Professor Langdon
Hammer: Last Wednesday,
talking about the poetry of
World War I, we were talking
about poems written in the
period 1914 to 1918,
pretty much the period of the
First World War.
This is a period that we've
already had a certain amount to
say about.
It is the period in which Frost
starts writing,
publishes A Boy's Will
in London and then North of
Boston in 1915.
It's the same period in which
Yeats's work undergoes its
important stylistic shift in
development in the volume called
Responsibilities and
other books from the teens
exemplified in that little poem
"A Coat."
It is a period in which,
in London itself,
are gathered Frost,
Yeats, Pound and Eliot – all
poets we'll study – not simply
gathered but interacting,
talking to each other,
reading each other's work and
giving each other ideas and
criticism.
Another figure in this milieu
and of this moment is the poet
H.D.
Here, she is in a photo from
1915 with a locket in a poetical
pose.
Let's see, I've some other
photos of the poet here.
 
 
Let's see.
 
 
 
This is as an older woman and
in a familiar place,
seated.
She's on the left,
well, on your left,
my right, with her companion
Brhyer right here.
 
And that nice man in the middle
is one of my predecessors in
this position,
Norman Holmes Pearson,
a professor of modern poetry:
one of the founders of American
Studies at Yale and one of the
people involved in the creation
of the incredible archive of
modern poetry in the Beinecke
Library,
where we have the papers of
Ezra Pound; H.D.;
lots of materials from Williams;
 
 
Langston Hughes;
and many other figures.
Let's see, there she is on her
seventieth birthday in the nave
of Sterling Memorial Library.
 
Well, and this is over in the
Beinecke, too.
That is her death mask.
 
Well, we've gone a long way
from that young woman with the
locket to this point.
 
Let's return to her in her
youth.
This is also over in the
Beinecke.
It's a photo of H.D.,
and it is inscribed,
"To Marianne Moore," her friend
and Pound's friend.
On your handout,
you'll see the interesting
anecdote relayed from Hilda
Doolittle's
Autobiographies:
I had never heard of
vers libre until I
was discovered by Ezra Pound.
[Pound did a lot for modern
poetry, including naming H.D.]
I did a few poems that I don't
think Ezra liked,
but later he was beautiful
about my first authentic verses
and sent my poems in for me to
Miss Monroe.
[That is Harriet Monroe,
the editor, a very powerful
woman, of Poetry
magazine.]
He signed them for me,
"H.D., Imagiste."
The name seems to have stuck
somehow.
[H.D.,
Autobiographies]
Well, this is a wonderful
anecdote, sometimes told
differently, in which Pound and
H.D.
– as she would come to be
known – were conversing about
her poems in a coffee shop.
 
And Pound put at the end of
H.D.'s poems a new signature to
them ("H.D.," that is) and at
the same time named the kind of
poet she was ("Imagiste") and
promptly,
since Pound is a great
entrepreneur,
sent the poems off to be
published and to found a
movement.
It's an interesting and telling
story.
I suppose if--This was
Poetry magazine,
its cover, where you see poems
by Pound and others that
included H.D.'s work in the same
volume.
There are a couple of things to
be said about this little
anecdote.
First of all,
there's the kind of complicated
literary exchange of a man
telling a woman what to call
herself,
and, in fact,
doing it for her and sending
it, her name and her work,
to be published.
The name "Imagiste" is funny.
It seems to,
well, it seems to evoke
something excitingly and
pretentiously foreign.
And you could remember the
force of French painting in this
period.
You know, everything that was
modern came from Paris,
it seemed.
And here is Pound trying to,
in effect, create something,
some similar kind of public
relations excitement for poetry.
"Imagiste" highlights,
well, it highlights the word
"image," and it highlights the
visual, as if poetry were a kind
of painting.
That's important.
And then there's the fact of
Hilda Doolittle's transformation
into H.D.
I don't know.
Is the name Hilda Doolittle
insufficiently poetic?
The compression of that kind of
wonderfully homely American name
into the enigmatic initials
"H.D."
seems emblematic of Imagist
aesthetics in general,
which depend on the radical
compression of language and the
conversion of,
well, the prosaic and everyday
to the essential.
 
