Ezra Pound As Literary Critic by Emeritus Professor K K Ruthven;K. K. Ruthven;

Author:Emeritus Professor K K Ruthven;K. K. Ruthven; [Ruthven, K.K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134977024
Publisher: TaylorFrancis
Published: 2022-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

The expenditure of all that time and energy was in the interests of creating ‘a grrrreat littttttterary period’ (L 235) through the collective achievements of a literary movement, a ‘modern experiment’ whose ‘justification’, he told Felix Schelling in July 1922, was The Waste Land (L 248). The constituent writers of the modernist movement were to be a loose federation rather than a closely knit group, and bonded together more by common antipathies than by an informed understanding of one another's work. To be in the movement was to ‘be with us’, he told Quinn in April 1918, ‘rather than with the Poetry Book Shop [of Harold Monro] and the Georgian Anthologies, [Lascelles] Abercrombie, Eddie Marsh, etc.’ (L 193). Pound's ultimate put-down of somebody, Aldington recalled (while mocking Pound's French pronunciation), was ‘Il n’est pas dong le mouvemong’ (Aldington 1968:133).

Like Imagisme, le mouvement was a triumph of the signifier, a fiction to confer on individual writers with separate careers in mind the illusion of moving towards a common goal. Ideally, they were to co-operate for what Eliot called their ‘reciprocal benefit’ (Gallup 1970:58), although in fact it was far easier to put their writing into the pages of the same journal than to leave them alone together in the same room: Eliot, for instance, did not much care for Ford's work, or Yeats for the work of Eliot or Lewis, and the only writing Joyce appeared to be interested in was his own. To speculate, as Lewis did, on whether Pound was the Baden-Powell of the mouvement (because ‘he was never satisfied until everything was organized’ (Lewis 1937:254)) was to move dangerously close to the abusers’ position. Adorationist orthodoxy, however, held that if the world's greatest talent scout had to behave like the world's most famous boy scout then so be it: for as Eliot was to write in 1946, who but Pound could have ‘created a situation in which, for the first time, there was a “modern movement in poetry” in which English and American poets collaborated’ (Eliot 1946:330)? And, if you not only had been admitted to Pound's mouvement but were in addition a beneficiary of his services, how could you avoid expressing your gratitude to the man?

For an answer to that question we can turn to one of Pound's principal abusers, Richard Aldington, and the story he told Herbert Read in January 1925 of how he and H.D. had been exploited by a self-promoting careerist who used their poems to draw attention to himself:

Imagism, as written by H.D. and me, was purely our own invention and was not an attempt to put a theory in practice. The ‘school’ was Ezra's invention. And the first imagist anthology was invented by him in order to claim us as his disciples, a manoeuvre we were too naifs (sic) to recognise at the time, being still young enough to trust our friends.

(Aldington 1965:127)

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