Ezra Pund and Vorticism

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oard of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

Ezra Pound and Vorticism: A Polite Blast

Author(s): William C. Lipke and Bernard W. Rozran

Source: Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1966), pp.

201-210

Published by: University of Wisconsin Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207248

Accessed: 20-04-2016 05:14 UTC

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EZRA POUND AND VORTICISM:

A POLITE BLAST

William C. Lipke and Bernard W. Rozran

In Who's Who (London) for the years 1915 through 1918, Ezra

Pound contributed the following entry: EZRA POUND, M.A.

vorticist... Recreations: fencing, tennis, searching the Times for evi-

dences of almost incredible stupidity. William C. Wees, in an article

entitled Ezra Pound as a Vorticist, ' described Pound's brief career

as a vorticist, his influence on the movement, and its influence on

him. Mr. Wees's presentation of the facts of Pound's participation in

the vorticist movement is welcome, but Pound's affiliation with vorti-

cism might be clarified if vorticism itself were more clearly under-

stood. As Mr. Wees indicates, vorticism was primarily a movement

in the visual arts. The following remarks are aimed not at disputing

Mr. Wees's interpretation of the facts of the movement, but at sug-

gesting a more precise meaning of vorticism.

What are the characteristics of vorticism as a visual style? If we

examine Mr. Wees's article we have little to go on. He cites, for

instance, the first issue of the vorticist magazine Blast and notes that

all of the illustrations (except for two by Spencer Gore) could be

called Vorticist. (p. 64) We are not told why they are Vorticist,

or on what basis we can call any work of art Vorticist. Further, Mr.

Wees presents some suggestions when he refers to Pound's poem

Dogmatic Statement as being like a vorticist painting which is

an abstract composition based on line, color, and pattern. (p. 69)

This description could apply to the work of Kandinsky or Picasso-in

1 William C. Wees, Ezra Pound as a Vorticist, Wisconsin Studies in

Contemporary Literature, VI, 1 (1965), 56-72. Citation of page numbers in

reference to this article will hereafter appear parenthetically in text.

WISCONSIN STUDIES I VII, 2



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fact to most of the paintings created between 1907 and 1915 by the

avant-garde.

While it is true that Pound coined the term in late 1913, the

works executed by the vorticist artist prior to this date can be seen as

a logical development of the non-representational vorticist style

labeled by Pound. T. E. Hulme, writing on Modern Art in the

New Age in 1914,2 attempted to unravel the complex styles practiced

by the more avant-garde English artists since 1905. All of these works

were, according to Hulme, part of the modern movement. This

modern movement in English painting was characterized by three

stylistic phases: post-impressionism, analytical cubism (which Hulme

considered the basis of the abstract phase of vorticism), and finally,

a new constructive geometric art which he found best typified in

the work of David Bomberg and Jacob Epstein. This last phase of

the modern movement was distinct from vorticism, Hulme claimed,

because it was more original and less derivative than the vorticist work.

What was the history of vorticism and what were the styles

within the developing movement? The cubist and futurist inspired

experiments of a group of English painters and sculptors executed

between 1911 and 1920 are part of a larger and more comprehensive

view of the vorticist movement. Three stylistic phases can be distin-

guished in the decade of vorticism, and all of them can be seen in the

illustrations to the first issue of Blast. The first phase could be called

primitive cubism. Much of the stimulus of the first phase derives

from certain drawings of the cubists and futurists. There are certain

works of Picasso and Herbin where emphasis upon the hard-edged

line tends to create planes of form rather than a more naturalistic

delineation of the object's contour line. This phase is, nevertheless,

representational and is inspired primarily by the rediscovery of primi-

tive sculpture. A related source for this first phase can be found in

the vorticists' admiration of Jacob Epstein's growing collection of

primitive sculpture. The second phase of vorticism, the style to which

I think Hulme was referring when he used the term analytical cub-

ism, is in fact a rather naive interpretation of what the vorticists

thought analytical cubism intended to present. Its characteristics are

the stick figures applied to the surface of the canvas, figures which

are reminiscent of certain paintings of Picabia and Severini executed

between 1910 and 1912. Hulme claimed that this vorticist style was

2 T. E. Hulme wrote four articles on Modern Art which appeared in the

January 15, February 12, March 26, and July 9, 1914 issues of the New Age.