And you could say that here
Pound is trying to do something
with the same ideal of extreme
economy with H.D.'s name.
What was Imagism?
 
This is a, well,
these are copies of H.D.'s
poems as they appeared in
Poetry magazine,
the poem "Hermes of the Ways."
 
H.D.
was – and there's her
initials right here,
this new pen name she went
under – she is writing,
even in this very early phase,
poems that have classical
subjects and antecedents and are
sometimes,
in fact, translations from
classical sources from the Greek
anthology and others.
Here is one,
"Epigram," after the Greek,
and then here's H.D.'s name
followed by the "Imagiste,"
in quotation marks,
identification that Pound has
introduced.
Imagism was,
initially, marketed – I think
that's the fair word to use –
in a series of anthologies that
collected this new,
exciting, representatively,
it seemed, modern poetry in an
anthology called Des
Imagistes--again
French-ified.
And then, you can see this is
from 1914, and it's published in
London and New York.
And then, well,
I'll tell you its table of
contents.
It's got poems by H.D.'s friend
and lover, also a soldier poet,
Richard Aldington,
H.D.
herself, F.S.
Flint and others,
including Amy Lowell and
William Carlos Williams.
 
James Joyce appears here,
and Ezra Pound,
who here has at least a couple
of poems that you've read for
today.
This was followed a little bit
later by this book called
Some Imagist Poets in
1915.
At this point,
Pound is no longer the master
entrepreneur,
and the movement has rather
been taken over by the very
amply represented Amy Lowell who
has become the primary exponent
of Imagism already by 1915.
 
And Pound has more or less
despaired of his own creation,
Imagism, and now complains of
it as being merely "Amygism," as
he referred to it.
 
Amy, well, you can see in this
a kind of, oh you know,
envy and competition on Pound's
part.
He's unhappy that his little
group has been taken over by Amy
Lowell, and so he doesn't want
to have anything to do with it.
Amy Lowell herself would later
become distressed at the
proliferation of Imagism and
Imagists and attempt to
copyright the name,
which she was unable to do.
Well, this was her longest
statement of poetics,
presented as a preface to that
volume, and I recommend it to
you.
It's an interesting statement
of Imagism.
And here's a photo of Pound
from the same period.
 
Pound, despite Amy Lowell's
taking over of Imagism,
remains the real theorist of
Imagism and the one whose
formulations we still return to
in order to understand what
Imagism was and,
to an extent,
to understand some of the
essential aesthetic ideas and
criteria of modern poetry.
 
On our handout,
you have Pound's rules – he
liked to make rules – for
writing an Imagist poem.
Happily, there are just three
of them, not too many:
(1) Direct treatment of
the "thing," whether subjective
or objective.
(2) To use absolutely no word
that did not contribute to the
presentation.
[We can see even in his
telegraphic rules here he's
trying to be economical.
 
And:]
(3) As regarding rhythm:
to compose in sequence of the
musical phrase,
not in sequence of the
metronome.
Well, these are each suggestive
and, as I say,
important ideas.
And they're worth dwelling on
to understand some of what
directs Pound's thinking and
some of Pound's important
influence early on in the
development of modern poetry.
 
First of all,
that focus on the "thing."
A poem is imagined here as an
image of a thing.
There's a kind of empiricism in
this, isn't there?
A kind of vaguely scientific
language.
And if you look in Pound's
retrospect, when he goes back
and reprints some of his writing
about Imagism and reflects on it
in that essay that's in the back
of your anthology,
you'll see Pound talking about
his wish to ally poetry with
science rather than
advertisement.
And here you can see him really
trying to do so in this stress
on objectivity or the aim or
objectivity.
Notice that the "thing" may be,
as he says, "subjective or
objective."
But when we call it a "thing,"
this has the effect of turning
even the subjective into
something objective,
something oddly objective.
And there's also,
in that first rule,
a kind of emphasis on
directness, you know,
direct treatment of the thing.
 
That's important.
 
