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https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ Theses Digitisation: https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/research/enlighten/theses/digitisation/ This is a digitised version of the original print thesis. Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] The Origins of British Modernism: A Study of Literary Theory and Practice from Walter Pater to Ezra Pound. Brendan Wallace PhD Thesis Department of English Literature University of Glasgow © Brendan Wallace September 1998. ProQuest Number: 10390900 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a co m plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10390900 Published by ProQuest LLO (2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Microform Edition © ProQuest LLO. ProQuest LLO. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.Q. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346 Abstract This thesis deals with the development of Anglo-American Modernism in London in the early twentieth century. It begins by depicting the economic and social position of the artist in the early nineteenth century, and agrees with Raymond Williams and EP, Thompson that the changing relationship between the artist and the market was responsible for what we call Romanticism. I then go on to argue that Romanticism explored the problems of artistic creation at a time when it seemed that aesthetic values were being sidelined in favour of materialism or utilitarianism, and that this raised the spectre of aesthetic relativism. 1 then argue that these central problems were essentially the same as the problems facing the first generation of British Modernists, and that this can be shown by studying the transitional figure of Pater. By tracing Pater's vacillations between objectivism and relativism (in terms of the ‘early' and ‘later' Pater), we can identify two strands of modernist thought: one which emphasises a materialist, relativist aesthetic, and another Idealist, Neo-Platonic element that more obviously derives from Romanticism. Following both of these elements into the twentieth century, I then demonstrate that W.B. Yeats belongs to this latter tradition, and that by the late 1890s he had formulated an Idealist metaphysic, which saw poetry as consisting of temporal ‘moments' in which a spatial Neo- Platonic metaphysical universe could be glimpsed. Under the influence of Nietzsche and Synge, Yeats went on to modernise his diction and emphasise ‘hardness' and ‘precision' in his verse, a process that was beginning by 1902. I then show that Ezra Pound followed in Yeats’s footsteps in this respect, that his early poetry also deals with the Neo-Romantic ‘moment’, and that Pound ‘modernised ‘ his poetry under the influence of Yeats. I then discuss the theorising of T.E. Hulme and argue that this follows in the footsteps of the ‘early’ relativist Pater. Hulme’s earliest poetry posits a non-metaphysical aesthetic, which, nevertheless, resembles Yeats’s in its emphasis on precise descriptions of poetic vision. Hulme, however, found this world view emotionally unacceptable (on the grounds that materialism is deterministic, and leads to aesthetic and moral relativism), and so (just as with Pater), as soon as he has stated his materialist poetic, he attempts to get beyond it, and affirm aesthetic value, and free will. His project, is, therefore, an attempt to create an objectivist but non-metaphysical way of thinking. Neo- Classicism and Anti-Humanism are his attempts to do this. I then show that the ‘Forgotten School’ of Imagism develops out of this way of thinking, and that this school (contrary to what the poets involved claimed at the time), has little to do with Pound’s later school of ‘Imagisme’. ‘Imagisme’ develops instead, out of Yeatsian Symbolism, and consists of Pound’s attempts to ‘modernise’ his own poetry (following Yeats) and work out a form that will structure the epic poem he was already planning. To Pound, the work of Richard Aldington and H.D. (nominally the other Imagistes) was of less importance than his relationship to Yeats. Finally I explore the influence of Bergson on the early work of Wyndham Lewis, and show that Lewis’s Vorticism is his attempt to work beyond what he saw as the basic flaws of Bergsonism, whereas for Pound, it was, again, an attempt to find a solution to his problem of poetic form. Contents Chapter ______________________________________ EêOâ Introduction................. 1 One : The Romantics and Pater............. 10 Two : Yeats Before 1900................................... 47 Three : The New Yeats..................... 105 Four : The Early Pound............................................ .124 Five : Pound Between 1908 and 1911................................... 165 Six : T.E. Hulme and Imagism......................................................................... 204 Seven : Imagisme......................... 251 Eight : Yeats, Pound, and ‘Neo-Classicism’........................ 291 Nine : Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism ..................................................326 Ten : Ezra Pound and Vorticism.............. 362 Conclusion ................................ 381 Bibliography............................................................ 388 Introduction This thesis will deal with the aesthetics of Anglo-American Modernism. Firstly, some definitions. For reasons that are made clear in Chapter One, I deal only with poets and painters. Novelists of the period (such as D.H. Lawrence), are therefore excluded. Secondly, since the publication of Peter NicholPs Modernisms it has become clear that the Postmodernist tendency to refer to Modernism as though it were a single movement, consisting of artists with similar aesthetic aims, has become untenable. Instead, it has become clear that Modernism (a term posthumously attached to the movement (or perhaps tendency would be a better label)), consisted of many writers, artists and musicians, in many countries, all with their own artistic agendas. What they had in common was certain aesthetic problems, problems stemming in the main, I shall argue, from the rise of industrial capitalism, and the implications this had for the production of art (there were other themes they explored as well, of course, but many of these were clearly by-products of this first process; the transition from a mainly rural economy to an urban one, for example). However, despite the similarities of the problems they faced, the solutions they offered were frequently very different. To explain why this should be so, we must be very careful to explain the specific cultural features of the countries where these Modernisms arose. In this thesis, for example, I contrast the differing approaches to modernity of the Italian Futurists and the British avant-garde based around the Tittle magazine’ The New Age, I shall show that these differences are related to differing conceptions of industrialism, progress, and the purpose of art, and that these can be linked back to the cultural and economic situation of these countries at the time. It is, therefore, what has become known as Anglo-American Modernism (actually, Anglo-Irish-American Modernism would be a more accurate term), that I will deal with here; it is not necessarily the case that studying the ‘solutions’ of Wyndham Lewis, Pound et ai., will illuminate the very different aesthetic phenomena that arose, in, for example, Spain, Russia, or Germany (let alone Japan or Latin America) at this time, even though these too are frequently referred to as ‘Modernist’. The next point to make is that I study Modernism in relation to its predecessor, the late Romanticism of the 1890s (as well as showing the links between this ‘Neo-Romanticism’, and Romanticism proper). Since the publication of AxeVs Castle by Edmund Wilson, it has become something of a commonplace that Modernism (or at least part of Modernism) is an adaption of Romantic aesthetics, and works such as Romantic Image by Frank Kermode, and The Post-Romantic Consciousness of Ezra Pound, by George Bornstein have done much to illuminate this connection. However, it is only recently that work by American scholars such as Leon Surette in The Birth of Modernism has enabled us to see the whole picture, and to realise just how much these early Modernists continued the Romantic view of the artist as being a ‘visionary’ or a ‘seer’. The findings of these writers, (which are prefigured by books such as Thomas Jackson’s The Early Poetry of Ezra Pound, and Kevin Oderman’s Ezra Pound and the Erotic Medium), are still controversial, but I think the evidence to support their findings is strong, and getting stronger as more work is done. For example. Pound’s work is filled with allusions

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