F. S. Flint and Ezra Pound / 2003

http://www.englishworld2011.info/

F. S. FLINT AND EZRA POUND / 2003

* * * The point is that exactly the same activity is at work as in the highest verse. That is the avoidance of conventional language in order to get the exact curve of the thing. s a #

* * * A powerfully imaginative mind seizes and combines at the same instant all the important ideas of its poem or picture, and while it works with one of them, it is at the same instant working with and modifying all in their relation to it and never losing sight of their bearings on each other—as the motion of a snake's body goes through all parts at once and its volition acts at the same instant in coils which go contrary ways. A romantic movement must have an end of the very nature of the thing. It may be deplored, but it can't be helped—wonder must cease to be wonder. I guard myself here from all the consequences of the analogy, but it expresses at any rate the inevitableness of the process. A literature of wonder must have an end as inevitably as a strange land loses its strangeness when one lives in it. Think of the lost ecstasy of the Elizabethans. 'Oh my America, my new found land,'3 think of what it meant to them and of what it means to us. Wonder can only be the attitude of a man passing from one stage to another, it can never be a permanently fixed thing.

1911-12 1924

3. Line 27 of John Donne's "To His Mistress Going to Bed."

F. S. FLINT AND EZRA POUND

In the March 1913 issue of Poetry magazine, the English poet and translator F. S. Flint published an article summarizing an interview with an unidentified "imagiste"— surely Ezra Pound. The article, partly dictated and rewritten by Pound, famously states the three principles of imagism—directness, economy, musical rhythm—which Pound later said he and the poets H. D. and Richard Aldington had agreed on in 1912. Flint's prefatory piece was followed in the same issue by Pound's manifesto, "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste." There Pound defines the image and issues injunctions and admonitions to help poets strip their verse of unnecessary rhetoric and abstraction. Poets, he argues, should write direct, musically cadenced, image-grounded verse. Born in London, F. S. Flint (1885—1960) worked in the British civil service, translated poetry (mostly French), and eventually published volumes of his own imagist poetry. Ezra Pound (1885—1972) was born in Hailey, Idaho, and was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College. During his twelve years in London, from 1908 to 1920, where he became closely associated with W. B. Yeats and T. E. Hulme, he was the most vigorous entrepreneur of literary modernism, helping James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and other writers launch their careers. In London he also began working on material for his major work, the massive poem The Cantos. Living briefly in Paris and then for twenty years in Italy as an ardent supporter of the Fascist regime, he was arrested for treason in 1945, having made Rome Radio broadcasts against the U.S. war effort. He spent twelve years, from 1946 to 1958, in a Washington, D.C., asylum for the criminally insane before returning to Italy, where he fell into an almost complete silence until the end of his life. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2004 / MODERNIST MANIFESTOS

Imagisme1

Some curiosity has been aroused concerning Imagisme, and as I was unable to find anything definite about it in print, I sought out an imagiste, with intent to discover whether the group itself knew anything about the "movement." I gleaned these facts. The imagistes admitted that they were contemporaries of the Post Impres- sionists and the Futurists; but they had nothing in common with these schools. They had not published a manifesto. They were not a revolutionary school; their only endeavor was to write in accordance with the best tradition, as they found it in the best writers of all time,—in Sappho, Catullus, Villon.2 They seemed to be absolutely intolerant of all poetry that was not written in such endeavor, ignorance of the best tradition forming no excuse. They had a few rules, drawn up for their own satisfaction only, and they had not published them. They were: 1. Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. By these standards they judged all poetry, and found most of it wanting. They held also a certain 'Doctrine of the Image,' which they had not committed to writing; they said that it did not concern the public, and would provoke useless discussion. The devices whereby they persuaded approaching poetasters to attend their instruction were: 1. They showed him his own thought already splendidly expressed in some classic (and the school musters altogether a most formidable erudition). 2. They re-wrote his verses before his eyes, using about ten words to his fifty. Even their opponents admit of them—ruefully—"At least they do keep bad poets from writing!" I found among them an earnestness that is amazing to one accustomed to the usual London air of poetic dilettantism. They consider that Art is all sci- ence, all religion, philosophy and metaphysic. It is true that snobisme may be urged against them; but it is at least snobisme in its most dynamic form, with a great deal of sound sense and energy behind it; and they are stricter with themselves than with any outsider. F. S. Flint