All this leads to,
in Pound's second principle
there, the idea of concision,
of efficiency.
Nothing that does "not
contribute to the presentation":
you know, "Hilda Doolittle,
your name is too long;
H.D."
"Presentation";
Pound doesn't say
"representation."
He says, "presentation."
 
Again, there's an emphasis on
immediacy, directness,
an ideal of presence,
if you will.
There is, in Pound,
a will to override or do away
with mediation,
to bypass, in a way,
the medium;
to make the word a thing;
to make the word an image and
the image a thing.
"Direct" also implies a kind of
stripping down of rhetorical
ornament – the idea,
again, that we saw in Frost
that the truth is something you
arrive at through reduction,
or in Yeats's little poem "A
Coat."
And remember that Yeats and
Frost are coming to these ideas
at just the same time that Pound
is finding these formulations
for his own poetics.
 
These ideas in Frost,
in Stevens--excuse me,
in Frost, in Yeats – not in
Stevens,
importantly – and here
centrally expressed by Pound,
these ideas all point to a kind
of radical skepticism in modern
poetry towards imagination and
towards rhetoric.
There's a skepticism about
poetry's own illusion-making
powers.
There's a kind of linguistic
skepticism here.
And good poetry has a kind of
ascetic dimension for Pound,
or so it seems at this point.
Finally, that third point about
prosody, that's important too:
what Pounds calls the kind of
priority of "the musical phrase"
over "the sequence of the
metronome,"
the musical phrase over a kind
of bigger and regularized
pattern.
That's a kind of privileging of
the part, the smaller thing over
the whole and certainly over
repetition.
It's a privileging of
individual detail over pattern
or sequence.
It's a privileging of this idea
of the musical phrase over the
abstract, or a kind of
continuous structure,
which is viewed as a kind of
mechanical discipline.
All of these ideas are
rehearsed, again,
by Amy Lowell,
and given sometimes somewhat
different emphases.
 
And you can compare her account.
 
Well, let's look at some of
H.D.'s poems to see Imagism at
work, as it were,
at least as practiced by H.D.
 
 
A number of the early poems
here in your anthology come from
her book, Sea Garden,
a wonderful and fascinating
first book that imagines the
poems themselves as constituting
together a kind of,
well, sea garden – a kind of
enclosed space – that offers
reflection on symbolic objects
that suggest a kind of allegory
of poetic activity for H.D.
in which flowers stand for kind
of poems, certainly kinds of
feeling.
And the garden itself
constitutes a certain kind of
pastoral, imaginative space.
And H.D.
has classical sources for this,
Greek models for this.
 
And the crucial poet for her is
Sappho.
And like Sappho,
H.D.
is a lyric poet of sexual
desire.
You can see her translation of
Sappho's fragment 68 on page
389.
Let's look at the poem "Garden"
on page 396, which gives a sense
of H.D.'s aesthetic--ascetic,
aesthetic program.
 
 
 
Here, there's an address to the
rose, the traditional symbol of
romantic beauty:
I You are clear
O rose, cut in rock,
hard as the descent of hail.
I could scrape the colour
from the petals
like spilt dye from a rock.
 
If I could break you
I could break a tree.
If I could stir
I could break a tree--
I could break you. II
O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.
Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air--
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.
Cut the heat--
plow through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.
The rose, image of romantic
beauty: you could compare it to
the rose in Yeats's early poems.
 
But here the image is
transformed.
H.D.'s emphasis is not on its
softness or sweetness or sensual
abundance, its richness of color
or touch.
Instead, the rose is "clear"
and "hard," just as an Imagist
poem is supposed to be.
 
It is cut in rock.
 
You could compare it to "Sea
Rose" on page 395,
the page before:
Rose, harsh rose,
marred with stint of petals,
meager flower, thin,
sparse of leaf,
[where again,
it seems H.D.
is writing about her poem and
its properties]
…
Stunted, with small leaf,
you are flung on the sand,
you are lifted
in the crisp sand
that drives in the wind.
 
