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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
‘I believe’, Swinburne wrote in 1875, ‘you know my theory that nothing which can possibly be as well said in prose ought ever to be said in verse’. The clarity of the distinction between prose and verse, though in practice a little wobbly, was felt to be actual in Victorian critical thought. It was not the long narrative poems (Maud, The Ring and the Book, Sordello, The Idylls of the King, The Prelude, Amours de Voyage) which undermined the distinction, but the exquisite poëmes en prose of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. To blur the lines between die different kinds of art one wrote poems titled ‘Symphony in Yellow’ (Wilde), ‘Pastel’ (Symons), ‘Prose pour des Esseintes’ (Mallarmé), titled paintings ‘Nocturne’ (Whistler), or created an art form designed to absorb and surpass all others (Wagner). In Marius the Epicurean Walter Pater proved that there was no viable distinction between the language of poetry and language of prose, and in so doing created a language which was richly and grotesquely unique. To talk of poetry in terms of dance, music and painting was to neutralize the pressure of moral judgement, but this did not efface the idea of the ‘poetic’ as something, in some sense, distinct from prose. Though the lines between the two were softened, they did not disappear, becoming, for the following generation, an increasingly problematic aspect of their own art.
1 Swinburne, to Stedman, E. C., 8 09 1875Google Scholar, The Swinburne Letters, ed. Lang, Cecil Y. (New Haven, 1960), vol. 3, p. 67.Google Scholar
2 Much of the material concerning Pound's response to Ford is familiar and has been discussed in Kenner, Hugh, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London, 1951)Google Scholar and, with greater pertinacity, by Schneidau, Herbert N., ‘Ezra Pound's Criticism and the Influence of his Literary Relationships in London, 1908–1920’, Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 1963Google Scholar; in DrSchneidau's, book, Ezra Pound: The Image and the Real (Baton Rouge, 1969)Google Scholar; and Hynes, Samuel, ‘Whitman, Pound, and the Prose Tradition’, in The Presence of Walt Whitman: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Lewis, R. W. B. (New York and London, 1962), pp. 110–36Google Scholar. I would like to suggest in this paper a somewhat wider perspective from which to consider the question of ‘prose’, and, at the same time, to argue for the closeness and interconnexion of Pound's poetics and his verse. I am unpersuaded by Dr Schneidau's argument that the Image of the Imagists was Ford's ‘Impression’ raised several powers. Too much special pleading has the effect of over-inflating, and hence diminishing, Ford's claims upon our attention in this context.
3 Ellmann's, Richard discussion of ‘La Fraisne’ and Yeats's ‘The Madness of King Goll’ is illuminating.Google Scholar See his Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Auden (New York, 1967), pp. 58–9.
4 10 (25 January 1912), 297–9.
5 Pound, Ezra, ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris.XI’, The New Age, 10 (15 02 1912), 370.Google Scholar
6 Pound's relations with Yeats are discussed in Hausermann, H. W., ‘W. B. Yeats's Criticism of Ezra Pound’, English Studies, 29 (08 1948), 97–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parkinson, Thomas, ‘Yeats and Pound: The Illusion of Influence’, Comparative Literature, 6 (Summer 1954), 256–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hutchins, Patricia, ‘Yeats and Pound in England’, Texas Quarterly, 4 (Autumn 1961), 203–16Google Scholar; Schneidau, Herbert N., ‘Pound and Yeats: The Question of Symbolism’, ELH, 32 (1965), 220–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ellmann, , Eminent Domain, pp. 57–87Google Scholar; Jackson, Thomas H., The Early Poetry of Ezra Pound (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), pp. 47–60, 129–40Google Scholar; and Schneidau, , Ezra Pound, pp. 13, 15–16.Google Scholar
7 Letter no. 210 in the Ezra Pound Collection, Yale University Library. These letters were collected and transcribed by Paige, D. D., editor of Pound's Letters.Google Scholar