202 1 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE



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distinguishable from its source ( analytical cubism ) in that the Eng-

lish artists made use of mechanical forms. While the first phase,

primitive cubism, dates from as early as 19094 and continues to

1914, the second phase of the vorticist style exists between 1912 and

1915. It appears in some of the war drawings and paintings of the

vorticists and reappears after the war. The third phase was essentially

less derivative and was non-representational. Growing in part out of

the 1913 experiments done at Roger Fry's Omega Workshops, it was

the logical termination of experimenting with the previous two phases.

This style became fully developed in 1914 and 1915 and reappeared

in late 1919 and 1920. It is distinct from other work done in England

or on the continent at the time. Angular lines expanding sequentially

rather than logically are its characteristics. The scheme is usually

worked around an unconventional unbalanced composition based

on the contrast between open volumes and tightly enclosed spaces.

This phase of vorticism is thus distinct from futurism in its repudia-

tion of the painterly technique, its insistence upon the non-figurative

motif, and its avoidance of the principle of simultaneous vision.

These stylistic considerations indicate the inaccuracy of some of

Mr. Wees's examples of visual vorticism. He claims that Blast is in

itself, a Vorticist work of art, perhaps the most successful of all Vorti-

cist works of art, because of its garish color, over-sized type, and

pugnacious tone. (p. 65) Similarly, it is difficult to conceive of the

vorticist manifesto which appeared in the first issue of Blast as suggest-

ing any of the stylistic phases of vorticism which we have outlined.

The manifesto, according to Mr. Wees is a kind of prose libre ...

in patterns of large, heavy type carefully arranged on the large pages.

In effect, the words create abstract Vorticist designs with lines and

blocks of black on planes of white. (pp. 64-65) IT IS DIFFICULT TO

IMAGINE ANY SENTENCE AS AN EXAMPLE OF THE VORTICIST STYLE, Or

any visual style in painting. Such an interpretation may be tempting,

but it hardly does justice to vorticist artists or to the styles they

had created.

3 Wyndham Lewis's Timon series, which were exhibited in part at Roger

Fry's October 1912 second post-impressionist exhibit, is unique in that it re-

flects all three stylistic phases of the vorticist movement. The forms are mechan-

ical, but closer to the curvilinear treatment of Duchamp than the more tightly

controlled angular schemes of Leger.

4 The earliest vorticist work of this primitive cubistic phase is Wyndham

Lewis's The Theatre Manager of 1909. It is now in the Print Room at the

Victoria and Albert Museum.

A POLITE BLAST 2 3



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Since he has not accurately identified visual vorticism, it is sur-

prising that Mr. Wees should be prepared to claim that Vorticism

was the only movement in pre-war England to fully and enthusiastic-

ally catch the spirit of the 'new age.' (p. 57) Hulme and his con-

structive-geometricists, Fry and his Omega Workshops, The British

Fauves, and others also enthusiastically caught the spirit and figure

very importantly in this decade of British art. It is an oversimplifica-

tion to state that Ezra Pound was the only person who kept vorticism

alive during the war. While he was one of the key figures who helped

to sell much of the vorticists' work to the American patron John

Quinn, the stimulus for pushing the work of William Roberts, Edward

Wadsworth, Jessica Dismorr, and Helen Saunders came from Wyn-

dham Lewis.5 It was Lewis, not Pound, who had the idea of staging

the vorticist show at the Penguin Club in New York, for Pound origi-

nally intended Quinn to give a large show of Lewis's works. Horace

Brodzky, secretary of the Penguin Club at that time and an earlier

pre-war friend of the vorticists, also was instrumental in persuading

Quinn to stage a vorticist exhibition.

