ABSTRACT
i will begin this tribute with some personal reminiscences for they will show more clearly than my subsequent arguments why I approach the case of Ezra Pound in a sympathetic mood. Between 1912 and 1914 I was a student in a provincial university. I had just begun to write poetry and had been infected by that spirit of adventure or experiment that was about in those days. The fashionable poets were the Georgians—their annual anthology began to appear in the year 1913, and when the war broke out one of their number—Rupert Brooke—suddenly became a national poet, representative of much that was good in the spirit of the times. But, also representative of something that I had begun to recognize as sentimental and weak. My enlightenment was not due to native perspicacity, so much as to the tutoring I had received from journals like The New Age and Wyndham Lewis’s Blast, which journals carried on a rowdy opposition to all that the Georgians represented in literature and art. By far the most active part in this opposition was played by a young American who had come to London in 1908, and had quickly made contact with the few figures in contemporary art and letters whom he could respect—W. B. Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, then just emerging as a self-styled Vorticist, and the belligerent philosopher T. E. Hulme. The intimate history of those pre-war years has still to be written, but a group, quite distinct from the Georgians, began to form. Pound was joined by a young poet, Richard Aldington, along with his American wife, who signed her poems with the initials H. D., by another American, John Gould Fletcher, and by a London poet, F. S. Flint. In the spring or early summer of 1912, Pound, H. D., and Aldington decided that they were agreed upon certain principles of poetry, which they proceeded to formulate. In January that year Hulme had collected in The New Age (25 January, 1912) five poems with the heading “The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme”—poems which were afterwards reprinted as an appendix to one of Pound’s volumes (Ripostes, 1915), and it is certain that Hulme had a good deal to do with the clarification of the group’s ideas. The group itself launched an anthology called Des Imagistes, which was edited by Pound and published in March, 1914. By the next year the group had split and a new anthology, Some Imagist Poets, was published, containing work by Aldington, H. D., Fletcher, Flint, D. H. Lawrence and Amy Lowell, but nothing by Pound.
