“The lighting of the lamps”

T. E. HULME, D. H. LAWRENCE, T. S. ELIOT, EZRA POUND, H.D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE)

The big outdoors of Thomas and Frost, peopled by common men and women rooted in a landscape, is an increasingly rare scenario in the urban worlds of the twentieth century. There is landscape, but unpeopled; and there is the thronging city. Also increasingly rare is a poetry that is not concerned with itself, a poetry not about poetry, pretending to be process but actually being about the process. The “decadent,” experimental legacy of the fin-de-siècle, deflected by the Wilde affair, began to emerge from the shadows. Yeats never made any bones about it: poetry was not a civic activity. Art began the process of understanding by understanding itself, and this could involve the singling out of its own resources and techniques, bringing them forward, experimenting with them. Swinburne—undervalued as he currently is—was the most successful experimentalist, obsessively fascinated with the properties of meter and rhythm. He is less a Victorian than an early modernist. So, too, Aubrey Beardsley: fascinated with line, and not only with line but with line on paper, the medium never allowing the viewer to forget it, even as the image struggled in its louche web. And Henry James, building a syntax more and more nuanced, extended, each extension delving into smaller and smaller crannies of character and motive, action in a patient catalepsy.

Experiment was not intended to foreground the artist, and yet because the art contrived—in its exaggeration of certain elements, its exclusion of others—to reveal its contrivance, the artist became a focus of curiosity. Experiments in different mediums were received by consumers—the age of the consumer had arrived—without new understanding. Critics voiced outrage and gave the new work a kind of notoriety, but the poet or artist was denied a critical context. Criticism did not try to extend understanding but to limit it: the word “no” replaced “how” and “why.” What the poet intended literally was read in the old symbolic way. The weird narratives of Swinburne were taken in the same spirit as the narratives of Crabbe or Wordsworth and found morally obnoxious (well, they are). And were not the inspirations for such things foreign, especially French? Were the lives of our Bohemian artists not based on a deplorable foreign model? Was there not rather too much of the love that dares not speak its name in their circles, too much moral liberality? The critics, some of them remarkably astute and eloquent men (all of them men) missed the joke and missed, too, the serious investigation that was under way. For them art and morality were indissoluble; art for art’s sake was immoral. No doubt art and morality are indissoluble; yet the moral and the orthodox are not synonymous. On the day that Oscar Wilde was sentenced, Richard Garnett, editor of the British Museum catalogue, predicted that British poetry would be dead for fifty years. Respectability and poetry were never comfortable bedfellows. Poetry was doomed to be what it already largely was in Britain, a minor art: the Rhymers and then the Georgians, with only Hardy, Yeats, Kipling, and arguably Housman to suggest that it might be something more. And only Yeats had time for the experimentalists.

Change and renewal would have to insinuate themselves subtly, would have to come from unexpected places, undefended flanks. A Trojan horse. And so they did: a Cambridge philosopher-mathematician, a Midland lad from the working classes, a gang of Americans. The seeds of change were very curious.

...I was bound

Motionless and faint of breath

By loveliness that is her own eunuch.

Minor poetry and singularly unpromising, almost comical in the absence of tone: self-parodying. Thomas Ernest Hulme is an enigma. For T. S. Eliot he was “the author of two or three of the most beautiful short poems in the language.” Was it two or three, and which were they? All of his very few poems were very short. Michael Roberts, the great modern-verse anthologist, admired Hulme’s critical and philosophical work and extended many of his ideas, writing an excellent study of him. Modern readers consider him more in the light of his thought and influence than of his poetry. The poems he wrote are “beautiful” in Eliot’s sense, though very much the fruit of their period. They illustrate his critical arguments but remain peripheral, where his thought is central to any serious consideration of modern poetry, as it is to the reappraisal of the poetry of the past.

Hulme was born in 1883 at Gratton Hall, the family home, in Endon, Staffordshire. In 1901 he went up to Cambridge on a scholarship to study mathematics. In 1904 he was sent down suddenly for unspecified reasons—something to do with libidinal adventures. He tried a course in biology and physics at University College, London, commuting to Cambridge to attend philosophy lectures. Impatient of authority, he dropped out and left England in 1906, taking a cargo boat to Canada. There he experienced—on “the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin-prairie of Western Canada”—the “necessity or inevitableness” of verse. He sensed the “chasm” between man and God, “the fright of the mind before the unknown.” The sheer weight, the tall abundance of those northern spaces, compacted his language: it tried to become hard, definite, resistant like stone.

He returned to Europe in 1907 and studied in Brussels with the philosophers Henri Bergson and Jules de Gaultier and the critic Rémy de Gourmont. In 1908, with the pressure of his Canadian experience and the suspiciously foreign perspectives and skills he’d acquired on the Continent, he arrived back in London and founded the short-lived Poets’ Club, a convivial discussion group. His next club did not have a name. It met at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant in Soho. There, in company with F. S. Flint, Edward Storer, Ezra Pound and perhaps Wyndham Lewis, among others, he read poems and discussed his theory of the “image” in poetry.

His ideas were derivative—of Bergson, de Gourmont, de Gaultier and others. He was a lucid assimilator and proselytizer. In 1911 he published a series of essays on Bergson, and in 1912 the “Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme” were published in January in the New Age and again (more this time) as an appendix to Pound’s collection Ripostes. Hulme’s actual collected poems—there were so few, he is like a poet of ancient Greece whose work survives in fragments—were published in 1960 in A. R. Jones’s The Life and Opinions of T. E. Hulme. As well as the poems and essays, he published translations of Bergson and Georges Sorel. Speculations and Notes on Language and Style, collections of fragments and short essays, were published posthumously. He planned many further works but fell in action in Flanders in 1917.

He was not academically trained in literature: he was an outsider in the literary milieu he chose—or created—in London. It needed a clear-headed outsider to begin diagnosing the infirmities of British poetry (and British culture more widely) and to propose remedies. He reacted most passionately against the facility of the 1890s poets, their self-indulgence; he was equally unfriendly to much of the “new” verse of the day, the emerging Georgianism. He and his friends discussed Oriental forms, the tanka and haiku, vers libre (“free,” or unmetered verse) and “poems in a sacred Hebrew form.” They countered prolixity with precise brevity, refuted the “vacuity” of their contemporaries with what they conceived as vivid, tight-lipped images. F. S. Flint recalled that much of their discussion was about poetic craft, one point de repère being French writers such as Jules Laforgue, a particular influence. Hulme insisted on “absolutely accurate representation and no verbiage.” What at first seems a refreshing naïveté in his attitude to language in relation to the world proves to be the fruit of a deep radicalism, his sense of that world inferred through language itself.

The Continental and historical models Hulme chooses, and his rejection of Romanticism, are part of a wider mission. With Wyndham Lewis he rejects a man-centered worldview and repudiates the principle of continuity. This principle is so prevalent a preconception, informs so many of our institutions and beliefs, that we believe it describes reality, when in fact it is but one way of conceptualizing it. We tend, because we are conditioned to believe in continuity, to draw back from gaps and jumps in nature, and between ourselves and nature. Hulme posits discontinuity between various realms of thought, the possibility of creating new kinds of connection, new forms. In this context “image” means that things not normally associated can be brought together into significant relationship; that relationships independent of normal ideas of continuity and logic can be resonant. This is the core of the Imagist revolution at its most pure, a revolution Hulme catalyzed, though he did not contribute to the Imagist anthologies or participate in their polemics. He seems to have stood back to watch his mischief take effect. Imagism stresses that poetry communicates metaphorically, not logically.

His program was for a neoclassical poetry: free to find or make associations without reference to “continuous contexts”: accurate and hard, intellectual, precise, and pessimistic, for man is small (those vast Canadian spaces had shown him how small), an animal, and fallen. These ideas or orientations develop differently in Eliot and Lewis.

Lecturing in 1914, Hulme argued against meter: “It enables people to write verse with no poetic inspiration, and whose mind [sic] is not stored with new images.” The word “inspiration” has the aspect of an unpurged residue from the very ideologies he set his cap against, but what he says of meter is crucial. Meter is a facilitator; poetry is not a facile art. Meter and the rhetorics that go with it can take over and inflate a poem, can impose a lax diction and deform ideas if it is unskillfully handled. The unit of significance in the poem, he argues, is not the word but the phrase or sentence; a poet, he argues, should consider the effect of the whole poem, not its local felicities. Vers libre had a crucial attraction for him and those who learned from, or with him. Here is the kernel of William Carlos Williams’s “variable foot” and of Charles Olson’s “breath” theories. If not the word, if not the “continuity” of syntactical units, then the line becomes the crucial unit, and a poem is a construction made less of words than of lines, each with a dynamic that harmonizes or contrasts with those that precede and follow. Rhythm in short and long measures displaces meter, and the appraisal of rhythm becomes a matter of acute instinct and discrimination. The metronome can be thrown away.

Hulme rejected Romanticism largely because of what he saw as its grandiloquent optimism, its inherent faith in progress, or what Hardy called “evolutionary meliorism.” He saw man as “a fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.” Though temperamentally hostile to authority, he proposes an authoritarian ethic. The new classical poet knows he is made of clay, that he’s physically and perceptually finite. “He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas.”

Bergson taught him distinctions (he might have learned them from Coleridge) that he introduced back into English poetic discourse: between intellect and intuition. Intellect analyzes and is the language of prose; intuition, the language of poetry, places the artist “back within the object by a kind of sympathy and breaking down... the barrier that space puts between him and his model.” The model, the object, is what the poet sets out to evoke in the image. Implied in this is a rigorous suppression of personality. Pound’s famous dictum “Make It New” comes from Hulme, too, who takes from de Gourmont the notion that language is constantly nearing extinction, shedding resonance, and must be regularly reinvigorated with a stock of new metaphors.

“Thought,” says Hulme, “is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation of two different images.” This was an early formulation of Pound’s definition of the image: “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” It was not a new idea, but it had not before been singled out and made the basis of a doctrinaire poetics. Previously it had been taken as one ingredient among many in the complex thing called poetry. Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, defined it: “It has been observed before,” he wrote, “that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterise the poet. They become proof of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet’s own spirit” (my italics). Despite the Romantic implications, this defines better than Hulme or Pound did what an image isn’t and is, what it can and cannot do. Coleridge’s definition comes in the context of an argument about language and the scope of poetry broader than Hulme envisaged. Coleridge, in his middle years, was trying to set down insights he had drawn from a lifetime of reading, meditating and writing. His intention was not prescriptive but deductive from the best examples he had available. The fact that Hulme’s and Pound’s dogmatic teaching started a school of poets reveals how some of the outstanding creative forces in our century have lost the wide perspective that earlier poets possessed and took for granted, have been reduced by metaphysical doubt and innate pessimism to programmatic reform. Pound’s irrepressible imagination and formal hunger extended his theories so that, over a long life, the trajectory of his prose and verse moves well beyond the early definitions. But Hulme’s life was short.