What then was Pound's contribution to vorticism as a movement

in the visual arts? Clearly, Mr. Wees is correct in asserting the impor-

tance of the label vorticism which was Pound's coinage. But it is

certain that the style existed, that the vortex was already being

depicted before the name was attached to le mouvement. Pound's

contribution of the label and his concommitant insistence upon the

value of non-representational painting may have helped to push the

vorticist artists from the more representational derivative experiments

to the non-representational stage of vorticism. One must not forget,

however, that the aesthetic theories of Kandinsky, Worringer, and

Hulme also figured as sources for the non-representational phase of

vorticism. Perhaps Pound's greatest achievement in the history of vor-

ticism as a visual movement was the conversion of the successful pho-

tographer, Alvin Langdon Coburn, to this abstract third phase of

vorticism. For while vorticism as a movement in the visual arts has

yet to be appreciated, Coburn's vortographs have long been recognized

by historians of photography as the first abstract photographs preced-

ing the dadaist photographic experiments of Christian Schad, Man

5 See Lewis's letter to Ezra Pound in The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed.

W. K. Rose (London, 1963), p. 85.

6 Interview with Horace Brodzky in London (November 15, 1964).

Brodzky's etching, The Vorticist Exhibition at the Penguin Club, January

1917 is one of the few documents of that exhibition.




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Ray, and Moholy-Nagy. But what did vorticism do for Pound, and

can we speak of a vorticist poetry?

II

To manipulate a poet's development by progressing him from

ism to ism neglects a simple truth: the source for establishing

this development in his poems. The biographical history of Ezra

Pound's London years prior to World War I includes his affiliation

with the Poet's Club, as well as afternoons with Ford Madox Hueffer

and evenings with Yeats, and such influences may be looked to legiti-

mately as the birthplace of the changes in tone, subject matter, word

choice, metrics, and visual arrangement of phrases and lines-all facets

that emerged in those poems Pound classified as experiments in

building the new art of metrics and of words. 7 To examine carefully

the occurrence and contents of these experiment poems within the

corpus of Pound's poems published after Ripostes will focus a critical

aspect on evidence from which to justifiably conclude that the poet

had (or had not) moved on.

In the case of early Pound the above approach is essential, for

otherwise demonstrable distinctions between Imagist and Vorti-

cist are blurred or ignored, with the result that a useful descriptive

rubric is made into an inappropriate label. Whereas Pound's Imag-

ist phase has been told and retold, and articles on his Vorticism

begin to proliferate, the comments to follow intend rather to provoke

some questions as to the accuracy of certain boundaries, the validity

of existing special categories.

In August 1912, Pound accepted Harriet Monroe's request that

he assume the duties of foreign correspondent for Poetry: A Maga-

zine of Verse.8 In subsequent contributions to Poetry there is a tone

of irreverence, sharp and caustic, and in Salutation and Salutation

the Second, Pound modulates neither word choice nor meters for

the delicate or decorous of the Chicago audience; instead he pro-

claims his intent to rejuvenate things. It is language of bombast,

of insult; the brazen, haughty tones of sarcasm later to explode on

the pages of Blast-forceful, vivid language, devoid of rhyme or set

meter; vers libre close to an everyday speech, into which comes the

occasional vulgarity, the occasional pornographic allusion.

7 Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. D. D. Paige (New York, 1950), p. 11.

8 Letters, p. 9.

A POLITE BLAST 1 205



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These few selections from Contemporania have the multitude

of characteristics all too frequently delegated only to Pound's later

Vorticist phase. In fact, this voice of the polemical satirist is clearly

one aspect of 1912-1913 poems which, at the same time, contain

many examples of the dry, hard Imagist decorum. Even more sur-

prising, Pound was involved in still another direction, which will be

dealt with later on.

Mr. Wees contends that by February 1914 with the publication

of Des Imagistes, Ezra Pound had moved on to Vorticism, . . . and

its 'hard light, clear edges,' by developing a new, more violent mode

of expression. (p. 57) Several comments by Mr. Wees do aid one to

construct the Pound milieu, especially after the formal announcement

of Vorticism. Unfortunately for the strength of Mr. Wees's presenta-

tion, he cites certain poems as evidence of violence that become part

of a new Poundian personae-a combined enfant terrible and moral

satirist. (p. 58) Namely: Salutation the Second and Pax Saturni.

