In A Genealogy of Modernism, Michael H. Levenson suggests that ‘the recent successes of avant-garde movements in the plastic arts and the
advantage of their aesthetic theories’, as well as veritable ‘talent’ in visual artists as the reasons for ‘the sudden importance for Pound of certain painters and sculptors’.12 While I do not disagree with this view, I wish to explicate in greater
details the reasons behind Pound’s association with these visual artists and the subsequent change in his aesthetics which such association brought about. There are four broad reasons: Firstly, it was in view of the publicity which European avant-garde movements like Futurism and Cubism were capable of generating that Pound decided to steer Imagism towards the visual arts. This was coupled with his increasing frustration with Imagism, both with its doctrines and its members. As an interdisciplinary movement, Vorticism is ‘a designation that would be equally applicable to a certain basis for all the arts’ (GB, 81), thereby offering Pound a wider, pan-arts platform for his aesthetic theories. It also offers a more distinct and robust identity, as Pound explained, ‘[i]n the ’eighties there were symbolists opposed to impressionists, now you have vorticism, which is, roughly speaking, expressionism, neo-cubism, and imagism gathered together in one camp and futurism in the other.’ (‘Vorticism’, 206)
Secondly, A. David Moody suggests that Pound found more inspiration, ‘more virtu in certain sculptors and painters than in his fellow Imagistes’.13 In a
letter to John Quinn on 23 August 1915 Pound declared: ‘so far as I am concerned “VORTICISM,” and the reason why I embroiled myself with a tribe of former friends etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum has been solely Brzeska and Lewis.’
(EPVA, 235) Pound’s friendship with the visual artists made him realise the inadequacies of his Imagist theories with their sole focus on poetry. The ‘talent’
that Levenson only mentions in passing actually encompasses a range of
12 Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism, p. 121.
13 A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. 1, the Young Genius, 1885-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 237. Original emphases.
visual techniques, both inspirational and applicable to Pound’s own art, which he learnt from or found resonance in the visual artists, including the sense of connection with art traditions of the past and the use of juxtaposition. For example, Pound described his feelings when sitting for Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture, Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound: ‘sculpture was so unexpected in one’s “vie littéraire.” I had always known musicians and painters, but sculpture and the tone of past erudition … set me thinking of renaissance life, of Leonardo, of the Gonzaga, or Valla’s praise of Nicholas V.’ (GB, 48) Pound was impressed by Gaudier-Brzeska’s ability to attain the excellence of past traditions with new means of expression in his artistic media, which was stimulating for Pound in terms of the creative process in literature. Pound also learned from the Vorticist sculptors to expand his use of juxtaposition in poetry, ‘to juxtapose as they did styles and subjects centuries and continents apart’; Dasenbrock argues that this method of ‘temporal and cultural montage’ allowed Pound ‘to reconcile his antiquarian and modern tendencies’ and ‘to [become] a modern poet’.14
Thirdly, in the visual arts Pound was able to find a formal referent for poetry. Pound’s Imagist and Vorticist periods are characterised by a quest for precision and concreteness, and it is not difficult to imagine his excitement when he found a counterpart ‘hard’ aesthetics in the visual arts. This formal referent for Pound initially only existed in sculpture, but upon the recommendation of Jacob Epstein, Pound sought it also in the drawings of Lewis, as he recounted in a letter to Quinn on 10 March 1916: ‘Years ago, three I suppose it is, or four’, he told Epstein that he found sculpture ‘so much more interesting’ than painting, to which Epstein replied, ‘[b]ut Lewis’s drawing has the qualities of sculpture’,
which set him off looking at Lewis (P/Q, 67). Pound admired contemporary sculpture for its manifestation of form: in contrast to the immaterial nature of poetry, what Pound found appealing in the visual arts is the visibility and undisputable evidence of skill and craftsmanship, the works’ concreteness and physical representation of beauty, the ‘direct treatment of the thing’. Ronald Bush also suggests that the question of artistic structuring and construction so evident in paintings like Lewis’s inspired Pound to think about ‘structural terms’ in relation to the poetic medium, which is crucial to his subsequent composition of The Cantos.15
Altogether, the awareness of a new sense of form, colours, subject matter and design in the visual realm contributed to Pound’s literary practice and confirmed his interdisciplinary aspirations. As Pound summed up his learnings from the visual artists in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir,
What have they done for me these vorticist artists? They have awakened my sense of form, or they “have given me a new sense of form,” […] These new men have made me see form, have made me more conscious of the appearance of the sky where it juts down between houses, of the bright pattern of sunlight which the bath water throws up on the ceiling, of the great “V’s” of light that dart through the chinks over the curtain rings, all these are new chords, new keys of design. (GB, 126)
For Pound, the visual arts constituted a new sensitivity and a new source of creativity: not only did the visual artists give him an education in visual language, it was more fundamentally an education in the processes of observation and perception, in ‘giv[ing] people new eyes, not to make them see some new particular thing’ (‘Vorticism’, 202). Furthermore, there is the artistic potential to
convey not only the ‘thing’, but more abstract notions such as the sense of form and the emotions of the artist.
Lastly, Pound’s association with the visual artists was for interdisciplinary artistic comradeship, as he wrote in his letter to the editor of Reedy’s Mirror on 18 August 1916 that, ‘[t]he pleasure in the vorticist movement was to find oneself at last inter pares.’ (EPVA, 218, original emphasis)Pound had been amazed by the fact that ‘[c]ertain artists working in different media have managed to understand each other. They know the good and bad in each other’s work, which they could not know unless there were a common speech.’ (‘Vorticism’, 208) Pound remarked on the interdisciplinary understanding of Lewis in a letter to the editor of the Egoist: ‘It interests me to find that my surest critic is a contemporary painter who knows my good work from my bad – NOT by a critical process, at least not by a technical process. It is interesting philosophically or whatever you choose to call it. Anyhow it indicates a “life” or a sameness somewhere that we are both trying with our imperfect means to get at. Our alliance must be with our own generation and usually with workers in other arts.’16 It is evident that Pound
saw connections between the different arts and recognised the potential of interdisciplinarity as the way forward in artistic creation, which explains his drawing of Imagism towards Vorticism as an attempt to facilitate interdisciplinary interactions and correspondence to the mutual benefits for each artistic medium, under the ideal framework of the ‘primary pigment’ where the creative impulse operates across different artistic media.
16 Ezra Pound, 'The Caressability of the Greeks (Correspondence)', in Egoist (16 March 1914), p. 117. Original emphasis.