Hulme’s poems “Autumn” and “City Sunset,” both published in 1909, have the distinction of being the first Imagist poems. “Autumn” is the better of the two:

A touch of cold in the Autumn night—

I walked abroad

And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge

Like a red-faced farmer.

I did not stop to speak, but nodded,

And round about were the wistful stars

With white faces like town children.

The poem observes. Two images fuse: skyscape and human faces. Moon becomes farmer, stars town children. The poem humanizes a skyscape and etherealizes a landscape. There is, too, implicit celebration of the rural at the expense of the urban—a Romantic, or a distinctly English, residue.

In “Images,” one poem reads in its entirety, “Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling.” Two aspects of the same thing are juxtaposed, a past and a present. The effect is more resonant than in much strictly Imagist verse because it has a time context; it does not exist (as the earlier poem does) in a perpetual present or on a timeless plane. William Empson writes that Imagist poetry is poetry that has lost the use of its legs—it does not move (in any sense), it does not evoke time sequence, existing only in space. This is one way in which it resists the tyranny of continuity, of cause and effect. Committed to the image, it disregards the contexts of the image. It has no conscience beyond artistic perfection. Hulme escapes Empson’s stricture occasionally, when he humanizes, or reduces, nature. His poems arise out of observation, not (as often with later Imagists) out of literature. In his poems he takes some liberties with his doctrines. For example, “The Man in the Crow’s Nest”:

Strange to me, sounds the wind that blows

By the masthead, in the lonely night.

Maybe ’tis the sea whistling—feigning joy

To hide its fright

Like a village boy

That trembling past the churchyard goes.

As in “Autumn,” nature is brought down a peg or two. The poem possesses dramatic eeriness, due partly to the rhymes, which create a tenuous stability. The precise syntax is wholly effective, and when the poet speaks in the last line of the boy not as “who” but “that,” he effects a subtle depersonalizing even there.

Hulme was a passionate man who knew he needed discipline and containment, intellectual control. His fellow modernists were similarly passionate and ambitious but less philosophical, less intellectual. The in-turned passions of Eliot, the extrovert passions of Pound, the classical purity of H.D. and the bald ambition of Amy Lowell are related qualities of a generation of American writers who made it their business to create new spaces in English poetry, who believed that they could break through the conventionality of the host literature and access the empowering tradition. One Englishman identified with their diverse program. He was as much an outsider as they were.

David Herbert Lawrence was not a pure radical. He contributed verse to the Georgian anthologies edited by Edward Marsh and to the Imagist anthologies—not those edited by Pound, for whom he was not rigorous enough, but those edited by Amy Lowell. Conflicting voices are heard in his early writing. The more popular is dramatic, telling stories, interposing moral comment, loosely formal in approach. The Georgians could take such verse on board, though its presence in Marsh’s staid compilations highlights the power of Lawrence’s apprentice work and the emotional and technical conventionality of much of the poetry that surrounds it. Marsh included “Seven Seals” and “Snake,” the closest he came to publishing erotic verse.

Amy Lowell chose for her Imagist book terse, imagistic and unmoralized poems. They are less immediately appealing. She published “Green” in 1915:

The sky was apple-green.

The sky was green wine held up in the sun.

The moon was a golden petal between.

This verges on surrealism avant la lettre. In another poem Lawrence wrote, “The street-lamps in the twilight have suddenly started to bleed.” He may have been writing to order for the Imagist anthology, but as he gained confidence in the power of clearly constructed images to convey feeling, he retreated from the received formal modes he had mastered only uncertainly. He moved toward a personal and eventually a vatic idiom. Eventually he came to sound like the Nietzsche of Also Sprach Zarathustra, big-voiced and assertive, with an inevitable loss of delicacy and precision. Yet he never settled entirely into one particular mode: his travels, his prose writing and reading always affect the supple, unstable style. Yet each poem bears his voice-print: it is hard to mistake his writing for that of any other poet, no matter what formal option he is exploiting.

His development through the Collected Poems is fascinating. It is the gradual evolution, or modulation, of a voice becoming more idiosyncratic and personal, declaring independence of traditional means, driven by emotional and intellectual predispositions that come to dominate his writing. There is a pressure of content behind all he writes. The germ of his mature style is present at the outset: he develops by disencumbering himself. Some of his best poems are achieved in the period just before his formal emancipation was complete, when there is still tension between the pull of tradition and the anarchic, recreative forces of his temperament. He emancipated himself because poetic theory and precedent exerted limited authority over him. Present emotion, present experience, demanded their own form; each image required unique articulation.

Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottingham, in 1885, the fourth child in his family. His father was a coal miner, his mother a former schoolteacher who came to despise her not always sober, sometimes uncouth husband. The tension between his parents is evoked in the poem “Discord in Childhood”: “Outside the house an ash-tree hung its terrible whips.” Inside, the disputatious voices rose and fell. Lawrence found initial security with his mother, but their relationship proved emotionally ambiguous, inhibiting his later relations with women. His background is full of contradictions: between his father’s insistent working-class attitudes and values and his mother’s middle-class hankerings; between the rural and industrial landscapes that coexisted around him; between sexual and moral obligations that often seemed, in those early years, at odds. A further complication in his childhood was the diagnosis of a lung infection, which, in 1930, was to kill him.

From the local council school he gained a scholarship to attend Nottingham High School. At the age of sixteen he began work as a clerk in a surgical appliances firm at thirteen shillings a week. He left to follow in his mother’s footsteps by becoming a pupil teacher in Eastwood and later in Ilkeston. Then at eighteen he went to University College, Nottingham. Until 1912 he taught at a school uncommittedly, exasperatedly, all the while working on his first novel and writing poems. Much of his teaching career was spent in Croydon, Surrey, among different landscapes and accents from those he knew in Nottinghamshire. “How can I answer the challenge of so many eyes?” he asks in one poem. The challenge of eyes later on, when he was invited to read his poems at Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in London, made him read with his back turned to the audience, a form of modesty that riveted attention even more narrowly upon him.

His social and intellectual background set him apart from the writers of the day. Without academic and financial advantages, emerging from the turbulent household of Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence with their irreconcilable values and contrasting ambitions for him, he was possessed by a dogged earnestness that he never lost. Not for him the socialized, ironic tones of Oxbridge writers, the mild experimental luxuries of Bloomsbury, busy with itself. Even today the absence from his prose and verse of what might be called social graces or social vices—which, applying familiar templates to unfamiliar subjects and feelings, habituate readers, deliberately setting them at ease—challenges those of us accustomed to the more mannerly or deliberate pathos and savagery of some of his contemporaries. For Lawrence is direct, in his writing, and makes no bones about it. He can write humorously, but he does not play with his medium or caricature subject matter or character for effect. We find, in his novels, stories, essays and poems quite as much as in his erratic and often brilliant correspondence, a man for whom writing is not so much an art as an act, an act with radical moral import and consequence. As his illness took firmer hold and he began to seek friendly climates to prolong his summers and defer death, his writing accelerated in urgency. He asks readers to invest more of themselves in his work than most writers require, and it is possible to balk—for some it is impossible not to balk—at the large ethical demands of his early and late work in particular, which often occlude the considerable artistic risks he takes. Perhaps the largest artistic risk was to take his art in such deadly earnest, and to ask us to do so too. This, quite as much as the vigor and consistency of his work, drew so perceptive and sour a critic as F. R. Leavis to admit Lawrence to the upper reaches of a Parnassus that he so severely guarded against lesser mortals.

But Leavis’s encomia came later. In the early years, teaching pupils who were reluctant to learn and whom he found it difficult and unsatisfying to motivate, irked him. He began to suffer the emotional and physical strain of a vocation for which he had no vocation. The death of his mother in 1910—after which he wrote several elegies, including “Sorrow,” “Brooding Grief” and, in a different vein, the wonderful “Piano”—left him worn out and near despair. These experiences provided plot, images and themes not only for Sons and Lovers (1913), his most autobiographical novel, but also for The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1921), books many regard as his masterpieces.

In 1911 his literary career began to take shape. Without his knowledge a friend—his first devoted lover—sent some of his poems and the story “Odour of Chrysanthemums” to Ford Madox Ford. Ford invited Lawrence to meet him, which the poet did with superb shyness and reluctance. Ford remembers (or reinvents) the meeting brilliantly in Portraits from Life (1937), recalling how “he had come, like the fox, with his overflood of energy—his abounding vitality of passionate determination that seemed always too big for his frail body.” Ford included the work in the English Review, talked up the new writer, and handed on his first novel, The White Peacock, to Messrs. Heinemann. It duly appeared, and in 1912 Lawrence wiped the chalk from his fingers, abandoned the classroom and traveled abroad for the first time.

Most of the poems Lawrence had written up to this time were far from assured. They are silted with abstractions, forced rhymes and weak auxiliaries; sometimes the syntax has to reverse to obey the constraints of meter or rhyme scheme. Some of the poems are obsessed with a physicality that falls short of carnality. “Virgin Youth,” for instance, a poem he later revised to highlight the erotic element, is a paean to frustration. And frustration is—not surprisingly, given his dislike of school mastering and his impatience for large literary success, for £2,000 a year—a dominant theme, disclosed unintentionally in the flawed forms. “Monologue of a Mother,” “Cherry Robbers” and other poems are tentative in expression if not content. The power of these poems is in evocative imagery, painterly vision. There is an adolescent tone in much of this writing, a desire to shock without the necessary bravado, which persists, though the bravado becomes commensurate in later poems. In Nettles (1929) and much of the later work there is unripeness, immaturity of sentiment and thought, and the occasional marring petulances, of the vestigial brat. These elements are at odds with the serene assurance of the very last poems and of the best animal and flower poems.

Self-discovery involved Lawrence in running away with Frieda von Richthofen, the wife of a distinguished Notthingham professor, in 1914. This romance has become legendary, though the legend sometimes omits the fact that Frieda lost contact with her children, that she and her lover had a volatile and reposeless love. Together they traveled, sustaining one another in flight from critical and moral opprobrium at home, and in flight from death. Unstable their love may have been, but it was sustaining. Had it not been, Lawrence could hardly have braved the difficult years of rejection and illness. His novel The Rainbow (1915) was confiscated and banned. In the same year he was forced with Frieda to abandon their home in Cornwall. They were thought to be German spies. He began to feel persecuted—he was persecuted. These pressures contributed to his least successful poetic veins: of satire and apocalypse.

