Early Writings by Ezra Pound
“The footsteps of the cat upon the snow: (are like) plum-blossoms.”
The words “are like” would not occur in the original, but I add them for clarity.
The “one image poem” is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion: I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work “of second intensity.” Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence:—
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals, on a wet, black bough.”
I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought.ak In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.
This particular sort of consciousness has not been identified with impressionist art. I think it is worthy of attention.
The logical end of impressionist art is the cinematograph. The state of mind of the impressionist tends to become cinematographical. Or, to put it another way, the cinematograph does away with the need of a lot of impressionist art.
There are two opposed ways of thinking of a man: firstly, you may think of him as that toward which perception moves, as the toy of circumstance, as the plastic substance receiving impressions; secondly, you may think of him as directing a certain fluid force against circumstance, as conceiving instead of merely reflecting and observing. One does not claim that one way is better than the other, one notes a diversity of the temperament. The two camps always exist. In 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. Futurism is descended from impressionism. It is, in so far as it is an art movement, a kind of accelerated impressionism. It is a spreading, or surface art, as opposed to vorticism, which is intensive.
The vorticist has not this curious tic for destroying past glories. I have no doubt that Italy needed Mr. Marinetti, but he did not set on the egg that hatched me, and as I am wholly opposed to his aesthetic principles I see no reason why I, and various men who agree with me, should be expected to call ourselves futurists. We do not desire to evade comparison with the past. We prefer that the comparison be made by some intelligent person whose idea of “the tradition” is not limited by the conventional taste of four or five centuries and one continent.
Vorticism is an intensive art. I mean by this, that one is concerned with the relative intensity, or relative significance of different sorts of expression. One desires the most intense, for certain forms of expression are “more intense” than others. They are more dynamic. I do not mean they are more emphatic, or that they are yelled louder. I can explain my meaning best by mathematics.
There are four different intensities of mathematical expression known to the ordinarily intelligent undergraduate, namely: the arithmetical, the algebraic, the geometrical, and that of analytical geometry.
For instance, you can write
3 × 3 + 4 × 4 = 5 × 5,
or differently, 32 + 42 = 52.
That is merely conversation or “ordinary common sense.” It is a simple statement of one fact, and does not implicate any other.
Secondly, it is true that
32+4 2 = 52, 62+82=102, 92+122=152, 392+522=652.
These are all separate facts, one may wish to mention their underlying similarity; it is a bore to speak about each one in turn. One expresses their “algebraic relation” as a2 +b2 = c2.
That is the language of philosophy. It MAKES NO PICTURE. This kind of statement applies to a lot of facts, but it does not grip hold of Heaven.
Thirdly, when one studies Euclid one finds that the relation of a2+b2=c2 applies to the ratio between the squares on the two sides of a right-angled triangle and the square on the hypotenuse. One still writes it a2+b2=c2, but one has begun to talk about form. Another property or quality of life has crept into one’s matter. Until then one had dealt only with numbers. But even this statement does not create form. The picture is given you in the proposition about the square on the hypotenuse of the right-angled triangle being equal to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. Statements in plane or descriptive geometry are like talk about art. They are a criticism of the form. The form is not created by them.
Fourthly, we come to Descartian or “analytical geometry.” Space is conceived as separated by two or by three axes (depending on whether one is treating form in one or more planes). One refers points to these axes by a series of co-ordinates. Given the idiom, one is able actually to create.
Thus, we learn that the equation (x-a)2+(y-b)2=r2 governs the circle. It is the circle. It is not a particular circle, it is any circle and all circles. It is nothing that is not a circle. It is the circle free of space and time limits. It is the universal, existing in perfection, in freedom from space and time. Mathematics is dull ditchwater until one reaches analytics. But in analytics we come upon a new way of dealing with form. It is in this way that art handles life. The difference between art and analytical geometry is the difference of subject-matter only. Art is more interesting in proportion as life and the human consciousness are more complex and more interesting than forms and numbers.
This statement does not interfere in the least with “spontaneity” and “intuition,” or with their function in art. I passed my last exam, in mathematics on sheer intuition. I saw where the line had to go, as clearly as I ever saw an image, or felt caelestem intus vigorem.
The statements of “analytics” are “lords” over fact. They are the thrones and dominations that rule over form and recurrence. And in like manner are great works of art lords over fact, over race-long recurrent moods, and over to-morrow.
Great works of art contain this fourth sort of equation. They cause form to come into being. By the “image” I mean such an equation; not an equation of mathematics, not something about a, b, and c, having something to do with form, but about sea, cliffs, night, having something to do with mood.
The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing. In decency one can only call it a VORTEX. And from this necessity came the name “vorticism.” Nomina sunt consequentia rerum, and never was that statement of Aquinas more true than in the case of the vorticist movement.
It is as true for the painting and the sculpture as it is for the poetry. Mr. Wadsworth and Mr. Lewis5 are not using words, they are using shape and colour. Mr. Brzeska and Mr. Epstein are using “planes in relation,” they are dealing with a relation of planes different from the sort of relation of planes dealt with in geometry, hence what is called “the need of organic forms in sculpture.”