These two poems were not published in Poetry on April 1, 1914,

as Mr. Wees contends, but one year earlier. How then can we accept

Mr. Wees's assumption that the contents of these two poems, along

with Commission, 'l indicate that by midsummer 1914 he [Pound]

had moved on to Vorticism ? (p. 57) Surely the mistake in dating

would be insignificant, except for an essential point that in the spring

of 1913 Pound is claimed by the numerous recorders of Imagism

as its staunch supporter, having printed in the March 1913 issue of

Poetry his oft-quoted A Few Don'ts by an Imagist. In fact, several

of the other poems in Contemporania (e.g. The Garret ) indicate

Pound's continued experimenting with clearly Imagist potentialities.

Since those separate harsher qualities claimed by Wees to delineate

Pound's new Vorticist phase are actually poems undisputedly Imag-

ist, is one to assume that by spring of 1913 Pound was both Imagist

and Vorticist? The question becomes ludicrous when one recalls that

the first proclamation of A Great English Vortex in Blast No. 1

did not announce Vorticism until June 1914. That Salutation the

Third in Blast No. 1 repeats this Juvenalian snarling, only enforces

this writer's contention that Pound's Vorticism consists of other

factors. First, Salutation the Third originally was intended as a part

9 Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, II, 1 (April 1913). This was part of the

selection titled Contemporania.

'o Ibid., p. 10.




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of the earlier Contemporania series of April 1913, thereby contra-

dicting Mr. Wees's point that this poem illustrates a totally new tone,

... more declamatory ... [the] development of a more violent poetic

expression. (p. 59) Pound's polemical declamations are, then, one

aspect of his early poems; but if Vorticism is to represent some new

aspect, one must look elsewhere. In fact, one needs to look again at

Contemporania, for in that selection the last poem indicates a form

of experiment excitingly original and more visually operative: In a

Station of the Metro -the two-line hokku familiar to the casual

reader and to the Pound devothe. And yet how curious that its printed

form-the word arrangement-as it appears in Poetry for April 1913

has nowhere been repeated. Especially when the directions for spacing

are in a letter to Harriet Monroe: In the METRO hokku, I was careful,

I think to indicate spaces between the rhythmic units, and I want

them observed. ' The spacings were observed and the poem appears:

IN ST TION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.13

How interesting to consider these spaces between rhythmic units

and to recall the third rule of the Imagistes: 3. As regards rhythm,

to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of

a metronome. '4 Metro was not a single instance of experimenting

with this emphasis on the visual arrangement of phrases and lines.

One section of The Garret presents an image as clear, hard, and

precise as any by Hulme or H. D., but which is constructed visually

as well:

Dawn enters with little feet

like a gilded Pavlova.

Pound's explanation for the visual emphasis indicates his concern for

precise effect: I'm deluded enough to think there is a rhythmic sys-

11 Evidence for this and other datings come from research in the Harriet

Monroe papers at University of Chicago Libraries.

12 Letters, p. 17. This letter might be misdated (30 March) since it refers

to material for the April issue. A probable date for it would be 10 March.

13 Poetry, II, 1 (April 1913), p. 12.

14 F. S. Flint, Imagisme, Poetry, I, 6, p. 199.

A POLITE BLAST 2 7



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tem in the d stuff, and I believe I was careful to type it as I

wanted it written, i.e. as to line ends and breaking and capitals. Cer-

tainly I want the line you give, written just as it is. (Letters, p. 17)

A special consideration for rhythm accomplished by selective

spacing between words and phrases: precisely the aspect of a unity

possible between musical harmony and the harmony of design; the

possibility of a visual design in a poem to complement the avant-garde

geometric school of English Cubists. Here was an experiment in the

paradigms of form, for in METRO the superposition technique

of hokku presents in its one, unified image an intellectual and emo-

tional complex in an instant of time. ' Second, METRO reflects

Pound's interest in the intriguing arrangements of colors and mass

in Japanese prints, and the use of just these elements in paintings by

a fellow expatriate, James McNeill Whistler. This ever-present aware-

ness and appreciation for dynamic intensities in painting and sculp-

ture of the avant-garde began to be recorded, as in Les Millwins,

by mid 9 3:

The mauve and greenish souls of the

little Millwins

Were seen lying along the upper seats

Like so many unused boas

With arms exalted, with Fore-arms

Crossed in the great futuristic X's,

the art students

Exalted.'