A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste

An "Image" is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. I use the term "complex" rather in the technical sense

]. In response to many requests for information prescribed form ["Editor's Note" from original]. regarding Imagism and the Imagistes, we publish "Vers libre": free verse (French). this note by Mr. Flint, supplementing it with fur- 2. Francois Villon (1431-after 1463), French ther exemplification by Mr. Pound. It will be seen poet. Sappho (fl. ca. 610—ca. 580 B.C.E.), Greek from these that Imagism is not necessarily associ- poet. Catullus (ca. 84—ca. 54 B.C.E.), Roman poet. ated with Hellenic subjects, or with vers libre as a http://www.englishworld2011.info/

POUND: A FEW DON'TS BY AN IMAGISTE / 2005 employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart,1 though we might not agree absolutely in our application. It is the presentation of such a "complex" instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art. It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works. All this, however, some may consider open to debate. The immediate neces- sity is to tabulate A LIST OF DONT'S for those beginning to write verses. But I can not put all of them into Mosaic negative.2 To begin with, consider the three rules recorded by Mr. Flint, not as dogma—never consider anything as dogma—but as the result of long contemplation, which, even if it is some one else's contemplation, may be worth consideration. Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work. Consider the discrepancies between the actual writing of the Greek poets and dramatists, and the theories of the Graeco-Roman grammar- ians, concocted to explain their metres.

Language

Use no superflous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as "dim lands of peace." It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions. Don't retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don't think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths. What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow. Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music. Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it. Don't allow "influence" to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed babbling in his dispatches of "dove-gray" hills, or else it was "pearl-pale," I can not remember. Use either no ornament or good ornament.

Rhythm and Rhyme

Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement; e.g., Saxon charms, Hebri-

1. British psychologist Bernard Hart (1879-1966) analysis. discusses "the complex" in The Psychology of Insan- 2. Reference to the Ten Commandments deliv- ity (1912), a book that helped popularize psycho- ered to Moses (Exodus 20). http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2006 / MODERNIST MANIFESTOS dean Folk Songs, the verse of Dante, and the lyrics of Shakespeare—if he can dissociate the vocabulary from the cadence. Let him dissect the lyrics of Goethe3 coldly into their component sound values, syllables long and short, stressed and unstressed, into vowels and consonants. It is not necessary that a poem should rely on its music, but if it does rely on its music that music must be such as will delight the expert. Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counterpoint and all the minutiae of his craft. No time is too great to give to these matters or to any one of them, even if the artist seldom have need of them. Don't imagine that a thing will "go" in verse just because it's too dull to go in prose. Don't be "viewy"—leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays. Don't be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a deal more about it. When Shakespeare talks of the "Dawn in russet mantle clad'M he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents. Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap. The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has discovered something. He begins by learning what has been discovered already. He goes from that point onward. He does not bank on being a charm- ing fellow personally. He does not expect his friends to applaud the results of his freshman class work. Freshmen in poetry are unfortunately not confined to a definite and recognizable class room. They are "all over the shop." Is it any wonder "the public is indifferent to poetry?" Don't chop your stuff into separate iambs. Don't make each line stop dead at the end, and then begin every next line with a heave. Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause. In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music. The same laws govern, and you are bound by no others. Naturally, your rhythmic structure should not destroy the shape of your words, or their natural sound, or their meaning. It is improbable that, at the start, you will be able to get a rhythm-structure strong enough to affect them very much, though you may fall a victim to all sorts of false stopping due to line ends and caesurae. The musician can rely on pitch and the volume of the orchestra. You can not. The term harmony is misapplied to poetry; it refers to simultaneous sounds of different pitch. There is, however, in the best verse a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the hearer and acts more or less as an organ-base. A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure; it need not be bizarre or curious, but it must be well used if used at all.