After the First World War, Lawrence and Frieda, tired of an England that was hostile to his artistic mission, traveled widely. He wrote travel books, essays, introductions, novels and poems. He painted. Much of his most stimulating prose occurs in essays briskly written for a specific occasion; the ideas retain an alarming freshness and challenge. Large-scale aphorisms trigger a wealth of subsidiary ideas as we read. These detonations of sense are the product of sharp, partial insights which dazzle one part of a work at the expense of the rest. Lawrence is always right, though never entirely right. Yet the essays, more than his poems themselves, have effected fundamental changes in later writers—encouraging a greater sense of presence and presentness, a sense that the language of poetry (as of prose) is enactive, making its subject in a complex mimesis of syntax, rhythm and diction.

Wherever he traveled—to Italy, Australia, New Zealand, the South Seas, California, Mexico and New Mexico—he strove to be present in the place, not seeing it as a visitor with a Kodak but apprehending it through its landscape, art and literature. In 1926 he was back in Italy. He spent his last four years traveling through Europe trying to retard the development of the illness he refused to acknowledge was tuberculosis. In 1930 he died in a sanatorium in the South of France.

His achievement as a poet is overshadowed by his achievement as a novelist, though his poetry has never lacked admirers and is increasing in presence as his prose writings are buried under academic study. The poems explore the themes of the prose fiction, but where the novels concentrate on relationships between people, the poems explore the relationship between individual and a given world, recreating those states of mind which exist, subjectively, apart from human contact. They complement the fiction. If, in Women in Love, the character of Birkin is unsatisfactory because exaggeratedly subjective and infuriatingly dominant, in the poems, Birkin—so like Lawrence himself—speaks directly, freed from the constraint of plot. At a time when his contemporaries were donning masks and inventing personae in order to speak, Lawrence’s mature poems belong, for the most part, unabashedly to the first person, a first person who can sound angry, vatic or lyrical, a first person “alive in the language.”

At the outset there are a number of poems of relationship. Love Poems and Others, his first collection, appeared in 1913 and includes his relations with his mother and his first and second lovers. These poems, written guiltily (“as if it were a secret sin”—they are autobiographical) are marred by deliberate literary effects. He distinguishes between two sorts of poems, those written by his “demon” and those composed by a more conscious hand. He will revise and tamper with the latter; but the former are final and irrevocable.

He is continually thinking about poetry, how it differs from prose in construction and objective, and his letters and essays are full of distinctions enormously enabling to later writers and readers. In 1913 he wrote to Edward Marsh that he saw his poems in spatial rather than temporal or rhythmic terms, more “as a matter of movements in space than footsteps hitting the earth.” There is still an emphasis on movement, but it is a movement away from the regular footfall of prescriptive meter toward the expressive cadences and suspensions of conversation, and later the incantatory, often biblical movement that Whitman helped him achieve. “It all depends on the pause,” he wrote, “the lingering of the voice according to feeling—it is the hidden emotional pattern that makes poetry, not the obvious form.” Soon he rejected the sense of balance that characterizes Georgian work. On the other hand, he could not depersonalize or aestheticize experience in the Imagist manner.

Later he called for a poetry of “the immediate present,” where “there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished”: open poetry. “Consummation” is a key word, suggesting that his poems deliberately defer or avoid dramatic climax: such climaxes set the artist outside the artifact, casting him inevitably in the role of constructor, orchestrator. He acknowledges Whitman as the master poet of the “present,” a writer whose poem has neither beginning nor end—this, Lawrence reminds us, does not mean that he has no past and future. The voice of the “present” tends to be rhapsodic, celebrating “the urgent, insurgent Now,” the “instant present”—if, that is, the demon dictates it. From Lawrence’s general statements about poetry, which add up to something like a theory, it would not be unreasonable to have expected from him a long poem or long poems like Blake’s or Whitman’s, or—among his successors—Olson’s or Robert Duncan’s. But for all that he learned from American poetry, his sensibility remained decidedly English, his runs seldom exceed the lyric. There are sequences and series, but few attempts at sustained long poems. The longer runs are to be found in the prose fiction, and often the prose writings are truer to the spirit of his poetic theory than the poems themselves.

Free verse is essential, he believes, to poetic utterance. A poetry without preconceived meter, stress patterns or syllabic count, articulated by “the whole man,” expressing his passions, conflicts and contradiction, is a voice of integrity, and poetry must be a language of integrity. He does not see free verse as finally unfree because ultimately subjective in its movement. Subjectivity, the willful ascription of significance to certain words, images and rhythms, is his principal limitation. Yet unlike his imitators who strive to achieve a voice unique to themselves, there is the Wordsworthian legacy still at work in Lawrence, a man speaking to men. What matters is not the idiosyncrasy of voice, the mannerisms of expression, but the suasive authenticity of movement.

Free verse compels a revolution less in prosody than in diction. Traditional diction, formal, tending toward archaism, off-the-peg for a poet working at half energy, is quite unserviceable in free verse. It sounds ridiculous. And after the revolution of free verse, it is rendered less serviceable for traditional metrical verse as well. Ironically, the modernist revolution in prosody revivified diction even for those writers—like Frost, like Larkin—who stand aloof from it. Lawrence took the revolution further than Hulme and the Imagists, writing an accessible poetry that was immediately appealing, recognizably experiential, a kind that, with different tools, the Georgians were crafting in conventional ways.

Lawrence sloughs off clichés and deploys a fresh language, new wine for his new bottles. He tells us, in a weirdly eroticized phrase, that in free verse “we look for the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment.” We are to expect “no satisfying stability, satisfying to those who like the immutable.” The “pure present” is a realm, he says, which we have never conquered. And he, too, fails to conquer it, for there is a stability in his poems—though not always “satisfying.” It is not the stability of the moralist who asserts meaning, though often Lawrence is intrusively didactic in awkward places, where the imagery has contained the very message he delivers in paraphrase. It is a stability of language, predictable rhythmic phrasing within a poem. His free verse is never as free as he claims; in many poems a cadential pattern is repeated with minimal variation. Free verse can be accompanied by a shortened syntactical measure (the short sentence being thought, perhaps, appropriate for the “urgent insurgent now”), which entails a shortening of the rhythmic measure. To achieve longer cadences it is necessary to bank up repetitions, or to create series.

Like Blake, Lawrence preempts his readers’ misgivings by acknowledging the faults in his writing and identifying them as necessary virtues. The poet James Reeves writes of Lawrence: “He had not the craftsman’s sense of words as living things, as ends in themselves. Words were too much means to an end.” And so they were. Lawrence would have said: And so they should be. This is why he sits uneasily alongside the Georgians, whom Reeves admires and advocates. He was never a “craftsmanly” writer. In his perceptive and not altogether sympathetic study, Reeves adds, “He can seldom have conceived a poem as a whole before he sat down to write it. It grew under his pen.” So did William Carlos Williams’s and—we may guess—some of Ezra Pound’s. The freedom of free verse has something to do with tolerating surprise, even with inviting it into the process. There is an analogy between the form of some of Lawrence’s poems and “the musical impromptu,” a “series of loosely connected variations.”

The famous Pansies (1928)—Lawrence once referred to them as “rag-poems”—are named after the flower, but the title suggests too pensées angliciées. The verb panser comes to the poet’s mind as well, “to dress or soothe a wound.” Each “pansy” is “a true thought, which comes as much from the heart and genitals as from the head.” Pansies are the closest Lawrence came to developing his own poetic form. That it is inadequate to all but the statement of image or opinion—without the compression or memorability of epigram, though it claims the authority of that form—implies the limitation of his formal imagination in verse. But when he allows an image to shape the form, as in the animal poems, or when he lets rhythm take hold, as in “The Ship of Death,” questions of analyzable form are beside the point.

The precision he learned from Imagism makes a poem such as “Baby Running Barefoot” strong, keeping it free of sentimentality and cliché. But he can write such Georgian waffle as “The first white love of youth, passionless and vain.” We know from external evidence that he was writing of real experiences, those described fully in Sons and Lovers. Encumbered by poetic diction, the poems fail. A lesson he never wholly learned: authenticity of emotion does not guarantee authentic poetry. In “Snap Dragon,” a poem about the same experiences, he revealed latent powers that eventually produced the animal and death poems; nevertheless, it is technically marred. Its loosely rhythmic form demands that he interpose “did” auxiliaries to plump out the measure; he forces the rhyme. Yet the flaws corroborate a tone of tentative innocence. Something of the poem’s troubling eroticism carries over into other love poems, particularly the Imagist “On the Balcony” and the Georgian “A Youth Mowing.”

He wrote political poems. In “Now It’s Happened,” he chastises the Russian Revolution, its betrayal of the great Russian artists of the previous century, with political and poetic naïveté. In “Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers” he chides left-wing demonstrators in Sicily, ostensibly because they pluck beautiful flowers to plug their churlish buttonholes, but also because he despises egalitarianism and the despotism of the crowd. Like Pound’s, his politics emerge from his aesthetics, though—he not having lived as long as Pound, and having distinct priorities—his political errors seem less noisome than the American’s.

The animal poems find natural form in free verse, forms that answer the images. “The Mosquito” erratically alternates long and short lines, attacks and retires. A similar process occurs in “Bat,” and in “Snake” the sinuous and the darting lines complement one another. These poems prefigure the Australian poet Les Murray’s celebrated collection Translations from the Natural World, in which an appropriate language is found for animals to speak. Murray takes the experiment beyond rhythm and syntax into diction itself.

In “Snake” the speaker finds himself guilty of the Fall, attempting to kill a dark angel that inspires terror and fascination, the serpent visiting the water trough defining in its movement, shading and self-contained purpose another world. Lawrence would cross over into this purposeful, innocent world. When his human nature does not impede him, he can do so, as in his finest poem, “Bavarian Gentians,” where he risks the dark and its indefinitions. In “Snake” he observes, attacks, laments. The snake, as an image, hovers between reptilian, human and divine. For an instant its drinking reminds him of a cow drinking, but it ascends in his observation by stages to being godlike. As the snake unfolds its meanings, the poet reveals himself in the terms he applies to it and eventually in his instinctive response, violence, and its withdrawal into the “dreadful,” the “horrid black hole.” As he hurls a log, the snake reverts to being merely a snake, the man becomes that limited creature, that fallen angel:

And so I missed my chance with one of the lords

Of life.

And I have something to expiate;

A pettiness.

There is an entirely colloquial humor—clean of irony—in the animal poems. In “Tortoise Family Connections” the baby tortoise is portrayed:

Wandering in the slow triumph of his own existence,

Ringing the soundless bell of his presence in chaos,

And biting the frail grass arrogantly,

Decidedly arrogantly.