The bright vibrance of Fauve colors, as well as suggestion for a

pictorial composition in diagonals, this section of the poem sketches

a design that thematically foreshadows the later Dogmatic Statement

on the Games and Play of Chess (Theme for a Series of Pictures) in

Blast No. 2 (1915), with its strong L's of colour which break and

reform the pattern. Why not believe the analysis by Pound himself?

The Game of Chess poem shows the effect of modem abstract art,

5 Letters, p. 11.

16 Earl Miner, Pound, Haiku, and the Image, The Hudson Review, IX

(Winter 1956-57), pp. 570-584.

17 Poetry, III, 3, p. 57.




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but Vorticism from my angle was a renewal of the sense of construc-

tion ... was an attempt to revive the sense of form.x8

Pound's enthusiastic response to the geometric sculpture of Henri

Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein, and to the designs of Wyndham

Lewis and Edward Wadsworth-this fact along with his translations

from the Fenollosa manuscripts add to the rare richness of his imagi-

nation's sources towards the end of 1913.

A magnificent variety of techniques and subject matters, of tones,

meters and verse theories were continually exercised, criticized, modu-

lated, even fused, as Pound sought by experiments in verse to teach

the American poet that poetry is an art, an art with a technique, with

media, an art that must be in constant flux, a constant change of

manner, if it is to live. '9 In the multiplicity of his interests, capabil-

ities, affiliations, preferences and compositions, one finds a man dedi-

cated to his craft; if this multiplicity is to be separated into neat

distinctions, then facts must be accurate and the view clear before

attaching to Ezra Pound some 'appropriate' ism.

III

Perhaps the influence of vorticism on Pound should be sought

not in the poet's style but in his attitude. Babette Deutsch noted in

1917 that Pound was a modern of moderns, whose credo it is that

a study of comparative literature of so many epochs and races is essen-

tial to that keen critical faculty which is part of the artist's equip-

ment. 20 Pound is a vorticist, Miss Deutsch claimed, from whom

and through whom and into whom ideas are constantly rushing.

(p. 861) Just as Gaudier-Brzeska's Vortex was written to show that

the sculptor now stood at the center of artistic endeavors of the last

two thousand years, and his work paraphrased that of Rodin, Archi-

penko, Archaic Greek, and Pre-Columbian sculpture; so Ezra Pound's

vorticism can be seen in his approach to poetry, in his drawing upon

the Chinese, the work of Guido Cavalcanti, the ballads of Provence,

and the classical Noh drama. Like Gaudier, Pound preferred a para-

phrase rather than a literal translation of his sources. It was an attitude

which Pound cultivated at this time to give his work a greater adapt-

18 Donald Hall, Ezra Pound: An Interview, Paris Review, 28 (Summer-

Fall 1962), pp. 28-31.

1' Letters, p. 43.

20 Babette Deutsch, Ezra Pound, Vorticist, Reedy's Mirror, XXVII, 51

(December 21, 1917), pp. 860-861.

A POLITE BLAST 1 209



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ability of metre to mood, as T. S. Eliot phrased it. Vorticism as a

visual movement was sustained through the efforts of the poet, but

Pound's own vorticism is as elusive to define as Rilke's impression-

ism. For as Wellek and Warren have noted:

Only when we have evolved a successful system of terms for the analysis

of literary works of art can we delimit literary periods, not as metaphysical

entities dominated by a time spirit. Having established such outlines

of strictly literary evolution, we then can ask the question whether this

evolution is, in some way, similar to the similarly established evolution of

the other arts. The answer will be, as we can see, not a flat yes or no.

It will take the form of an intricate pattern of coincidence and divergences

rather than parallel lines.21

21 Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York,

1956), p. 135.


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