3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749—1832), Shakespeare's Hamlet: "But look, [he morn in rus- German Romantic poet, playwright, and novelist. set mantle clad / Walks o'er the dew of yon high 4. From Horatio's speech in the opening scene of eastern hill" (1.1.147—48). http://www.englishworld2011.info/

AN IMAGIST CLUSTER: T. E. HULME, EZRA POUND, H. D. / 2007

Vide further Vildrac and Duhamel's notes on rhyme in "Technique Poetique."5 That part of your poetry which strikes upon the imaginative eye of the reader will lose nothing by translation into a foreign tongue; that which appeals to the ear can reach only those who take it in the original. Consider the definiteness of Dante's presentation, as compared with Mil- ton's rhetoric. Read as much of Wordsworth6 as does not seem too unutterably dull. If you want the gist of the matter go to Sappho, Catullus, Villon, Heine when he is in the vein, Gautier when he is not too frigid; or, if you have not the tongues, seek out the leisurely Chaucer.7 Good prose will do you no harm, and there is good discipline to be had by trying to write it. Translation is likewise good training, if you find that your original matter "wobbles" when you try to rewrite it. The meaning of the poem to be translated can not "wobble." If you are using a symmetrical form, don't put in what you want to say and then fill up the remaining vacuums with slush. Don't mess up the perception of one sense by trying to define it in terms of another. This is usually only the result of being too lazy to find the exact word. To this clause there are possibly exceptions. The first three simple proscriptions8 will throw out nine-tenths of all the bad poetry now accepted as standard and classic; and will prevent you from many a crime of production. ". . . Mais d'abord ilfaut etre un poete,"9 as MM. Duhamel and Vildrac have said at the end of their little book, "Notes sur la Technique Poetique"-, but in an American one takes that at least for granted, otherwise why does one get born upon that august continent! Ezra Pound

5. Charles Vildrac (1882-1971), French poet, worth (1770-1850), English poets. playwright, and critic, and Georges Duhamel 7. Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1342-1400), English (1884—1966), French novelist and critic, cowrote poet. Heinrich Heine (1797—1856), German poet. Notes sin la Technique Poetique (1910). "Vide": Theophile Gautier (1811 — 1872), French poet. consider. 8. Noted by Mr. Flint [Pound's note]. 6. John Milton (1608-1674) and William Words- 9. But first it is necessary to be a poet (French).

AN IMAGIST CLUSTER: T. E. HULME, EZRA POUND, H. D.

At the inception of imagism in London, the key imagists included the English poet philosopher T. E. Hulme and the expatriate American poets Ezra Pound and H. D. The paths of these three writers were densely interconnected at this juncture. In his poetry volume Ripostes (1912), Pound published an appendix of five poems, "The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme," prefaced by a note that printed the term imagistes for the first time. That year, in a London teashop, Pound had announced to the English poet Richard Aldington and the American poet H. D. that they were "imagistes," and two years later he included their and his work in the first imagist anthology, Des Imagistes. Although imagism began in London, with a French-styled name, the American poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925), derided by Pound for watering http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2008 / MODERNIST MANIFESTOS down imagism's principles, helped disseminate its ideas in the United States, where she publicized and promoted imagism in anthologies, lectures, and readings. In spare, hard-edged poems the imagists sought to turn verse away from what they saw as the slack sentimentality and fuzzy abstraction, the explanatory excess and metrical predictability of Victorian poetry. Imagism owed a debt to the symbolism of Yeats and nineteenth-century French poets, but it shifted the emphasis from the musical to the visual, the mysterious to the actual, the ambiguously suggestive symbol to the clear-cut natural image. The imagists looked to models from East Asia (haiku for Pound's "In a Station in the Metro") and classical Europe (Greek verse for H. D.'s "Oread"). Their poetry is compressed, achieving a maximum effect with a minimum of words. It is often centered in a single figurative juxtaposition, conjoining tenor and vehicle without explanation. And it typically relies not on strict meters but on informal rhythms or cadences.

H. D. (1886—1961) was born Hilda Doolittle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and educated at Bryn Mawr College. In 1911 she went to Europe for what she thought would be a brief visit but became a lifelong stay, mainly in England and in Switzerland. After her initial imagist phase she wrote more expansive works, including the three long, meditative poems that make up Trilogy (1973), precipitated by the experience of the London bombings in World War II.

T. E. HULME: Autumn

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. 5 I did not stop to speak, but nodded, And round about were the wistful stars With white faces like town children.