The furniture and the cadence of the first three lines recall those of Ted Hughes’s animal poems, yet the grace that illuminates Lawrence’s animal world, accepting and unthreatening, celebratory, a grace of tone and witness, belongs to no other poet this century. Lawrence writes: “Man cannot live in chaos. The animal can. To the animal all is chaos, only there are a few recurring motions and aspects within the surge.” Those recurrences are our points of access; and having gained access, the poet presses back toward chaos, to subject himself to the animals’ environment, not to destroy himself but to extend his understanding. The real artist, he urges, will see things in chaos.

“The Ship of Death” braves dark, unknown waters. It’s one of the outstanding, and certainly the most ambitious, of his dark poems. The images evoked remain suspended, isolated within a powerful, incantatory cadence. Unlike most of his poems, “The Ship of Death” is memorable not for its shape or cadence, but for the actual phrasing. “We Have Gone Too Far” is in the same vein, with a cadential intensity, like rhapsodic keening and, triumphantly, a celebration. This is the world of “Bavarian Gentians,” where the flowers radiate darkness as a torch does light. The poet does not draw back: he embraces the experience.

As revealed in the poems and the prose around them, Lawrence can be read as a sometimes shrewd diagnostician, a revolutionary avant la lettre, who saw what poetry might do and how his contemporaries were selling it short. But because his prose work took precedence, or he lacked sufficient formal imagination, or because the time was not quite right, he did not write the poems his criticism proposed. His best poems and writing about poetry, like Cézanne’s pictures and letters, promise much that was to come, much that is still to come. Like no other poet of his century apart from Pound, Lawrence remains insistently, insultingly, undeniably contemporary, a demanding enabler whom writers follow as often to perdition as to a promised land.

At Cambridge in the 1940s, where F. R. Leavis was making a critical talisman of Lawrence and Eliot (minus his objectionable piety), the young lecturer Donald Davie remembers tutoring the equally young poet and would-be filmmaker Charles Tomlinson. Tomlinson was interested in the visceral, in Henry Miller and Lawrence, whose work engaged the whole body, with special reference to the libidinal bits. Davie’s task was to steer his charge onto a more disciplined path, not by insisting, as Leavis did, that Lawrence was the moral teacher, but by creating a context in which Lawrence’s temperature might be credibly taken. Lawrence represents a zigzaggy middle way between the revolutions of Pound and Eliot and the counterrevolution based on Hardy. Lawrence admired Hardy but went another way: a kind of prophet but no idealist, he suffered “constant guilt and horror at what the English had done to England.” Davie, having identified serviceable elements in Lawrence (but not in his poetry), defined the Lawrence mystique, the kinds of license issued in his name. He gets him clear in the frame, and in getting Lawrence clear he redefines Hardy—and Eliot.

Eliot, like Hardy, is at the heart of Donald Davie’s concerns. The American modernist is so deeply a part of Davie’s imagination, and of another echt English writer from another landscape, C. H. Sisson, that they are sometimes not wholly aware of the debt, as if Eliot is part of their second nature. They are made of Eliot (and Pound) quite as much as they are of Hardy. The tension within their poetry and criticism is generative. A vigorous modernism has taken root in them, but in an inhospitable and always skeptical English soil. It was Davie’s task to bring Eliot into play in Tomlinson’s creative world, as in those readers who feel the contrary pull of Hardy or Lawrence.

After their deaths, writers tend to suffer a revaluation, first (in the immediate aftermath) overvalued, and then knocked down a few pegs. Eliot’s reputation has undergone a serious and excessive devaluation since he died in 1965. His politics, usually presented in a form so simplified he would not have recognized them, have told against him. There are shadowy areas in the biography into which prurient critics point their torches. The poetry and the criticism remain controversial in much the way they were when they first appeared, as if the paint had not yet dried on them. Eliot effected a radical change in the ways in which the intelligentsia thought about poetry and literature generally, but the change—in Britain at least—was not as fundamental as it once seemed. There are forces of reaction, the most potent being those that present themselves as the most “liberal” and democratic.

Whereas Lawrence is inscribed in each of his poems, Eliot insists on the poet’s impersonality. Hugh Kenner terms him “the invisible poet.” Marianne Moore saw him as “a master of the anonymous.” Eliot is largely responsible for such critical rhetoric. It does not fit him as poet, critic or dramatist. His work is immediately recognizable as his. It would be hard to confuse even the least-known of his lines with that of another poet. His images, cadences and tones are distinctive.

Why did he so stress “impersonality” and recoil at the idea of a biography? Did he harbor dark secrets? The biographies he was adamant should not be written reveal a man unhappy and discontented by nature, but no more monstrous than most and, even in his success, more vulnerable than many. His insistence seems to have been a strategy to protect the poems from the higher gossip which reads the work as a camouflaged commentary on specific occasions in the life and thus, just as a crudely historicist approach confines the work within its period, kills the poem as poem, reading it as document or text. He was right to fear the worst. His first marriage is the subject of a play and a film. Speculation abounds about his early years. What are we to make of his racial attitudes?

But what are we to make of his poems? His description of the creative process is lucid, but relates most pertinently to the early poems. He says “the emotion of art is impersonal.” The writer experiences “a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” The language borders on the religious and mystical, and these terms Eliot employed before he became a committed Anglican. What occurs in his work is an extinction of biographical referents; but the personality in all its reticences is a palpable presence in every line. His poems are the more personal for carrying the sometimes heavy burden of the various cultures he has assimilated.

For Eliot, tradition is a matter of accretion. Each new work of literature relates to and subtly alters the work that has come before. A writer acquires tradition by dedicated reading, study and a sharpening discrimination. Writers and readers develop an instinct for both the pastness and the presence of tradition. All literature is finally contemporary, no writer can be judged outside the context of the living tradition. But some resources are no longer, or not just now, serviceable; forms, registers and elements of diction can belong specifically to their period, and though the works still speak, their resources are unavailable today.

Eliot developed among poets seeking a modern idiom, trying to renew poetic forms and accommodate new material. He learned something from the vivid social poet of the 1890s John Davidson, particularly about subject matter. The essays of Davidson’s contemporary Arthur Symons directed his attention (as they had Yeats’s before him) to French poets such as Jules Laforgue and the symbolists. The poet’s mission was to discover analogy and unity in disparate elements of experience and to hold them in expressive tension. Eliot took this to mean discovering a stable, independent “set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be a formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” This is the famous “objective correlative,” a term widely misused in criticism. Eliot viewed it in terms of imagery, implicit plot and the organization of sound.

By coordinating the sound qualities of words the poet elicits meanings from areas of consciousness that language does not generally penetrate, but where meanings are latent. It is the auditory imagination which performs these “raids on the inarticulate,” by placing words in a context, using them in full knowledge of their semantic value, their cultural associations, and then maximizing their rhythmic and aural effect, fusing several levels of speech and thought in a single experience. Though he mastered traditional meter, Eliot developed stress rhythms as distinctive as they are inimitable (though they lend themselves to parody).

The idea of an “auditory imagination” is haunting. Eliot—and some poets after him, including Louis Zukofsky and Ted Hughes—have entertained the idea that a poem read to people ignorant of the language it is written in will elicit a response, perhaps a correct response, simply through its sound values. It is a seductive notion, but those who have sat through poetry readings in unfamiliar languages know that the “music” of a language eventually becomes monotonous, and a hunger for sense, or for recognizable referents, asserts itself after a few minutes.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States, in 1888, the seventh child of Henry Ware Eliot. His father was company secretary and ultimately chairman of the Hydraulic Press Brick Company. He provided a prosperous home and a good education for his offspring. The family was Unitarian in religion, devoted to good works, taught to believe in human perfectibility and to distrust ritual. Piety without sacrament, a certain moral severity, and a materialist bent gave the young Eliot a host of elements against which to rebel.

He seems to have enjoyed a happy, if formal, relationship with his parents. He studied at Smith Academy in St. Louis, where he wrote a number of poems, some of which survive. The earliest, written when he was nine or ten, were about “the sadness of having to start school again every Monday morning.” Four years later he wrote “some very gloomy quatrains in the form of the Rubáiyát.” At sixteen he wrote “A Fable of Feasters,” which reveals a love of Byron and genuine prosodic skill. His mother, Charlotte, ambitious to be a poet, encouraged her son. When she read his early, cloying imitation of Ben Jonson, she esteemed it as better than anything she had written, which shows less humility than foresight and a discriminating ear.

Eliot attended Harvard College between 1906 and 1910 and wrote the “Ode” for Class Day in 1910. He cut his editorial teeth on the Harvard Advocate, the literary journal to which he also contributed poems. Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, left a deeper impression on his early poems than St. Louis had. It was the land- and cityscape of his imagination, much as New Hampshire became Frost’s chosen landscape, though he was a Californian by birth.

Greek and Latin were central to Eliot’s studies at Harvard, and he attended a course on Dante, about whom he later wrote a suggestive, influential and largely wrong-headed essay. He also read French, German and some philosophy. French poetry attracted him, especially Laforgue. He imitated the Frenchman in “Humoresque,” which he published in the Advocate, and another poem, “Spleen,” in which alleys and cats get their first look in on his verse, along with signs of balding and the excessive fastidiousness that Prufrock more fully displays. In “The Death of St. Narcissus,” another early piece, the first stirrings of The Waste Land sensibility are heard. The poem’s mannered eroticism combines the legend of Narcissus and the story of St. Sebastian, mingling them with material from Arthurian romance. In 1909 and 1910, when he began his graduate work, Eliot wrote “Portrait of a Lady” and “Preludes I and II,” and began work on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It was startlingly assured and precocious work for a young man of twenty-one, steeped in the classics and European culture, and with Henry James as a kind of tutelary spirit.

Eliot responded to Laforgue’s tonal suppleness, his precise imprecision, the way character is created not by plot and external detail but by hesitancies of voice, peculiarities of detail, by playing off the familiar and subverting expectations. It is a kind of clarity that eludes paraphrase, whose logic is not constructed but inferred. The earlier symbolists had tended—as Donald Davie describes it—to set images at a certain distance from each other, letting the unspoken sense emerge from the spaces between. Individual images were made expressive beyond the physical sense to which they were addressed; sounds became visible and smells palatable—the synesthesia that infatuated Edith Sitwell. Individual images become symbols, points at which disparate meanings are drawn together and expressed all at once. For the later symbolists the poem itself, as a whole, is the symbol. It might have a plot, all the elements of which work toward a complex symbolic meaning or meanings. Laforgue achieves suggestiveness by developing plots, or pseudo-plots, which give a poem continuity without limiting its particular significance—drawing, as it were, a grid-map that relates differently to different land masses. Organization becomes symbolic, and fragmentation is a crucial strategy.