Can the spice-rose
drip such acrid fragrance
hardened in a leaf?"
This is a poetry that wishes to
convey to us an acrid fragrance
in hardened forms.
In "Garden," too, H.D.
 
is interested in a kind of
experience that is harsh or
astringent, that would open
itself to elemental forces –
here represented by the wind –
forces that suggest human
passion as much as weather,
and that would transform the
poet's torpor and heat and do so
specifically through the action
of cutting,
which is important.
Here, and really in all these
early poems, H.D.'s poems take
place as a kind of lyric drama
of apostrophe:
that is,
the act of address through
which a speaker finds her voice
by speaking in some relation to
a part of the object world;
speaking to a thing,
which she identifies with or
struggles against or both,
as is the case,
I think, in the poems I've just
read.
Here, too, you could see these
images in H.D.'s poems as,
in some sense,
things "subjective or
objective," to take Pound's
phrase.
The extreme compression of
these poems expresses a kind of
wish for intensity,
as if by compacting things you
made them more fierce--sometimes
a wish for breaking or cutting,
and, you might say,
fragmenting of things to get
down to essential parts;
to do away with the,
let's say, lassitude of mere
rhetoric;
and to cut to what is essential.
Well, "Oread" is maybe H.D.'s
most famous poem from her early
work and a poem often presented
as a paradigm of Imagism.
If so, it makes us see Imagism
in somewhat different terms from
those Pound presented.
 
It is, like the other poems
I've just been discussing,
a kind of dramatic monologue,
which was not something that
Pound's ideas emphasized.
 
Here "Oread" is the name for a
wood nymph, and it indicates the
speaker of the poem who says:
Whirl up, sea--
Whirl your pointed pines,
Splash your great pines
On our rocks,
Hurl your green over us,
Cover us with your pools of
fir.
Again, there's a kind of lyric
act of apostrophe,
of address, where what is
implored would be a kind of
overwhelming experience.
 
Who or what exactly is Oread?
 
Is this nymph addressing?
 
It's hard to say.
 
Is she speaking,
in fact, to the sea as she
seems to be?
"Whirl up, sea--… / splash
your great pines over us."
 
Or is she speaking to the woods
and the pines as if they were
the sea?
It's hard to decide.
It is a poem that presents a
kind of enigma on that level and
doesn't resolve the question it
provokes.
The very brevity of the poem
expresses a kind of wish for
intensity that is right on the
edge of canceling the poem,
you could say,
leaving us nothing there at
all.
A speaker, in this case,
who wishes to be covered up,
to be subject to a greater
force.
And the poem leaves us with
this cognitive problem,
the difficulty of identifying
what is figure or ground,
what is literal or what is
metaphor.
That is, whether she is
speaking to sea or pines,
seeing the sea like pines or
the pines like the sea.
 
"The Pool" is another enigmatic
poem here, one that poses
questions.
Well, this problem that "Oread"
raises is, in fact,
one that you see in other
Imagist poems,
the question of what is literal
and what is figurative.
 
Pound, again,
theorizes this--the effects
that I'm trying to describe.
 
In the middle quotation on your
handout, he speaks of the idea
of instantaneity or suddenness.
 
He talks about the poem as
constituting a "complex" of
elements held together,
made in some sense simultaneous
with one another;
rather, you know,
as "Oread" holds sea and pines
together in a way that asks us
to see these elements as joined.
 
Pound says:
An "Image" is that which
presents an intellectual and
emotional complex in an instant
of time.
[And when he uses that word
"complex," it has,
perhaps, certain resonances
from psychoanalysis and also,
perhaps, from chemistry.]
It is the presentation of such
a "complex" instantaneously
which gives that sense of sudden
liberation;
that sense of freedom from time
limits and space limits;
that sense of sudden growth,
which we experience in the
presence of the greatest works
of art.
[And then he says (one of my
favorite quotations):]
It is better to present one
image in a lifetime than to
produce voluminous works [Pound,
"A Few Donts by an Imagist,"
Poetry]
You could see "Oread" as a poem
wishing for and seeking that
"sense of sudden liberation"
that Pound talks about here.
 
It's important,
again, that Pound emphasizes
presentation.
It is the presentation rather
than the representation of such
a complex, as he describes it.
How is presentation different
from representation?
For Pound, the literary image
is not a memory of a prior
reality, a reflection;
but is rather something more
like a new experience itself.
 
