A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis 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 Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details Modernism and State Power in the Pre-War Poetry and Prose of Ezra Pound, 1911–1914 by David Hull Dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in American Studies University of Sussex September 2014 2 I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be, submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. Signature:............................................................................ 3 UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX DAVID HULL PHD IN AMERICAN STUDIES MODERNISM AND STATE POWER IN THE PRE-WAR POETRY AND PROSE OF EZRA POUND, 1911–1914 SUMMARY Pound scholars have tended to assume that questions of state power, and of the relationship between the state and the individual, only become central to his work during the inter-war period. The present thesis, however, argues that these questions are a major concern in Pound’s writing during the years immediately preceding the First World War, and that questions of state power significantly colour Pound’s imagist and vorticist work. Chapter one reads Pound’s translation of the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer as a contribution to the radical Edwardian debate about the expansion of the state’s bureaucratic power and the threat it might pose to individual autonomy. I also consider the way Pound’s translation links state power to the division of labour. Chapter two re- assesses Pound’s instigation of the imagist movement, against the backdrop of his concurrent fascination with the First Balkan War, an episode all but ignored in previous Pound scholarship. I argue that Pound interpreted the Balkan states as undertaking on the battlefield the very same modernizing struggle that he saw himself as embarking upon in the field of letters. Chapter three argues that as Pound’s pursuit of the ‘new’ intensifies, his identity as an American—as, in his words, ‘a citizen of a free State, a member of the sovereign people’—takes on a dual significance. Poetically, America’s perceived national youthfulness and virility become important tropes for novelty and modernity in his poetry. Politically, though, Pound casts the unfolding national, political and nascent imperial project of the United States as a metonym for modernity itself, scoffing at the Italian Futurist’s ‘automobilism’ as essentially provincial, and proposing instead his own ‘American Risorgimento’. Methodologically, this thesis strives to combine close readings of Pound’s poetry and prose, seen within its original publication context (that is, largely in little magazines), with careful reference to the broader historical context. Please note: For the purpose of online publication, all copyrighted material reproduced in the examination copy of this thesis (except that considered ‘fair use’) has been removed. The redacted material is collected in a supplementary volume. 4 Table of Contents Summary..........................................................................................................................3 Acknowledgements..........................................................................................................5 A note on sources for Pound’s poetry and prose...........................................................6 Introduction......................................................................................................................7 ‘Not any protector’: the state and the individual in Pound’s ‘The Seafarer’..........26 Part one: the state........................................................................................................26 ‘Ishmael by himself alone’: A. R. Orage and the expansion of the Edwardian state ................................................................................................................................26 ‘The Seafarer’ and the state....................................................................................35 Pound, Orage and Edwardian industrial relations..................................................43 Part two: the individual...............................................................................................50 The poetics of Poundian individualism..................................................................50 Pound, Walter Pater and virtù.................................................................................55 Part three: the difficulty..............................................................................................63 Intellectual and manual labour...............................................................................63 Serious artist or state functionary?.........................................................................72 A ‘foreign fastness’: ‘The Seafarer’ and European colonialism............................79 Imagism’s ‘fellow rebels’: Ezra Pound and the Balkan Wars...................................84 The Balkan Wars as background to imagism.........................................................87 Pound’s intervention...............................................................................................94 ‘the silly sentimentalism of post-Victorian England’...........................................100 Imagism’s harem..................................................................................................103 Wooden bullets and luminous details...................................................................112 Imagism and warfare: ‘the swift contraposition of objects’.................................120 ‘Tenzone’ and modernism....................................................................................129 ‘[O]ur American Risorgimento’: Pound, The United States and the conception of modernism....................................................................................................................136 ‘our American Risorgimento’...............................................................................143 Pound’s transnational nationalism?......................................................................152 Pound’s anti-democracy and American imperialism............................................160 Pound’s ‘Alexander Hamiltons’ and American democracy.................................168 An imagist national portrait: ‘one sap and one root’............................................176 Frontiers...............................................................................................................184 Conclusion....................................................................................................................187 Appendix: Pound’s Balkan War letters in The New Age.........................................195 Bibliography.................................................................................................................197 5 Acknowledgements I am grateful to University of Sussex and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the funding they provided for this project. I would also like to thank my supervisors, Daniel Kane and Keston Sutherland for their advice and patience. A number of scholars have offered me valuable help and advice in the course of this project. In particular, I would like to thank Bob Jessop for his incredibly generous response to my query about Nicos Poulantzas’s work. Similarly, Eugene Michail, Sam Davies and Jean Rose, took time to offer me advice and information. Gerard Gunning gave me the benefit of several enlightening conversations about poetry, and made one remark in particular which inspired the third chapter of this thesis. Thanks are due also to my friends in the School of History, Art History and Philosophy—particularly, Tim Carter, Patrick Levy, and Gabriel Martin—and to the department itself for providing the study space we shared. I am grateful also to Sara Hooshyar for her support and her keen editor’s eye. I must also thank my brother, Daniel Hull, for providing me with a very fine roof over my head for the past year. Finally, I thank my parents, John and Wendy Hull, for their unwavering support (emotional, material, intellectual, grammatical) without which this project would have been simply impossible. 6 A note on sources for Pound’s poetry and prose Much of the primary prose material cited in this thesis was originally published in little magazines, particularly The New Age, The New Freewoman, The Egoist and Poetry. The intellectual context of these journals forms an important part of this thesis. Happily, these publications have been made available online by the Modernist Journals Project (http://www.modjourn.org), a fantastic resource run by Brown University and the University of Tulsa. Consequently, although some of Pound’s prose is available in T. S. Eliot’s edition of Pound’s Literary Essays, and William Cookson’s edition of Pound’s Selected Prose, and all of his work published in periodicals is available in the eleven- volume Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose Contributions to Periodicals,