Eliot visited France in 1910, attending lectures at the Sorbonne, and returned to Harvard to pursue his doctorate on European and Indian philosophy in 1911. Among his teachers were George Santayana and Irving Babbitt. In 1914 he traveled to Marburg to pursue his studies, but with the First World War he turned up in London, gravitating to Merton College, Oxford, where he continued working on his doctoral thesis on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley. It finally dawned on him that he was not cut out to be a philosopher and in 1915 he left university and married for the first time. He tried his hand at teaching in a junior school in London, but soon moved on to work at Lloyds Bank. London at the time was strewn with literary groups and cliques. Bloomsbury was at work, and so were the Sitwells. Eliot reviewed books and wrote articles. He came into contact with Ezra Pound and with Imagism. If he spent most of his adult life in England, he never ceased to regard himself as an American poet. In 1959 he declared, “My poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England.”

Though never an Imagist, Eliot understood the Imagist program and, as a fellow traveler, profited from it. He wrote later that Imagism was the point de repere for any consideration of modern English poetry. His association with Pound, like so many other writers’, was energizing: he began to pare down his language, to economize for impact. He learned how important juxtaposition was as an organizing instrument, that the setting side by side of images or vignettes not obviously or logically related could be used to precise effect, without explication or moralizing.

Robert Graves met the youngish Eliot in 1916, while on leave. He describes him as “a startlingly good-looking, Italianate young man, with a shy, hunted look, and a reluctance (which I found charming) to accept the most obvious phenomenon of the day—a world war now entering its bloodiest stage... I was due to return to the Somme any day, and delighted to forget the war too in Eliot’s gently neutral company.”

In 1917 Eliot, together with H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), took over editorship of the Egoist from Richard Aldington. He needed the formal authority and the responsible freedoms an independent editor enjoys in order to develop a literary environment, with collaborators willing to take risks in appraisal and reappraisal. In 1922 he founded his most influential magazine, the Criterion, which, with Edgell Rickword’s short-lived Calendar of Modern Letters, established a new standard of critical and creative writing. His years as a magazine editor coincided with his early success as a poet. In 1917 Prufrock and Other Observations appeared, and Poems (1920, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press) widened his readership. In 1922 came The Waste Land, which seemed to change English poetry for good. Eliot became at first the most controversial, and then the most respected avant-garde writer of his day. The Hollow Men (1925) did little to extend his reputation, for despite the poems’ merit, Eliot seemed to be pastiching or parodying the novel strategies of his earlier work.

In 1927 he became a British subject and joined the Church of England. Ash Wednesday (1930), the first substantial production of the English Eliot, was received without enthusiasm, its religious concerns anathema at a time of increasing social tension and its poetic strategies too demanding for new readers. The dramatic fragments Sweeney Agonistes (published in book form in 1932) have only in recent years attracted the attention their originality merits. In 1944 his last major poetic work, Four Quartets, was published (Burnt Norton, 1935; East Coker, 1940; The Dry Salvages, 1941; Little Gidding, 1942). After that, most of his flagging poetic energies were directed to dramatic verse.

Eliot’s later career took him into the thick of publishing. It cannot be denied that the task of editing other people’s work, appraising manuscripts for publication, engaging in the actual trade, diverted him from his own work, much as they did Edgell Rickword from his. He became part of an establishment he was instrumental in creating. He won various awards, including the Nobel Prize and the Order of Merit in 1948, and was canonized as “the poet of the century”—rewards for the major poet of The Waste Land and the critic of The Sacred Wood, Tradition and the Individual Talent, and the other major books and essays, not the editor or the minor dramatist of the verse plays.

His forcefulness as a critic, the patrician authority of his style, defined one possible way for English literature this century to go; but when he was established, he began a gradual recantation, manifested in his plays, later poems and criticism, and in the poetry list he published at Faber and Faber with its notorious sins of omission and commission. He qualified and undermined the radical challenge he threw down in his early works. He changed ground subtly on Milton and on Goethe, poets he had earlier criticized with stupendous severity. The change was dictated by the occasions for which the later appraisals were prepared, and yet change there was, of a kind that smacks of disingenuousness. The later Eliot hardly diminishes the early firebrand. Prufrock may have grown into the elder statesman, but it is Prufrock who is our contemporary, while the elder statesman of Eliot’s last two decades is unreal. Eliot was assimilated into the culture he adopted.

Elder Eliot bears much of the responsibility for deflecting modernism in Britain, for lessening its impact on English poetry and critical thought. The apparent climax of his poetic writing, Four Quartets, for all its obliquity, rejects the intensity of The Waste Land and his earlier modernist work. Four Quartets is discursive and in places prolix. Though intellectually taxing and rhythmically resourceful, a work of undeniable magnificence in nineteenth-century terms, it has as much in common with late Auden as with early Eliot. The poet is expatiating before an audience, exploring rather than discovering his meanings. He becomes a complex but explicit moralist. The subtle erotic undertones of his best writing have vanished. A lax discursiveness makes too many concessions—particularly in The Dry Salvages—to the merely poetic, and the organization, similar in each quartet, is to some extent arbitrary. Discoverer becomes missionary. When a poet of Eliot’s stature in his later work rejects the exacting practices of his youth, his foes can say “I told you so,” his followers can participate in the rejection, sitting at the feet of the comfortable elder, avoiding contention with the serious young man.

Eliot’s situation as an expatriate twice over—from Unitarian St. Louis to agnostic Boston, from New England to England—taken with his social and religious concerns, his hunger for a natural home, make his development comprehensible. E. M. Forster wrote of his religion, “What he seeks is not revelation but stability.” The epigraph to “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar,” reads with an irony that in retrospect cuts both ways, “nil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera fumus” (“only the divine stands firm; the rest is smoke”). In Ash Wednesday he “constructs something upon which to rejoice,” accepting the forms of faith in the hope, or belief, that by grace faith will follow. This is the “grammar of assent” of the Catholic and Anglo-Catholic nineteenth century. A quest for stability is central in Eliot’s work, and the early poems evoke the very instabilities and discontinuities from which the later writings seek to extricate him. The social and personal agony of The Waste Land and the individual agony of “Prufrock” are responses to instability, and the poet could not have stayed in that place for long without self-destructing. The power of the religious poetry is not in its faith but in the desire to believe, to find something believable, in the forms, liturgies and dogmas quite as much as in the deity. Religion is an instrument of acculturation for him: Anglicanism and Englishness are intertwined.

When stability is entirely beyond his reach, as in “Prufrock,” the tone becomes elegiac, or satirical in the “Sweeney” poems. Desire for stability results in his radical conservatism as a critic, an impersonal dealing in “certainties” and his technical experimentation as a poet. Poems and prose fulfill complementary functions; in time the prose was destined to triumph over the tense anxieties of the verse. Craving stability based on the old order, a writer has to discover what forms are viable in the present. The great innovations—often the work of conservative imaginations—generally occur in our literature in the elegiac mode and spread out from there. The Prince in Giuseppe de Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard declares the strategy: to stay the same we must change. Adjustments of form, of surface, protect the deeper dispositions and divisions of a culture.

When Eliot began writing for the theater, he saw the poles of dramatic language as being ceremonial and liturgical at one extreme (the chorus, the dance) and realistic, social, demotic at the other. His poems are enacted between these extremes, tending first toward one, then the other. They are often dramatic (more dramatic than the plays). Dramatic monologues are among his best work; like Pound, he owed a debt to Browning as much as to Laforgue. Many of the poems’ epigraphs are drawn from plays, classical as well as English.

In Ash Wednesday Eliot began to dramatize not voice but content. The “speaker” here, not self-defining as in Prufrock, not a figure as such, becomes morally implicated in what he says, expressing not generalities but particular experiences. The question arises: Is he posturing, is the internal conflict real in the way he suggests, is he gesturing at religious meanings? The impact of this poem seems to me a sufficient answer, but more insistently the same question arises with Four Quartets. When he speaks of “the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings,” the “wrestle” is not felt in the exposition to which he treats us. He appears to be constructing something with which to wrestle. The poet becomes visible, personae dwindle. Eliot, when he pauses to reason or puzzle out an idea, lets the poem go. Pound knew this and put his pencil through such passages in The Waste Land. He didn’t perform the same surgery on the Quartets—he would have been temperamentally incapable of doing so, the themes and procedures being so remote from those he and Eliot had developed two decades earlier.

Eliot is not at his best as a philosopher, mingling discursive with allusive poetry, except when he shatters the former with a decisive intrusion of the latter, or when he reports speech and is not himself speaking. So long as the impersonal experiencing is maintained, the poetry is safe. This “impersonality” disappears not when we read actual biographical data—Eliot is reporting a nervous disorder: “On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing”—but rather when we read, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” in “Gerontion” and feel the images, moralized, have been left lifeless. Eliot reaches a degree of experiential intensity unparalleled in modern poetry; it is natural, if regrettable, that he had to retreat into cogitation.

Illness, fever, delirium, nervous disorientation—like half-sleep—he believes allow a freedom of association within the poet’s mind. Images, long incubated, flow free under the vertiginous release of mental and physical disorientation. If they find language, poetry may occur. This appears to have been the case with the rapid composition of The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes. For Eliot, this is not inspiration but something ambiguously negative, “the breaking down of strong habitual barriers” that “re-form very quickly.” One is tempted to say that this, precisely, is inspiration, clearly defined. But most critics take inspiration to be a positive impulse.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” completed when Eliot was twenty-three and published in a book six years later, is his most striking early achievement. Discontinuous and fragmentary in plot, the poem is continuous only in rhythm and tone. Without specifying a location, Eliot vividly evokes a series of places. The title contains the governing irony: this “love song” is in fact an elegy, and an elegy not for what has been but for what might have been had the eloquently inadequate speaker been more equal to the social challenge of his world and more complete in himself. Juxtaposing fragments of conversation, observation, experience, Eliot creates a mosaic, a characterization that does not stop at character but realizes a particular social class that Eliot knew well. It is at once inner and external landscape, a state of mind and a flickering narrative. The poem becomes a symbol, a form through which a multitude of tentative meanings flows; it is successful in the mode to which the more overtly symbolic and less accomplished “Gerontion” also belongs.

