Ezra Pound at the Home of William Carlos Williams, Rutherford, New Jersey, June 30, 1958
Labeled as modern poetry’s most distinguished advocate, Ezra Pound brought modern poetry into the public eye forcing the world to notice it. Pound conjured up a continual pursuit for literary advancement. Several very influential meetings with the supreme intellects of his time lead to Pound’s formation of the Imagist Group in 1912 composed of Hilda Doolittle, Richard Aldington, and F.S. Flint. The group was dedicated to discovering new philosophies of thought and experimenting with new changes in verse form. Objectivity, efficiency and creativity seem to be the three pillars that this group was founded on. The poets who call themselves imagists write with these aspects at the forefront of their art.
The selected poems of Pound’s that are in Ramazani’s anthology all show Imagist devotion. Poems like A Pact and In a Station of the Metro exemplify the imagist movement toward simplicity mixed with an objective perspective. The Rest and The Return challenge traditional meter and voice by using lyrical pattern and repetition. Despite the success of these poems, it is interesting to look at other works of Pound and their lack of inclusion in the anthology.
While researching for different works from Pound I discovered from the “Modernist Journals Project” Before Sleep, which was published in the English journal, edited by Wyndham Lewis, called BlastNo. 1 (1914-06-20).
Blast Magazine constructed in 1914
The lateral vibrations caress me,
They leap and caress me,
They work pathetically in my favour,
They seek my financial good.
She of the spear stands present.
The gods of the underworld attend me, O Annubis,
These are they of thy company.
With a pathetic solicitude they attend me;
Undulant,
Their realm is the lateral courses.
Light!
I am up to follow thee, Pallas.
Up and out of their caresses.
You were gone up as a rocket,
Bending your passages from right to left and from left to right
In the flat projection of a spiral.
The gods of drugged sleep attend me,
Wishing me well;
I am up to follow thee, Pallas.
This poem discusses the counter-forces at play on an individual when he or she is awake or asleep. The Reader feels the intense power of light and dark, due to the spelled out descriptions of the actions taking place in the poem. This poem steps away from the bleak open-ended interpretations of Pound’s imagist pieces, and instead relays a clear message that has an intentional emotional agenda for the reader. Pound uses word and phrase repetition in this piece, which is very anti-imagist. He also uses old English style and word choice, suggesting almost a romantic feel.
This shift in writing style arose out of Pound’s work due to his sudden disdain for some of the new forms of Imagist poetry. They began to carry a style of sentimentality that he did not appreciate. Out of this he created a new movement called Vorticism, which suggested a force rather than an image. In this poem in particular the reader can see the prominent dynamistic tone, which came to more minutely define Vorticism. Dynamism can be defined as the quality of being characterized by vigorous activity and progress. There is no need for the reader to infer what is happening in the poem because it is now actually acted out by the speaker.
Great archival work here. It’s important to note that “imagism” isn’t a phrase we can easily apply to all of Pounds poems before a certain time. His “Pact,” for example, departs from those principles in its more didactic quality. But overall, I think you trace the different between that more serene imagism of some of Pound’s work and what he was going for in his Vorticist work.