Pound’s Contemporania are the stars here. I mistyped “starts,” a meaningful slip? I’ll just note a few observations that might
be useful. First, I think that I learned
something about the publication history of these poems from Cyrena Pondrom’s
awesome essay “H.D. and the Origins of Imagism” from a 1985 issue of Paideuma, a journal currently run by
dear friends (I worked there for a year).
If I remember correctly, Pound had sent poems to Poetry but demanded them held back so that Aldington and H.D. would
be published first, before sending new poems in a more Imagiste style. What strikes me most about this sequence, on
reading it again, is perhaps how the poems define themselves. They define their audience and their
reception, and are out to provoke as well as enshrine themselves. This isn’t exactly unprecedented, (“So long
lives this, and this gives life to thee”) but what might be novel is that some of
these poems aren’t about much else than their own quality. This reminds me of a moment in Barrett Watten’s
Plasma: “If it’s a good idea, it
results in a permanent change.” That
whole stanza from Plasma could be
about the Imagists…
I want to zoom in on two particular lines from the first
poems: “I beg you, my friendly critics/ Do not set about to procure me an
audience” (1). Could this be referring
to the apologia from March’s issue of Poetry? I have a feeling that this poem is in
dialog with Poetry itself—and The New Age as well, with its
preoccupation with procurers. Procurers
show up again in “Pax Saturni,” and I wonder whether or not Pound is
positioning himself against Beatrice Hastings and her denial of forced
prostitution here. Maybe?
Which leads me to make a note about how this project has
developed: it is more of a public notebook than anything else. I’m not really reviewing the little reviews
in any sense beyond re-viewing. I may
hold back some things I’m thinking, or I might type them up, but I’m sure my
thoughts are not complete.
Yeats’ poem is thrown into biographical relief by the
comment in the “Notes” section of the issue: “Mr. Yeats' poem is especially significant
because of its rare autobiographical mood. It is seldom that this poet speaks
of his attitude toward his art, or the world's attitude toward him.” That seems like a good gloss to me—the poem
is a combination of Yeats meditating on his dead acquaintances (and Maude
Gonne, of course) and an ancient Irish legend.
I’m struck by how this poem is a foreshadowing of “Easter, 1916,”
published three years earlier. All
changed, all changed utterly. A terrible
presentiment… I’m not enough of a Yeatsian to know exactly what’s going on
here, I might try to figure it out.
Lastly, Harriet Monroe puts her money on modernism in the
essay at the end of the issue, “The New Beauty.” She cuts her ties with Victorian and
Elizabethan verse styles, in favor of a new beauty that that goes beyond
questions of “subject, nor yet of form.”
Modernism is instead located in the power of vision—odd to juxtapose
that next to Contemporania. Yeats and H.D. might agree, though. Monroe also pretty much admits to printing subpar
poetry in order to encourage young authors.
See the apologia for Pound, in the previous issue. Lastly, on a postcolonial note, she ends with
fulsome praise for Rabindranath Tagore: “But this Hindoo shows us how
provincial we are; England and America are little recently annexed corners of
the ancient earth, and their poets should peer out over sea-walls and
race-walls and pride-walls, and learn their own littleness and the bigness of
the world.” This follows on the reviews
by Pound. I’m not sure what to do with
that, but I do think it is cool.
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