“Portrait of a Lady” is “Prufrock” ’s companion piece, though it was completed earlier and, because more specific in plot and the relationships it evokes, it is more limited in its resonance than the more famous poem. The title comes from Henry James’s great novel, the epigraph, from Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta: “Thou hast committed— / Fornication; but that was in another country, / And besides, the wench is dead.” These words contrast sharply with the contained, dry tone of the poem, suggesting another country and another age in which sexual desire is acted on. The quiet, proper and cultured lady serving tea, the equally proper Prufrockian visitor, are illuminated by the title and the epigraph, which propose two models of selfish, self-destructive or destructive action. In the world of Eliot’s lady, nothing actually happens: manners and custom have dried out the protagonists, who gradually brim with self-disgust. As in “Prufrock,” manners and attitudes that govern communication make the expression of anything important virtually impossible. It is a culture of obliquity. “That is not what I meant at all...” complains a voice in “Prufrock.” Failed communication as a theme recurs even in Eliot’s most assured and least successful later work. These constraints he portrays so well in part because he was himself constrained and never entirely escaped, at least not in daylight. The bizarre nighttime and no-time of the “Sweeney” poems, less oblique, has the candor of madness.

In “Preludes” Eliot was exploring the same theme indirectly, with reference to other social orders of which he had less experience:

I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing.

The verse turns on the word “thing.” Against the anguish of almost recognition, the poet savagely counsels:

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;

The worlds revolve like ancient women

Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

These are the separate “worlds” of social classes, isolated worlds of individual men and women, as solitary in Eliot’s cityscape as in Hardy’s unforgiving rural setting.

The image of music plays through the poetry. In poem titles we read of songs, rhapsodies, preludes, quartets, “Five-Finger Exercises.” Music suggests a certain kind of organization, an attitude to language, certain intended effects. In The Waste Land it is a tragic music; later it becomes the painful, redeeming Shakespearean music. Images of architecture, painting, and of course a constant flow of literary allusions, inform the poetry. Being an urban writer, Eliot has no nature to fall back on: it is all nurture, his poems are made of made things, on a ground entirely given over to human projects, passions and tragedies. A figure wandering through much of the poetry is old, sexless Tiresias, who has achieved a numb, knowing stability.

Eliot and Pound rebelled together against what they saw as the misuse of free or unmetered verse. A mannered acerbity enters Eliot’s blackly humorous and suggestive “Sweeney” poems and the other work in rhymed quatrains. Though style and tone change, the organization remains the same. The “Sweeney” poems possess the same precise imprecision, the same sudden juxtapositions and transitions of imagery. They draw on the English Metaphysical poets—Donne in particular—as much as they do on the late symbolists, and they are dense with literary allusion. Where they are less supple than the poems that precede them is in tone. The quatrain form is chosen for a polemical purpose, to stand against the failures of the free-verse writers. Used with the verbal intensity Eliot requires of it, the quatrain is incapable of those sudden shifts of mood and tone that occur in earlier poems. It is only here, however, that Eliot achieved a thoroughgoing impersonality of manner.

Sweeney Agonistes, fragments of a verse play, was published, one imagines, with some trepidation by the writer. He certainly kept it in his drawer for rather longer than even Horace would have advised. Eliot composed it at great speed and without premeditation. The rhythmic brio of the near-nonsense verse is dazzling. Despite the brevity of the fragments, characters and unanchored situations are suggested. These fragments reveal what originality Eliot might have achieved as a dramatist had he premeditated verse drama less and let his turbulent imagination write the plays, for the turbulence in Sweeney is unprecedented in English verse. These are not the affluent classes of his finished plays, the society whose voices he never quite managed to register accurately. Here the characters are rootless, leading their hectic lives in an urban world ignorant of country houses and the Church of England. Telephone conversations, unexpected arrivals and departures, Tarot readings, intrusions of characters from other poems—including Mrs. Porter and Sweeney himself—and undisguised sexuality and cruelty, make it unique in Eliot’s work and central to it: a potent “might have been.” This is the dramatic genius that Eliot suppressed (or lost) in order to write the ceremonious plays, from Murder in the Cathedral, with its moral pretensions, to The Confidential Clerk. Eliot in his plays tried to make the verse unobtrusive, to communicate subtle and sometimes esoteric meanings. He achieves flatness rather than conversational fluency, relieved by a few memorable scenes in which the poetry is given its head and the action ritualized.

In The Waste Land he demanded to be read differently from other poets. He alters our way of reading for good, if we read him properly. The poem does not respond to analysis of its meanings—meanings cannot be detached from the texture of the poetry itself. The idiom is synthetic, fusing (or collaging) voices, each with its own allusions and images and implicit life story. The shifting voices and tones of voice are not signaled by marginal directions but in alterations of cadence and diction within the “flow.” Though the poem cannot be said to be “organic,” it does enact a process, stage by stage evoking people, places and cultures, their fullness impoverished and laid waste. The downward movement of the poem is turned, in the final section, toward potential regeneration. Before this point, the pattern is of decline: historical and legendary figures of the past, sharply evoked, are succeeded by the lackluster, passionless, unregenerate “present,” its classes and concerns evoked in sterile female figures and emblematic voices. Cleopatra, Desdemona and Ophelia give way to the neurotic lady, the typist and the women in the pub, their relationships cursory, inarticulate, incomplete.

Eliot’s apt literary and cultural allusions—to Spenser, Dante, Baudelaire, Wagner, Shakespeare and others—have a particular force when redefined in terms of The Waste Land. The past in its most achieved forms is implicated and degraded in the present; the poem is enhanced by our recollection of the works from which the allusions are taken. We might be tempted to read The Waste Land against the grain of Tradition and the Individual Talent, for in the poem Eliot suggests that cultural addition adjusts the past indeed, but also degrades it.

There is more than manipulation of allusion and narrative at work in The Waste Land. In the opening lines of “The Burial of the Dead,” the first section of the poem, Eliot uses five present participles: “breeding,” “mixing,” “stirring,” “covering” and “feeding.” Each occurs at a line ending, with the emphasis of enjambement, suggesting ongoing process, organic and natural. In the first eight lines of the poem, spring, summer and winter are suggested. Memory and desire (past and future) are latent in the cruel rebirth of the year.

The natural progression is juxtaposed to the nattering recollections of Marie. Her voice is displaced by the dark tones of, perhaps, Tiresias, “for you know only / A heap of broken images”...“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” The longing strains of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde are silenced by the hopeless refrain, “Oed und leer das Meer” (“Desolate and empty the sea”). The cruelty of false starts—Marie curtailed by Tiresias, memory by the present—leads to the sham hope that spiritualism may hold the answer, and Madame Sosostris, the clairvoyant, is visited. Her turning up of cards that are sequences of images is in emblematic form what the poet is doing, turning up and setting side by side before us a sequence of voice images, from which we can draw conclusions about the present, past and future. The relationship between card and card, the sense of sequence, must be inferred. The Tarot cards provide a correlative for the discontinuous technique of the poem. They offer no revelation. The future cannot be confidently predicted; the present is without direction.

“A Game of Chess” pursues the process of degeneration into the intimacies of relationship. The opening passage compels us to recall Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Virgil’s Dido, and (degeneration already setting in) the heroine of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. The verse breaks off suddenly in a jazz tune, the cheapness and accuracy of which recall the verve of the songs in Sweeney Agonistes. In “The Fire Sermon,” the third section of the poem, Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” degenerates into an insalubrious ballad, and Sweeney himself puts in a brief appearance. The Buddha’s “Fire Sermon” was preached against the fires of lust, envy, anger and other destructive passions. It too is put to work in this altering context. A suggestive eroticism is at play. There are hints of perversion in Mr. Eugenides’s advances, of impotence in Tiresias, of loveless sex and infecundity. But the section is not satirical in intent—rather, it is painfully elegiac. It is a verse that enacts the process of decay, most aptly when it introduces the theme through allusion to great art and artists, historical personages, and the history of a particular river, the Thames, at the heart of a particular urban society just after the Great War.

“Death by Water,” the fourth section, evolved out of Eliot’s own French poem, “Dans le Restaurant.” The passage intensifies and alters the recurrent image of water, with its normally curative and baptismal powers. This particular image of drowning is an emblem of futility, fulfilling Madame Sosostris’s prophesy but to no purpose: the futility of worries over profit and loss, youth and age, the elements, all forgotten in the once-and-for-all transformation of death, a bleak stability without suggestion of rebirth (though the allusion to Shakespeare’s redemptive play The Tempest sows seeds to which the final section at last adds water).

“What the Thunder Said” concludes the poem in what is the most difficult, and least successful, section. As the drought breaks and the thunder speaks, various elusive suggestions of hope occur—the fleeting image of Christ at Emaus, for example. We move east from the Thames to the great holy Ganges. But despite the thunder’s advice to “give, sympathize, and control,” the speaker of the closing lines is the mad prince, without inheritance and without posterity, snared in the present. This final juxtaposition, of hope and the man incapable of grasping it, is the most tragic and telling in the poem.

The Waste Land is inexhaustible because of the way in which it evokes a particular social, moral, historical and aesthetic moment, freighted with an abundant past, wrecked on a sterile present. To ask for a coherent “solution” to the poem is to misread the very technique. There is a solution, but there is a cultural and historical gap between the mad prince and the thunder’s counsel. The thunder speaks to the mad prince, but the mad prince cannot act upon its advice. The generous philosophies of the East, and the Christian faith, which begins to seem possible, demand an open ear, a heart prepared. The poem is incomplete because the poet is too truthful to “construct something upon which to rejoice.”

In Ash Wednesday the subjective element dominates more than in any of the other poems. The idiom is neither discursive nor committedly allusive and spare. It hovers. Liturgical allusions, used in the spirit in which Eliot deploys literary allusions, weaken the overall effect. Something of the subjectivity is to be felt in “The desert in the garden, the garden in the desert”—internal and external landscapes are interchangeable because constructed, not given. The “I” is more powerful here than the correlatives through which it works. A psalmodic cadence is employed, as though the poet chooses liturgical music in order to persuade himself. “Journey of the Magi” and “Marina” pursue similar themes and come up with more tentative answers, inviting rather than compelling assent. “Marina,” one of Eliot’s most perfect poems, is brief, intense and sensuous: desire based on memory, not working against it.

Four Quartets are more comprehensible—or paraphrasable—than Eliot’s earlier poems. They include much subtlety and fine verse. Considered as poems, their discursive and finally monotonous progression between points of achieved poetry can disappoint readers resistant to Eliot’s meanings. Four Quartets is a poem of meanings, detachable meanings. His thoughts change course, not for dramatic effect or to suggest fragmentation as in earlier poems, but simply because he can go no further with them. He plays them out. Having accepted at Oxford that he was no philosopher, he returned to philosophical verse. A flatness of diction and rhythm, a prosaic plumpness of phrase, these occur, but no “intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings.” The battle was over well before that phrase was neatly turned round its enjambement. Of the four, Burnt Norton is the outstanding quartet, including some of his most quoted lines. Yet the poem is not memorable. Eliot has simplified his technique, if not his discipline, to appeal to a wide audience, not in order to clarify his meanings.