8 Pound, Ezra, ‘Ford Madox (Hueffer) Ford; Obit’, The Nineteenth Century and After, 126 (08 1939), 179.Google Scholar
9 Letter no. 219 in the Ezra Pound Collection, Yale University Library.
10 Review of High Germany in The Poetry Review, 1 (March 1912), 133.
11 Pound, Ezra, ‘Prolegomena’, The Poetry Review, 1 (02 1912), 75.Google Scholar
12 Pound, Ezra, ‘Status Rerum’, Poetry, 1 (01 1913), 125.Google Scholar
13 Paige, D. D. (ed.), The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941 (London, 1951), p. 58.Google Scholar
14 Ford, Ford Madox, Thus to Revisit: Some Reminiscences (London, 1921), pp. 206–7Google Scholar. Emphasis added.
15 Hueffer, Ford Madox, ‘Modern Poetry’, The Thrush, 1 (12 1909), 39–53.Google Scholar
16 Hueffer, Ford Madox, The Critical Attitude (London, 1911), pp. 27–8.Google Scholar
17 Hueffer, Ford Madox, ‘Impressionism – Some Speculations. II’, Poetry, 2 (09 1913), 222Google Scholar; reprinted in Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, ed. MacShane, Frank (Lincoln, Neb., 1964), pp. 139–52.Google Scholar
18 Hueffer, , The Critical Attitude, p. 97.Google Scholar
19 Poetry, 2 (August 1913), 179. This essay is collected in MacShane, Frank (ed.), The Critical Writings oj Ford Madox Ford (Lincoln, Neb., 1964).Google Scholar
20 Pound, Ezra, ‘In Metre’, The New Freewoman, 1 (15 09 1913), 132.Google Scholar
21 Pound, Ezra, ‘The Approach to Paris’, The New Age, 13 (2 10 1913), 662.Google Scholar
22 Pound, Ezra, ‘Peals of Iron’, Poetry, 3 (12 1913), 132.Google Scholar
23 Pound, Ezra, [Review of] Love Poems and OthersGoogle Scholar, by Lawrence, D. H., Poetry, 2 (07 1913), 149–51.Google Scholar
24 Pound, Ezra, ‘The Approach to Paris’, The New Age, 13 (2 10 1913), 662Google Scholar. Cf. Hutchins, Patricia, ‘Ezra Pound's “Approach to Paris”’, Southern Review, 6 (Spring 1970), 340–55.Google Scholar
25 The ‘Contemporania’ poems appeared in Poetry (April and November 1913), The Smart Set (December 1913), Poetry and Drama (March 1914), Blast (June 1914), Poetry (August 1914), Blast (July 1915) and Pound's, Catholic Anthology (1915)Google Scholar. Fifty out of a total of 68 ‘Contemporania’ poems were collected in the unabridged edition of Lustra (1916).
26 Pound, Ezra, Collected Shorter Poems (2nd ed., London, 1968), p. 110Google Scholar. Further references to CSP will be made in the text.
27 CSP, p. 95. Strachey's name has been silently deleted from the text as it appeared in Poetry (April 1913) ; there are other textual revisions to the ‘Contemporania’ poems.
28 Pound, Ezra, ‘America: Chances and Remedies’, The New Age, 13 (8 05 1913), 34.Google Scholar
29 Hynes, Samuel, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton and London, 1968)Google Scholar contains a valuable account of the nature of censorship in Edwardian society.
30 The review appeared anonymously, though Hynes (The Edwardian Turn of Mind, p. 295 ) remarks that ‘This is the style, and these are the opinions of Strachey’.
31 ‘A Poisonous Book’, The Spectator (20 November 1909), pp. 846–7 ; quoted in Hynes, , The Edwardian Turn of Mind, p. 294Google Scholar. For Wells's reaction to this review, see Experiment in Autobiography (London, 1934), vol. 2, p. 471.
32 Strachey, , The Adventure of Living (London, 1922), p. 322Google Scholar; quoted in Martin, Wallace, ‘The New Age’ Under Orage (Manchester and New York, 1967), p. 2n.Google Scholar
33 Yeats, W. B. to Gosse, Edmund, 25 02 1912Google Scholar, Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Wade, Allan (London, 1954), pp. 565–6Google Scholar. Yeats hoped to prevent similar measures of censorship being imposed in Ireland, seeing that it was ‘an attack on opinion pretending to be an attack on morals’.
34 Belasco, David (1854–1931)Google Scholar, American playwright and producer, was noted for the realistic stage settings of his productions.
35 Yeats, W. B. to Gregory, Lady, 3 01 1913Google Scholar; quoted in Jeffares, A. N., W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet (New Haven, 1949), p. 167.Google Scholar
36 Lawrence, W. G. to his mother, 28 01 1914Google Scholar, The Home Letters of T. E. Lawrence and His Brothers (Oxford, 1954), p. 496.
37 McNair, H. F. (ed.), Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell: Correspondence of a Friendship (Chicago and London, 1945), p. 255.Google Scholar
38 Read, Forrest (ed.), Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound's Essays on Joyce (New York, [1967]), pp. 61–2.Google Scholar