1912

EZRA POUND: In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.1

1913,1916

1. Pound describes this poem's genesis in the expression. I do not mean that I found words, Gaitdier-Brzeska (1916): "Three years ago in Paris but there came an equation . . . not in speech, but I got out of a 'metro' train at La Concorde, and saw in little splotches of colour. . . . The 'one-image suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and poem' is a form of super-position, that is to say, it another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then is one idea getting out of the impasse in which I another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a to find words for what this had meant to me, and thirty-line poem, and destroyed it. . . . Six months I could not find any words that seemed to me wor- later I made a poem half that length; a year later I thy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that made the following hokku-Vike sentence." "Hokku": evening ... I was still trying and I found, suddenly, another term for haiku. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

BLAST / 2009

H. D.: Oread1

Whirl up, sea— Whirl your pointed pines, Splash your great pines On our rocks, s Hurl your green over us, Cover us with your pools of fir.

1914

H. D.: Sea Rose

Rose, harsh rose, marred and with stint of petals, meagre flower, thin, sparse of leaf,

5 more precious than a wet rose, single on a stem— you are caught in the drift.

Stunted, with small leaf, 10 you are flung on the sands, you are lifted in the crisp sand that drives in the wind.

Can the spice-rose 15 drip such acrid fragrance hardened in a leaf?

1916

1. Greek nymph of the mountains.

BLAST

The journal Blast was published only twice—on June 20, 1914, though released on July 2, one month before Great Britain entered World War I, and a year later, during the war that would bring its short life to an end. But its initial preface and two-part manifesto, printed in the first pages of the first number and excerpted below, are among the most important documents in the history of modernism. They rhetorically and typographically embody the violent iconoclasm of vorticism, an avant-garde movement in the literary and visual arts centered in London. The English writer and painter Wyndham Lewis founded and edited Blast, whose title he said, "means the blowing http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2010 / MODERNIST MANIFESTOS away of dead ideas and worn-out notions" (it also suggests ^ire, explosion, and damn!). He drafted much of the vorticist manifesto and fashioned its shocking visual design, likening Blast to a "battering ram." Ezra Pound became a vorticist after abandoning imagism, because he felt that the vortex, "the point of maximum energy," offered a more dynamic model for art than the static image of the imagists. The French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891—1915), killed in World War I and memorialized both in the "War Number" of Blast and in Pound's book named for him, was another key vorticist leader. In the pages of Blast 1 and 2, artworks by Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, and other visual artists appeared alongside writings by Lewis, Pound, T. S. Eliot, and other avant-gardists. The vorticist manifesto, signed by Lewis, Pound, and Gaudier-Brzeska, among others, reflects the London modernists' competitive anxiety about European avant-gardes such as cubism and especially futurism. Under the charismatic leadership of F. T. Marinetti, the futurists celebrated speed, modernization, and the machine, while call- ing for the destruction of the museums, the libraries, all such bastions of the past. The vorticists—in lists of things and people to "BLAST" and "BLESS" compiled at group meetings—similarly blast convention, standardization, the middle class, even the "years 1837 to 1900." And yet despite their cosmopolitan enthusiasms, the vorticists also assert their independence, repeatedly criticizing the futurists. For all their antipathy toward England, they also "BLESS" it, revaluing, for example, English mobility (via the sea) and inventiveness (as the engine of the Industrial Bevolution). Wyndham Lewis (1882—1957) studied for several years at London's Slade School of Art before exploring the avant-garde visual arts in Paris. On returning to London in 1909, he began to write fiction and exhibit his paintings. During World War I he served as an artillery officer and then as a war artist, and afterward he continued to paint and publish essays, poetry, and fiction, including his first novel, Tarr (1918). Like Ezra Pound, he alienated many friends because of his subsequent support of fascism. The excerpts below are taken from Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex, No. 1 (1914). For the complete two-part Blast manifesto and more on futurism and cubism, see "Modernist Experiment" at Norton Literature Online.

Long Live the Vortex!

Long live the great art vortex sprung up in the centre of this town!1 We stand for the Reality of the Present—not for the sentimental Future, or the sacripant2 Past We want to leave Nature and Men alone. We do not want to make people wear Futurist Patches, or fuss men to take to pink and sky-blue trousers.3

l. London and dynamism of the modern age and sought to 2. Boastful of valor. break with the past and traditional forms. 3. The futurists celebrated the technology, power, http://www.englishworld2011.info/

