
English Romantic Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1953), p.122.
[34] Quoted in Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats: 1865-1939, 2nd ed.
(London: Macmillan, 1962), p.272. Of Yeats’s Romantic lineage Frank Kermode
says, ‘It is not really surprising that what is often regarded as Symbolist
influences in Yeats can be traced to earlier Romantic thought’. See Romantic
Image, p.107.
[42] Pound, Literary Essays, ed. Eliot, p.3. Herbert Read says of
these two principles that they ‘come from Hulme, almost in his own words’. He
then quotes Hulme: ‘Always seek the hard, definite, personal word’ and ‘All
emotion depends on real solid vision or sound.
It is physical’. See The True Voice of Feeling, p.121.
[60] Read notes that Hulme’s statement on thought and language (‘Thought
is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation of the mind
of two different images. Language is only a more or less feeble way of doing
this’), ‘anticipates Pound’s “ideogramatic method”, which he supposedly owes to
Fenollosa. See The True Voice of Feeling, p 109.
[68] Pound, A B C, p.23. Read notes that in a letter to William
Carlos Williams dated 21 October 1908, Pound says that the ultimate
accomplishment of poetry should be: ‘To paint the thing as I see it’. See The
True Voice of Feeling, p.105.
[69] Quoted in Geoffrey Clifford Jaggs, ‘Techniques of
Truth in the Poetry of William Wordsworth and Ezra Pound’ (unpublished doctoral
thesis,
[70] Interestingly, Edna Longley in ‘The Great War, History, and the
English Lyric’, says that Thomas's poem ‘Lob’, ‘preempts The Waste Land’
when he writes lines such as: ‘This is tall Tom that bore / The logs in, and
with Shakespeare in the hall / Once talked’. See The
[71] Andrew Motion, The Poetry of Edward Thomas (London, Boston
and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1980), p.2. It should be pointed
out that it is important for us not to conclude from this analysis that
Modernist and Georgian styles are to be equated.
Bibliography
Bornstein, G., ed. Romantic
and Modern: Revaluations of Literary Tradition (
Eliot, T. S., ed. Literary
Essays of Ezra Pound (
Hone, J. W. B. Yeats:
1865-1939, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1962)
Jaggs, G. C. “Techniques of Truth
in the Poetry of William Wordsworth and Ezra Pound” (unpublished
doctoral
thesis,
Kermode, F. Romantic
Image (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957)
Larrissy, E. “Modernism
and Postmodernity”, in Romanticism: An
(
Leavis, F. R. Revaluation:
Tradition and Development in English Poetry (
1956)
Motion, A. The Poetry
of Edward Thomas (
1980)
Pound, E. The A B C
of
---. The Selected
Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941, ed. by
1982)
---. The
Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson,
ed. by I. B. Nadel (
of
Read, H. The True
Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry (
1953)
Schneidau, H. N. “Pound
and Wordsworth on Poetry and Prose”, in Romantic and Modern:
Revaluations
of Literary Tradition, ed. by George Bornstein (
Sherry, V., ed. The
Smith,
P. Pound Revised (London and
Canberra: Croom Helm, 1983)
Thurley, G. The
Romantic Predicament (London: Macmillan, 1983)
Witemeyer,
H. “Walter Savage Landor and Ezra Pound”, in Romantic and Modern:
Revaluations of
Literary
Tradition, ed. by George Bornstein (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 147-63
Too often, Modernism is
seen as a wholesale rejection of Romantic poetic precepts and aesthetic
ideals, and as a principled return to a more impersonal, concrete and Classical
set of artistic procedures. The virtue of this essay is that it challenges
any easy separation of Romanticism and Modernism, and it encourages a fresh
look at the continuities in poetic theory from the late eighteenth century
to the mid twentieth century. One vital continuity is found in the empirical
grounding that seems to persist in poetry, despite the transcendental yearnings
of a good deal of Romantic and Victorian lyricism. The essay also prompts
a reconsideration of the role of Ezra Pound as a mediator, and perhaps even
as a poetic conservative, in reformulating, rather than simply blasting
away, inherited Romantic ideals. Pound is discovered to have more positive
and considered views on the work of Victorian poets such as Algernon Charles
Swinburne than many readers might expect. The common ground between Pound
and Edward Thomas likewise suggests that accounts of Modernism as a radical
departure from earlier literary ideals are sometimes overstated. At the
same time, other Modernist poets, including T.S. Eliot, clearly did see
themselves working in opposition to some of the basic formulations of Romantic
theory, including the notion of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’.
This essay opens up new paths of investigation and calls for a new enquiry
into the origins of Modernism and its complex relations with Romanticism.