EZRA POUND'S DEVELOPING POETICS, 1908-1915: THE CRITICAL PROSE

Pound's early critical prose reveals the development of the poetics which served as the basis for poetic composition throughout his career. Therefore, this study--a Pound biography, 1908-15, with the critical prose moved to center stage--narrates Pound's development through Imagism, Vorticism, and the "Ideogrammic Method," identifying discoveries, continuities, and inconsistencies. A recurring theme is the impingement of his conception of "what thought is like" on his understanding of language and, therefore, on his poetic theory. I have also discussed the influences of Yeats, Hulme, Ford, Upward, H. D., Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, and Fenollosa.;The poetics Pound brought to London can be assembled by correlating statements in his first letters home and such essays as "The Wisdom of Poetry" and "The Serious Artist" with the list of "poetic ideals" included in a 1908 letter to Williams. The resulting understanding of Pound's earliest poetic principles illuminates his later pronouncements on the poet's social function, the place of didacticism in art, the relation of painting and poetry, and the difference between the "image" and a mere visual impression.;The first London influences Pound encountered were Hulme's and Ford's differing forms of literary "impressionism." Though the young Pound absorbed these two influences, he later used "impressionism" as a foil by which to emphasize distinctive elements of Imagism and Vorticism.;Pound's essay, "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris," helps document the crucial transitional period during which he undertook to "modernize" himself. In it he discusses his relation to "the tradition," enumerates technical principles, and states assumptions about language and knowledge which were important to the shape of his poetics. Also in the essay, all three of the Imagist tenets can be found in Pound's praise of Arnaut Daniel's canzos.;Imagism itself was as much a destructive as a constructive movement, intended to burn away the stock poetic gestures of the previous age. Imagism eschewed, in addition to an outmoded "poetic" diction, the structural props of speaker, narration, and traditional verse forms which help to sustain longer poems. Pound isolated the "image" (actually three distinct kinds of "images") as the basis upon which to build his new poetry, but he would have to replace the structural elements Imagism abandoned before writing The Cantos.;The mimetic emphasis of Imagism was challenged by the work of Pound's fellow Vorticists. Their abstract visual art caused him to stress the expressive elements of his poetics and to speak more insistently about "conception," as opposed to the "reception of impressions," as the activity fundamental to poetic composition. Also, the structural strategies Pound observed in Vorticist painting--and described with musical analogies--helped him begin to get beyond the impasse of the brief, Imagist poem.;Fenollosa's essay on the Chinese written character brought Pound unsuspected corroboration for his poetics. In it Fenollosa defended Pound-like poetic principles in the context of more fully conceived theories of language and epistemology than Pound himself had been interested in working out. In so doing, it revealed to Pound (and reveals to us) the philosophical implications of his own poetics.;Throughout Pound's career a recurring theme in his criticism was the distinction between forms of "conception" and "reception" in the creative process. In my conclusion I summarize his uses of literary "impressionism" and its passive "reception of impressions" as a foil by which to emphasize the poet's acts of selection and arrangement important in his own poetics. Though these poetics were consistently empirical in bias, Pound distinguished between slavish forms of mimesis and work in which an expressive element probed forward in "exploration."...