He had grown older; history had taken various turns since the challenge of The Waste Land and the technical precocity of the Prufrock poems. If one is critical of Four Quartets it is only by the standard Eliot set in his early poems. They are disappointing—not at first reading, but when they have been lived with for a few years. They lack the intensity and eloquence of unspoken meanings. They are “full of high sentence” and not quite true—worked up, too reasonable, too sociable, the product rather than the process of thought. Edgell Rickword got the early Eliot right, noting the two sharp impressions the poems make: “urgency of the personality, which seems sometimes oppressive, and comes near to breaking through the so finely spun aesthetic fabric,” and “technique which spins this fabric” and issues in an economy of expression which sets the slim Poems, 1909–1925 on a different plane from “the bulky monsters of our time.” He adds, “It is by his struggle with technique that Mr Eliot has been able to get closer than any other poet to the physiology of our sensations... to explore and make palpable the more intimate distresses of a generation for whom all the romantic escapes had been blocked.”

Eliot’s poetry has a comparable importance within the tradition to Dryden’s and Wordsworth’s in earlier centuries, effecting a renewal in poetic language. Even today, “Prufrock” and The Waste Land are more challenging and “contemporary” than much work produced last year or last decade. They are contemporary, present in the way great poetry remains present and available, entering our aural memory and lodging there. It is with Eliot and Pound that our poetic and critical language, our sensibility, are thoroughly shaken out. If the dust has settled again, if the challenge of modernism has not been accepted in the longer term, it is our loss. Against the formal rigor and wholeness of Eliot’s oeuvre the fiddlings of postmodernism have a facile and fudged look. The cold hand of convention grips firmly; those radical intelligences which turn our eye back to the informing tradition and help us to pry ourselves free are few. To take them seriously involves disciplines and revaluations that are hard to sustain in a conformist literary culture. Even Eliot, in the end, breathed the same air as lesser poets.

But Ezra Pound didn’t. When Robert Graves met him at All Souls’, Oxford, in T. E. Lawrence’s rooms, he was surprised: “From his poems, I had expected a brawny, loud-voiced, swashbuckling American; but he was plump, hunched, soft-spoken and ill-at-ease, with the limpest of handshakes.” Pound hadn’t much time for the Georgians, and at this point Graves was associated with them and with all that Pound had set his cap against.

Born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885, Pound grew up in Wyncott, Pennsylvania, and became a student, ultimately at the University of Pennsylvania, of Romance languages. His contemporaries included William Carlos Williams and H.D. (who attended Bryn Mawr), and he became a close friend of each—indeed he courted H.D., but her father thought him a poor match. After graduation in 1906 he taught briefly, but was dismissed as too bohemian for Wabash College, Indiana. He traveled to Venice, publishing his first book, A Lume Spento, at his own expense. He was besotted with Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Browning. Whitman was in his blood. He was translating the poetry of the troubadours, Provençal and Anglo-Saxon verse. “The Seafarer,” included in 1912 in Ripostes, is his first major poem and foreshadows the opening of the Cantos. Indeed everything he read and translated at this time was “laid down” for eventual decanting into his great work. It was in Ripostes that he included Hulme’s poems. The Imagists were invented, with their list of rules: “Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether objective or subjective; to use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation: as regarding rhythm, to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.” He busied himself about his career and about H.D.’s—she too was in London—and Richard Aldington’s, who married her. Pound sent their verse off to Poetry (Chicago)—he was acting as foreign correspondent for the journal—and it was he who persuaded Hilda Doolittle to call herself H.D. Imagiste (the frenchified ending signifying her Continental affinities), later abbreviated to H.D. Pound also promoted the work of Williams, Flint, Ford, James Joyce and Amy Lowell (the last of which he rather regretted). In Poetry he published “A Few Don’ts by an Imagist”—Moses’ commandments for modern verse—including “Go in fear of abstractions” (which he abbreviated as “GIFOA” in the margins of The Waste Land) and “Don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs.” One thing we don’t look for in Pound’s prose is polite correctness of expression. He writes prose the way he talks—emphatically, without embellishment, and in a definite tone of voice.

He took his own medicine. A thirty-one line poem he ran through the Imagist wringer came out as two very famous lines, the poem called “In the Station of the Metro”; alongside H.D.’s “oread” it is the paradigmatic Imagist poem that fuses two images without interpretative fuss: “The apparition of those faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” Defining what he meant by the image, Pound evoked “the precise moment when a thing outward and objective transforms itself into a thing inward and subjective.”

Imagism was not enough—and besides, the rich and always forthright American poet Amy Lowell, with her mauve Rolls Royce and, legend says, a cigar clenched between her teeth—usurped his place as editor of the Imagist anthologies. With her it became tennis without the net: in Pound’s view she did not understand vers libre or what genuine Imagism was (even though she did admit Lawrence to the club, and Lowell wrote some creditable verses of her own). Pound renamed the group the Amygists and took his ball elsewhere. He invented a new game with Wyndham Lewis, a game more dynamic than Imagism and encompassing the graphic and plastic arts as well as poetry. They called it Vorticism and together produced two impressive issues of the magazine Blast. Such movements were polemical groupings, launchpads for some of the most significant talents of the century. The modest beginnings with their dictats and papal bulls would be absurd were it not for the fact that Pound, Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore, Lewis, Joyce, Lawrence and others all subscribed in one way or another early in their careers.

For Pound, more important than the movements was his personal engagement with other languages. Ernest Fenollosa, an American working in the Orient, had left notes on The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. His widow entrusted to Pound the editing of the manuscript, and it was a crucial task in his development. Already in Lustra there were Oriental touches. From Fenollosa he learned something of the dynamic of a language entirely different in construction from those he already knew, a language whose writing was ideogrammatic, and whose ideograms, he believed, included image elements. The Japanese Noh plays, which he edited and translated from Fenollosa’s versions, were also of interest to Yeats. Cathay (1915) includes Pound’s seventeen translations or imitations of Chinese verse, his most compelling versions of any poetry apart from Homage to Sextus Propertius. The “Song of the Bowmen of Shu” is called “Ode” in the Classic Anthology of Chinese Verse. There is nothing conventionally “songlike” about it. Donald Davie, Pound’s best English reader, says that it recalls no preexistent English form. It may have a touch of plainsong about it, but otherwise it is something new, a resource invented out of another language and literature. Pound has “internalized” the “music.” In his versions one line of Chinese characters often becomes a single sentence, the punctuation relaxed to ease the flow, with commas where we would expect full stops. Punctuation dictates the pace and is used unconventionally. Pound’s Chinese measure is not the syllable or stress count, but the fulfillment of the grammatical movement of the sentence—a contained rhythm of syntax. “To break the pentameter, that was the first heave,” he said elsewhere. Certainly in the poems in Cathay the pentameter is no longer in control. The finest of the Chinese poems is in the voice of a woman: “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.”

What was the common denominator between the score of cultures with which he was on more than nodding terms by his early thirties? The search led him toward the Cantos. A crucial stepping stone was Homage to Sextus Propertius, which he published in 1917, working on this classical project at the same time as the Chinese. He develops an idiom that is full of parodic elements. It is a “translation” that at every point tells the reader it is translation: deliberate awkwardnesses, classroom translationese and some of the finest and most poised of his writing are juxtaposed in a work that conjures up an ancient and a modern world, a classical and a modern sensibility, in the same breath.

It was in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, published in 1920, that—in variable rhymed quatrains—he managed to slough off the last tatters of the 1890s. Eliot read the poem as “a document of an epoch,” and it deserves to be placed beside The Waste Land, with which it shares certain themes and techniques. The quatrains break down in the fourth section, and in vers libre Pound writes one of the great war poems, vividly prefiguring the clarity and anger of the Cantos:

These fought in any case,

and some believing.

pro domo, in any case...

Some quick to arm,

some for adventure,

some from fear of weakness,

some from fear of censure,

some for love of slaughter, in imagination,

learning later...

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;

Died some, pro patria,

non “dulce” non “et decor”...

walked eye-deep in hell

believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving

came home, home to a lie,

home to many deceits,

home to old lies and new infamy;

usury age-old and age-thick

and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.

Young blood and high blood,

fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,

disillusions as never told in the old days,

hysterias, trench confessions,

laughter out of dead bellies.

Mauberley is more closely focused than The Waste Land on the European, and specifically the English, political, cultural and spiritual world after the war, the poverty of spirit, the coarse materialism and the hollowness of those who make and those who promote “value.” It is a poem of bankruptcy, and after seeing Mauberley’s world it was only a matter of time before Pound abandoned England for good as a world that could not be repaired. Mauberley is the last poem by Pound which English readers at large will tolerate. Many seem to part company with the poet after this point, seeing the later work as a wild aberration in its form, language, allusiveness, and in its politics. The theme of usury appears in Mauberley. It becomes an eloquent (“With usura hath no man a house of good stone,” Canto XLV) and then a poisoned strand in the Cantos, the strand upon which he hangs his notorious anti-Semitism. In 1966 the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko refused to share a podium with Pound. When Robert Lowell read one of the Pisan Cantos at New College, Oxford, in 1968, half the audience walked out in protest.

In 1945 the poet, in a prison cage at Pisa, under arrest by the American military for his collaboration with the Italians in the war, took savage stock of what he had said and how he had behaved, of what had happened, discriminating what was and what was not vanity in what he had done and made.

“Master thyself, then others shall thee beare”

Pull down thy vanity

Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,

A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,

Half black half white

Nor knowst’ou wing from tail

Pull down thy vanity

How mean thy hates

Fostered in falsity,

Pull down thy vanity,

Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,

Pull down thy vanity,

I say pull down.

But to have done instead of not doing

this is not vanity

To have, with decency, knocked

That a Blunt should open

To have gathered from the air a live tradition

or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame

This is not vanity.

Here error is all in the not done,

all in the diffidence that faltered,

Canto LXXXI ends with a comma. Dessunt nonulla.

In 1914 Pound married Dorothy Shakespear. In 1920 they moved to Paris and in 1924 to Italy, where they settled in Rapallo. There he stayed for much of the rest of his life. Before he left England he had begun the Cantos, and they were developing into a long poem, a work which was all-consuming. In 1925 he revised and published XVI Cantos, and five years later a further thirty Cantos followed. In the end there were 117 complete or almost complete Cantos (the last seven as Drafts and Fragments, published in 1968, four years before the poet, who had fallen silent, died). The books and essays that came out while the Cantos were being composed were political and economic polemics expounding his monetarist and fascist views, essays (notably How to Read and ABC of Reading) and translations.