Not an imitation of a thing,
but itself a kind of thing.
Again, in Pound,
as Pound thinks about these
things, there's a drive
specifically through technique
to arrive at a kind of
transparency beyond technique.
This is also,
it should be emphasized,
a Romantic project.
 
The image gives a kind of
epiphany, a visionary
experience, for both poet and
reader;
gives us sudden liberation from
historical particularities of
place and of time.
 
Let's look at Pound's own poem
"In a Station of the Metro,"
which is on page 351 as an
important test case and example
for this poetics.
 
 
 
It has the honor of being the
shortest famous poem in modern
poetry.
You can memorize it.
"In a Station of the Metro" and
wonderfully, when I've said the
title I've already said a third
of the poem:
The apparition of these
faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet,
black bough.
"In a Station of the Metro."
 
"The apparition of these faces
in the crowd," semicolon,
"petals on a wet,
black bough."
Not many elements.
 
The title--how does it function?
 
It functions as a kind of
locator.
It places us somewhere.
 
It places us specifically in
the Paris underground,
in a station of the metro.
 
As I said, that title really
is, well, you could understand
it as standing outside the poem
or really as a part of the poem
itself.
Lines one and two,
again, pose for us this
question of, "what is the figure
and what is ground?"
 
What is being observed and what
is the metaphor it is
generating?
Are we, in fact;
is Pound observing faces and
comparing them to petals on a
wet, black bough?
 
Is he seeing both those things
in some sense?
We have here two elements
joined and compressed,
radically.
Probably, it's wrong to speak
here of metaphor or,
for that matter,
simile.
But rather, we can use the word
that Pound uses,
"image," or,
as he would later call it,
"ideogram," borrowing from his
ideas about Chinese writing.
 
The key to this poem,
as to other Poundian poems,
is syntax.
Syntax is the temporal ordering
of language, the ordering of a
sentence's unfolding and
consequently the definition of
its elements and the
relationships among them.
 
Pound has here a kind of
abbreviated parataxis,
that is, a syntax of series.
 
Here, only two elements are in
that series.
The series is joined by an
"and," usually.
But here there is no "and."
 
Here, the syntax is compressed
in the service of rendering what
is, in effect,
a new kind of perception:
a perception that is modern,
urban, of the crowd,
momentary;
but also, as Pound conceives
it, timeless,
pointing us allusively to
historical and cultural
overlays.
We're in Paris,
but this literary form draws on
Japanese verse models and
Japanese pictorial aesthetics.
The time is now,
the present,
"these faces."
This is self-consciously an
image or picture of modernity,
but it's also the picture of an
underground that inevitably
recalls the classical underworld
and so also recalls the long
poetic history of comparing dead
souls to leaves,
which you find in Homer,
Virgil, Dante,
Milton.
Here, it's as if an epic simile
from one of those great poems
had been taken out and presented
to us in fragmentary form.
All of this,
this kind of rich,
allusive overlay,
is created through a kind of
stripping down to the poem's
essential, primary elements.
Pound gives us the story of the
poem's composition here,
which, whether it's true or
not, is an important poetic
fable that stands behind this
poem.
He says:
Three years ago [in your
footnote]
in Paris, I got out of a
'metro' train at La Concorde,
and saw suddenly a beautiful
face, and then another and
another, and then a beautiful
child's face,
and then another beautiful
woman, [you know,
a whole series]
and I tried all that day to
find words for what this had
meant to me,
and I could not find any words
that seemed to me worthy,
or as lovely as that sudden
emotion.
[Again, suddenness.]
And that evening… I was still
trying and I found,
suddenly, [another experience
of suddenness]
the expression.
I do not mean that I found
words, but there came an
equation… not in speech,
but in little splotches of
colour….
The 'one-image poem' is a form
of a super-position,
that is to say,
it is one idea getting out of
the impasse in which I had been
left by my metro emotion.
I wrote a 30-line poem and
destroyed it….
Six months later I made a poem
half that length;
a year later I made the
following hokku-like
[haiku-like]
sentence.
So there, interestingly,
this poem that purports to
present – and "present,"
again, is the right word rather
than "represent" – a moment of
intense, vivid spontaneous
emotion is arrived at,
as Pound describes it,
through laborious technique and
overtime.
And that technique is
concentrated specifically on
what?
Compression,
cutting things down and
eliminating words.
Again, as in Frost's "Mowing,"
the truth is something you get
down to by cutting away
rhetorical ornament.
Pound takes Japanese and
Chinese poetries as models for
this aesthetics of compression.
 