BLAST / 2011

We are not their wives or tailors. The only way Humanity can help artists is to remain independent and work unconsciously. WE NEED THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY—their stupidity, animalism and dreams. We believe in no perfectibility except our own. Intrinsic beauty is in the Interpreter and Seer, not in the object or content. We do not want to change the appearance of the world, because we are not Naturalists, Impressionists or Futurists (the latest form of Impressionism),4 and do not depend on the appearance of the world for our art. WE ONLY WANT THE WORLD TO LIVE, and to feel it's crude energy flowing through us. It may be said that great artists in England are always revolutionary, just as in France any really great artist had a strong traditional vein. Blast sets out to be an avenue for all those vivid and violent ideas that could reach the Public in no other way. Blast will be popular, essentially. It will not appeal to any particular class, but to the fundamental and popular instincts in every class and description of people, TO THE INDIVIDUAL. The moment a man feels or realizes himself as an artist, he ceases to belong to any milieu or time. Blast is created for this timeless, fundamental Artist that exists in everybody. The Man in the Street and the Gentleman are equally ignored. Popular art does not mean the art of the poor people, as it is usually supposed to. It means the art of the individuals. Education (art education and general education) tends to destroy the creative instinct. Therefore it is in times when education has been non-existant that art chiefly flourished. But it is nothing to do with "the People." It is a mere accident that that is the most favourable time for the individual to appear. To make the rich of the community shed their education skin, to destroy polite- ness, standardization and academic, that is civilized, vision, is the task we have set ourselves. We want to make in England not a popular art, not a revival of lost folk art, or a romantic fostering of such unactual conditions, but to make individuals, wherever found. We will convert the King' if possible. A VORTICIST KING! WHY NOT? DO YOU THINK LLOYD GEORGE6 HAS THE VORTEX IN HIM? MAY WE HOPE FOR ART FROM LADY MOND?7

4. Naturalism, a late-nineteenth-century school of and remained the king until 1936. realism, claimed all human life was governed by 6. David Lloyd George (1863—1945), British pol- natural laws. Impressionism emphasized the sub- itician, prime minister 1916—22. jectivity of perspective over any inherent quality in 7. Wife of wealthy industrialist Sir Robert Mond, a represented object. and a prominent member of fashionable London 5. George V ascended the British throne in 1910 society. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2012 / MODERNIST MANIFESTOS

We are against the glorification of "the People," as we are against snobbery. It is not necessary to be an outcast bohemian, to be unkempt or poor, any more than it is necessary to be rich or handsome, to be an artist. Art is nothing to do with the coat you wear. A top-hat can well hold the Sixtine. A cheap cap could hide the image of Kephren.8

AUTOMOBILISM (Marinetteism)9 bores us. We don't want to go about making a hullo-bulloo about motor cars, anymore than about knives and forks, elephants or gas-pipes. Elephants are VERY BIG. Motor cars go quickly. Wilde gushed twenty years ago about the beauty of machinery. Gissing,1 in his romantic delight with modern lodging houses was futurist in this sense. The futurist is a sensational and sentimental mixture of the aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870. The "Poor" are detestable animals! They are only picturesque and amusing for the sentimentalist or the romantic! The "Rich" are bores without a single exception, en tant que riches!2 We want those simple and great people found everywhere. Blast presents an art of Individuals.

|6_ BLAST years 1837 to 1900 Curse abysmal inexcusable middie-ciass (also Aristocracy and Proletariat). BLAST pasty shadow cast by gigantic Boehm (imagined at introduction of BOURGEOIS VICTORIAN VISTAS).

8. Ancient Egyptian pharaoh buried in one of the labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that great pyramids at Giza. "The Sixtine": the Sistine deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant Chapel, in the Vatican. conditions, must be done by machinery . . . . At 9. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876—1944), Ital- •present machinery competes against man. Under ian writer and founder of Futurism, glorified war proper conditions machinery will seri'e man. ' and technology and invented a "drama of objects" 2. Insofar as they are rich (French). in which human actors play no parts. 1. Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901. 1. George Gissing (1837-1903), naturalist This sixth list of items in the "BLAST" section English novelist. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Irish comes last, before the "BLESS" section. writer and critic; in his 1891 essay "The Soul of Man 2. Joseph Edgar Boehm (1834-1890) sculpted a under Socialism," he writes: "All unintellectual colossal marble statue of Queen Victoria. http://www.englishworld2011.info/

BLAST / 2013

WRING THE NECK OF all sick inventions born in that progressive white wake. BLAST their weeping whiskers—hirsute RHETORIC of EUNUCH and STYLIST- SENTIMENTAL HYGIENICS ROUSSEAUISMS (wild Nature cranks) FRATERNIZING WITH MONKEYS DIABOLICS —raptures and roses of the erotic bookshelves culminating in PURGATORY OF PUTNEY. CHAOS OF ENOCH ARDENS laughing Jennys Ladies with Pains good-for-nothing Guineveres.6 SNOBBISH BORROVIAN running after GIPSY KINGS and ESPADAS bowing the knee to wild Mother Nature, her feminine contours, Unimaginative insult to MAN. DAMN all those to-day who have taken on that Rotten Menagerie, and still crack their whips and tumble in Piccadilly Circus, as though London were a provincial town.