As Donald Davie says, for those who value the Cantos the poetry must “survive a self-evidently and perilously wrong understanding of history, and hence of politics.” It must also survive the huge wealth of reference, of disparate-seeming traditions, that inform it: Chinese ideograms, quotes from Thomas Jefferson, Provençal, Italian, Greek and a host of other cultural “zones.” Pound more clearly than any of his contemporaries illustrates the complete change in attitudes to “tradition” that occurs when the center no longer holds, when the English that was exported to the colonies comes home with its own luggage, not the luggage that was exported with it.

Pound’s life changed after he arrived in Italy. It became more concentrated. There were no longer regular casual meetings with groups of friends. If someone came to see him, they visited, sometimes for weeks at a time. Young poets stayed near him in Rapallo, just as they stayed near Laura Riding and Robert Graves in Mallorca. He established informally what he called the “Ezuversity.” Concentrating on his studies, he developed his anticapitalist and anti-Zionist theories. In the magnificent Canto XXX, one of the great political poems of the century, unpardonable because it defines with such plangency his early fascism even while his contemporaries were lining up behind Stalin, he writes:

Compleynt, compleynt I hearde upon a day,

Artemis singing, Artemis, Artemis

Agaynst Pity lifted her wail:

Pity causeth the forests to fail,

Pity slayeth my nymphs,

Pity spareth so many an evil thing.

Pity befouleth April,

Pity is the root and the spring.

Now if no fayre creature followeth me

It is on account of Pity,

It is on account that Pity forbideth them slaye.

All things are made foul in this season,

This is the reason, none may seek purity

Having for foulness pity

And things growne awry;

No more do my shaftes fly

To slay. Nothing is now clean slayne

But rotteth away.

The Canto is cast in a quasi-Elizabethan mold, eluding the iambic but with a music that sounds familiar, a diction deliberately set in time, calling up the unambiguously great period of English poetry in which forms of tolerance led to the poetic and political distortions of the Jacobean and its aftermaths.

His economic theories seemed hare-brained, his anti-Semitism intolerable. Friends chose to ignore him rather than call him to account. Unchecked in his pursuit of “truth,” unheeded in his Cassandra-like prophesies, he became ever more strident. The politics and economics of the later Cantos are increasingly crude, until the poem is broken open by the defeat of the Axis powers and Pound himself is arrested by the Americans in 1944 for treason. Was he driven mad by his theories, hatreds and defeats? The Pisan Cantos and the later work suggest that he was not. Certainly the poetry he wrote out of the experience of having lived through the consequences of his ideas and actions is at times mighty and resonant, at times utterly opaque. He was taken back to the United States and declared insane (otherwise he might have been executed for his actions). Fourteen years later he was released—William Carlos Williams and Frost worked hard to get him freed—and he returned to Italy to continue his long work.

He insisted that there was no “structure” to the Cantos, no “key” to the ways in which they fit together, no plot. His work is not to be understood through paraphrase or conventional analysis. It is the quintessence of Imagist practice, a tissue of juxtapositions of historical fact, poetry, politics, vocal registers, music, satire. The theme, Yeats said in 1936, is flux: “plot, characterisation, logical discourse, seem to him abstractions unsuitable to a man of his generation.” The legacy of Hulme is fully present here, as is the legacy of Fenollosa. Pound speaks of his method as “ideogrammatic,” each distinct register, quotation, voice, equivalent to an ideogram in the line of ideograms in a Chinese poem, to be read, auralized and visualized. Canto I merges Old English, Homeric and other strands; the second introduces a wholly colloquial voice in argument with Robert Browning, about Sordello. Each allusion invites us to read, but to read beyond, over the poet’s shoulder, the texts he alludes to. There is a continual interplay between voices, cultures, registers; the reader is engaged in the poem to an unprecendented degree, not scrabbling about after footnotes but identifying (as in The Waste Land) the transitions from voice to voice, and responding to the modulations and metamorphoses that occur. Events inhere in place and in language. If modernism is essentially—as some critics argue—the art of anthology, of selection and collocation of material from the imaginary museum, responsible modernists will respect the integrity of what they borrow and protect it by deploying it within a system of ironies that indicate what it means in itself and what it is being used to express in the new context, about the other material gathered in that context. This is how Eliot works. This is how Pound works.

Odysseus and Confucius, Jefferson and Malatesta, the black prisoner held at Pisa alongside him and the King of Portugal, authors known and authors read, all have a part in the culture of the Cantos. In 1923 Pound wandered around the Italian battlefields with Ernest Hemingway, who told him the story of Sigismundo de Malatesta and his battles with the Pope, Malatesta who had the Tempio built. Malatesta becomes emblematic of power used for good, both in chastising the wickedness and greed of Pius II and in creating durable works. What in the biography begins as a casual encounter or engagement, a walking tour, an evening’s conversation, finds its way into the deeper life of the Cantos, what Williams called “the impressive monument which Pound is building against our time.” The word “against” has two senses here, the obvious sense of opposition, and the positive sense, in which a squirrel gathers nuts against winter.

After Pound we read poetry differently. If, that is, we read Pound at all. Without him, it is hard to know how we could read Basil Bunting, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Charles Reznikoff, Robert Duncan and a host of others. It is hard to know how we could read H.D., so much Pound’s own creation. The diversity of his direct and indirect heirs is not division. The wealth of his own distinctive culture, with its discrete selections, sanctions in various ways their various cultures. Without Pound, much of the most innovative poetry looks like nonsense. Williams is not enough: Pound is the problematic, polyphiloprogenitive ancestor. And those who reject him, for his politics or for his poetry, build on the tradition he abandoned in 1920 when he abandoned England, the “sinking island.” Returning to attend the funeral of “Possum,” T. S. Eliot, he was almost entirely silent. When Stephen Spender loped up to him and reintroduced himself with the words, “I’m Stephen Spender. You don’t remember me?” he replied, “No, I don’t.”

H.D. too came to England, and then—for personal rather than political reasons—abandoned the English. Pound’s campaign for her work was almost too successful. He named her, he characterized her as the crucial Imagist, and she has never quite worked herself free of that early marketing ploy. The only woman in the first wave of major Anglo-American modernists, her work is different in kind from the others’, even in its earliest and purest Imagist forms. Her major work, the Trilogy on war, was first published in a single volume in 1973, the three discrete parts, The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945) and The Flowering of the Rod (1946) having been pulped or remaindered by their publisher. Robert Lowell caricatured her vision of the war as “bombs falling on the British Museum.” In 1972 Hermetic Definition was published. These books, with Helen in Egypt (1961), are the crucial ones, published long after her celebrated (or notorious) apprentice work of 1914–38.

She was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1886, into a devout and strict Moravian family. Her father was a learned astronomer and moved with his family to a post in Philadelphia. At Bryn Mawr she translated Latin poetry and began to write some of her own, experimenting with free verse. In England she married Richard Aldington, got to know D. H. Lawrence and many of the other writers of the day, and discovered a forceful advocate in Pound. Selling her poems to Harriet Monroe at Poetry he called the work “objective—no slither; direct—no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won’t permit examination. It’s straight talk, straight as the Greek!” Talk it certainly isn’t: the stilled rhythms, the utter purity of expression, leave voice out of the equation altogether. There is “no slither” because there is little movement of any kind. Still, she was the Imagist touchstone, an example of how poetry could be reclaimed from the excesses of the Georgians, where language generally seemed (to Pound) to exceed its occasion, and where the occasions themselves were merely conventional. In H.D. Pound found a concentration, an absence of sentiment, and accuracy of rhythm. The iamb was nowhere in sight. For F. S. Flint she seemed to attain “accurate mystery,” a hardness without decoration (unless we take the marbly images as themselves decorative). She names things: actual flowers and trees, stones and metals. Her sand is “crisp”; “through the bronze / of shining bark and wood / run the fine threads of gold.” Her most famous poem fuses the sea and the pine forest, so closely merged that each is the other:

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.

It is less the images here that are potent, more the rhythm, the use of strong imperatives that are rendered gentle and suasive, an exhortation that is a description, admitting us in the word “us” of the concluding line. The poem begins at the point where two images fuse.

Her Imagist period ended with a nervous breakdown: her marriage ended, a favorite brother was killed in the war, her father died. Her friend Bryher rescued her and lovingly reassembled her. With Bryher she went to Corfu and had a vision—or a hallucination—in which she saw the Greek gods of sun and victory. In Vienna in 1933–34 she underwent psychoanalysis with Freud (her Tribute to Freud is a fascinating account of these experiences). He read her life as a quest that related to archetypal myths. Indeed, his reading was curiously Jungian and certainly enabling to H.D. He made what had been an instinctive quest into something more deliberate. He helped her make connections between the disparate elements in a life up to that point unsettled and emotionally chaotic, apart from the anchored and anchoring love between herself and Bryher. In 1937 she published her translation of Euripides’ Ion, a crucial development into voices and actions. To Freud she attributed the strength she gained for renewal, the imaginative coherence that made it possible for her to begin Trilogy among the terrifying disruptions of the Second World War.

It is a poem that picks a way from desolation toward regeneration. The triplet and couplet stanzas are capable of delivering image and narrative, but are most effective in weaving connections between her own age of crisis and those ancient ages that feed her imagination: Pompeii, Egypt, Greece. Her Moravian memory becomes inclusive, her father has a symbolic place, the gods become God, eternity is a fact:

Ra, Osiris, Amen appeared

in a spacious bare meeting-house;

he is the world-father,

father of past aeons,

present and future equally;

beardless, not at all like Jehovah,

he was upright, slender,

impressive as the Memnon monolith,

yet he was not out of place

but perfectly at home

in the eighteenth-century

simplicity and grace;

then I woke with a start

of wonder and asked myself,

But whose eyes are those eyes?...

The syntax is supple and always correct; whatever the tensions there is a way to find order and connection. It is deliberate but admits surprises. In Hermetic Definition—her most beautiful work, beautiful in the old way of poetry—the surprise is love.

Why did you come

to trouble my decline:

I am old (I was old till you came)...

Here is the climate of the Mediterranean, but also the climate of her childhood:

O, do not bring snow-water

but fresh snow;

I would be bathed with stars...

Pound and Eliot in different ways would have concurred with her quiet triumph in untangling memory, lust and desire, in the lines:

love built on dreams

of the forgotten first unsatisfied embrace,

is satisfied.