And it's worth stressing that
on the one hand Pound is
polemically writing in protest
against late nineteenth-century
drawing rooms that are crowded
with bric-a-brac and the
ornamental aestheticism of,
well, of a poet such as
Swinburne or even the early
Yeats.
And yet, Pound's taste for
Japanese and Chinese art comes
right out of Victorian decadence
and--well,
you can see this yourselves if
you look at the paintings of
James Whistler and others.
 
Pound is a polemical modernist
artist who is also really,
as he looks right here,
a Victorian decadent.
For Pound, compression in
Japanese and Chinese poems means
implication.
And that's what he's really
interested in getting at.
 
In your RIS handout,
you'll see his translation of
Li Po's "Jewel Stairs'
Grievance," as Pound renders it.
In Pound's handling, he says:
The jewelled steps are
already quite white with dew,
[Again, this is a dramatic
monologue]
It is so late that the dew
soaks my gauze stockings,
And I let down the crystal
curtain
And watch the moon through the
clear autumn.
And then Pound,
ever the teacher,
in his poems as elsewhere,
says in his presentation of
this poem:
Note.--Jewel stairs,
therefore a palace.
Grievance, therefore there is
something to complain of.
Gauze stockings,
therefore a court lady [is
doing the complaining],
not a servant who complains.
Clear autumn,
therefore, he [he for whom she
was waiting]
has no excuse on account of the
weather.
Also she has come early,
for the dew has not merely
whitened the stairs,
but soaks her stockings.
 
The poem is especially prized
because she utters no direct
reproach.
Here, as Pound unfolds it for
us, does his explaining for us,
the human situation is inferred
from the scene because it is so
exactly rendered.
And the power of sentiment is
felt, not through its direct
expression but rather through a
kind of deliberate restraint,
"The poem is especially prized
because she utters no direct
reproach."
Narrative here,
in this poem as in other
instances of Pound's work,
is displaced by the pictorial,
or you might say is not so much
displaced as condensed in it.
 
All that matters of the story
of a lover's grief can be told
in a quatrain.
Well, I'm going to finish in
just a moment,
but I want to suggest a further
dimension to this aesthetic that
I'm trying to describe.
In other translations from the
Chinese, Pound – who didn't
know Chinese,
and I'll say a little bit more
about that next time – builds
a kind of layered narrative out
of discrete images and finds a
way to,
in a sense, not simply create a
poetry of radical compression,
but rather a poetry that
expands out of this Imagistic
basis.
The "River Merchant's Wife:
A Letter" on page 352 is an
example, and it's one of the
really great love poems of
modern poetry.
Like the "Jewel Stairs'
Grievance," it is a dramatic
monologue for a female speaker,
but these are different poems.
By the end of this one,
the wife speaks very directly,
not in reproach but in
self-knowledge and pained
desire.
The leaves fall early
this autumn, in wind.
 
The paired butterflies are
already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West
garden;
They hurt me.
I grow older.
If you are coming down through
the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
Of the paired yellow
butterflies, the wife says with
sublime simplicity,
"They hurt me.
/ I grow older."
It's possible to forget that
the speaker who says this is
sixteen, not thirty-six.
 
But her age makes no difference.
 
She is already grasping – as
you too will have – through,
in this case,
the pain of her separation from
her husband that the essential
experience of living in time is
loss.
With this recognition,
Pound's poem reaches out of the
confines of its Imagism toward
something much larger.
 
And at the same time,
you see him carrying forward
the Imagist's "don'ts."
 
This poem is a direct treatment
of feeling.
It uses absolutely no word that
does not contribute to the
presentation,
and it is composed in the
sequence of the musical phrase,
not that of the metronome,
with those dramatically varying
line lengths.