3. Hairy. nyson (1809-1892). "Enoch Arden" (1864) is 4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712—1778), French another narrative poem by Tennyson, rejected here philosopher who argued that humans are good and for its sentimentalism. Jenny is the title character noble in their natural state, before society and civ- of another sentimental poem (1870), by the ilization corrupt them. English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). 5. A middle-class London suburb. 7. Swords (Spanish). "Borrovian": from George 6. In late-medieval romance, King Arthur's queen Henry Borrow (1803—1881), English writer of pop- in Camelot; also, the title character in two narra- ular gypsy romances, such as The Zincali: An tive poems by the English poet Alfred, Lord Ten- Account of the Gypsies of Spain (1843). http://www.englishworld2011.info/

2014 / MODERNIST MANIFESTOS

8. "Circus": here traveling entertainment act with shilling and sixpence, then equivalent to about animals and acrobats; also British traffic circle. thirty-five cents. "Wonder Zoos": traveling exhibition of exotic ani- 2. Those blasted here range from individuals, such mals. as Charles Burgess Fry, England's star cricket 9. Marie Corelli, pseudonym of Mary Mackay player and a tireless self-promoter, to things (1855-1924), best-selling (and royal favorite) blasted seemingly for the thrill of doing so, such as English writer of romances and religious novels in codliver oil. Blasted, too, are institutions or mem- which she aimed to reform social ills. "Dickensian bers of the national, literary, or cultural establish- clowns": from the novels of English writer Charles ment (e.g., the post office, a much-lauded model Dickens (1812-1870). of Victorian efficiency, and the British Academy, 1. Suburban district of London. "1/6": 18d, or a established in 1902 by Royal Charter as the http://www.englishworld2011.info/

MINA LOY / 2015

national academy for humanities and social sci- the Dictionary of National Biography, etc.). Also ences), including various clergy and public leaders blasted are artists and writers whom the Vorticists (e.g., Bishop of London; William Ralph Inge, dean believed were meager talents in spite of their pop- of St. Paul's Cathedral; the Reverends Penny- ularity (e.g., painter Frank Brangwyn, poet Ella feather and Meyer; R. J. Campbell, English Con- Wheeler Wilcox, actors George Grossmith and gregationalist minister in the City Temple of Seymour Hicks, composers Joseph Holbrooke and London, and a Pantheist; Cardinal Herbert Edward Elgar, etc.), as well as those associated Vaughan, archbishop of Westminster and superior with fads (e.g., Sir Abdul Baha Bahai, leader of the of the Catholic Missionary Society; Norman Bahai faith) or idealistic social reform (e.g., author Angell, pacifist British economist; Arthur Chris- Marie Corelli; Sidney Webb, a leader of the Fabian topher Benson, schoolmaster at Eton College, Socialist organization; Annie Besant, theosophist author of Edward VII's coronation ode). Critics and suffragist). Some names (e.g., Indian poet unfriendly to the avant-garde are also included Rabindranath Tagore) are misspelled. For a (e.g., William Archer, drama critic for the Nation; detailed discussion of the cursing and blessing in Sir William Robertson Nicoll, biblical editor and Blast, see William C. Wees, Vorticism and the sometime literary critic; Lionel Cust, director of English Avant-Garde (1972). the National Portrait Gallery and contributor to

MINA LOY

Mina Loy (1882—1966) was born in London to a Protestant mother and a Jewish father. She began her artistic career in the visual arts, but she later became an exper- imental poet, writing lyrics and long poems that created a stir because of their poetic, linguistic, and sexual iconoclasm. From 1899 to 1916 she lived and worked mostly in Munich, Paris, and especially Florence. She moved to New York in 1916 and to Paris in 1923, then settled in the United States in 1936.