I trust I have made clear what I mean by an “intensive art.” The vorticist movement is not a movement of mystification, though I dare say many people “of good will” have been considerably bewildered.
The organization of forms is a much more energetic and creative action than the copying or imitating of light on a haystack.
There is undoubtedly a language of form and colour. It is not a symbolical or allegorical language depending on certain meanings having been ascribed, in books, to certain signs and colours.
Certain 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.
As for the excellence of certain contemporary artists, all I can do is to stand up for my own beliefs. I believe that Mr. Wyndham Lewis is a very great master of design; that he has brought into our art new units of design and new manners of organisation. I think that his series “Timon” is a great work. I think he is the most articulate expression of my own decade. If you a
Mr. Wadsworth’s work gives me pleasure, sometimes like the pleasure I have received from Chinese and Japanese prints and painting; for example, I derive such pleasure from Mr. Wadsworth’s “Khaki.” Sometimes his work gives me a pleasure which I can only compare to the pleasure I have in music, in music as it was in Mozart’s time. If an outsider wishes swiftly to understand this new work, he can do worse than approach it in the spirit wherein he approaches music.
“Lewis is Bach.” No, it is incorrect to say that “Lewis is Bach,” but our feeling is that certain works of Picasso and certain works of Lewis have in them something which is to painting what certain qualities of Bach are to music. Music was vorticist in the Bach-Mozart period, before it went off into romance and sentiment and description. A new vorticist music would come from a new computation of the mathematics of harmony, not from a mimetic representation of dead cats in a fog-horn, alias noise-tuners.
Mr. Epstein is too well known to need presentation in this article. Mr. Brzeska’s sculpture is so generally recognized in all camps that one does not need to bring in a brief concerning it. Mr. Brzeska has defined sculptural feeling as “the appreciation of masses in relation,” and sculptural ability as “the defining of these masses by planes.” There comes a time when one is more deeply moved by that form of intelligence which can present “masses in relation” than by that combination of patience and trickery which can make marble chains with free links and spin out bronze until it copies the feathers on general’s hat. Mr. Etchells6 still remains more or less of a mystery. He is on his travels, whence he has sent back a few excellent drawings. It cannot be made too clear that the work of the vorticists and the “feeling of inner need” existed before the general noise about vorticism. We worked separately, we found an underlying agreement, we decided to stand together.
NOTE
I am often asked whether there can be a long imagiste or vorticist poem. The Japanese, who evolved the hokku, evolved also the Noh plays. In the best “Noh” the whole play may consist of one image. I mean it is gathered about one image. Its unity consists in one image, enforced by movement and music. I see nothing against a long vorticist poem.
On the other hand, no artist can possibly get a vortex into every poem or picture he does. One would like to do so, but it is beyond one. Certain things seem to demand metrical expression, or expression in a rhythm more agitated than the rhythms acceptable to prose, and these subjects, though they do not contain a vortex, may have some interest, an interest as “criticism of life” or of art. It is natural to express these things, and a vorticist or imagiste writer may be justified in presenting a certain amount of work which is not vorticism or imagisme, just as he might be justified in printing a purely didactic prose article. Unfinished sketches and drawings have a similar interest; they are trials and attempts toward a vortex.
AFFIRMATIONS
AS FOR IMAGISME
The term ‘Imagisme’ has given rise to a certain amount of discussion. It has been taken by some to mean Hellenism; by others the word is used most carelessly, to designate any sort of poem in vers libre. Having omitted to copyright the word at its birth I cannot prevent its misuse. I can only say what I meant by the word when I made it. Moreover, I cannot guarantee that my thoughts about it will remain absolutely stationary. I spend the greater part of my time meditating the arts, and I should find this very dull if it were not possible for me occasionally to solve some corner of the mystery, or, at least to formulate more clearly my own thoughts as to the nature of some mystery or equation.
In the second article of this series1 I pointed out that energy creates pattern. I gave examples. I would say further that emotional force gives the image. By this I do not mean that it gives an ‘explanatory metaphor’; though it might be hard to draw an exact border line between the two. We have left false metaphor, ornamental metaphor to the rhetorician. That lies outside this discussion.
Intense emotion causes pattern to arise in the mind—if the mind is strong enough. Perhaps I should say, not pattern, but pattern-units, or units of design. (I do not say that intense emotion is the sole possible cause of such units. I say simply that they can result from it. They may also result from other sorts of energy.) I am using this term ‘pattern-unit’, because I want to get away from the confusion between ‘pattern’ and ‘applied decoration’. By applied decoration I mean something like the ‘wall of Troy pattern’. The invention was merely the first curley cue, or the first pair of them. The rest is repetition, is copying.
By pattern-unit or vorticist picture I mean the single jet. The difference between the pattern-unit and the picture is one of complexity. The pattern-unit is so simple that one can bear having it repeated several or many times. When it becomes so complex that repetition would be useless, then it is a picture, an ‘arrangement of forms’.
Not only does emotion create the ‘pattern-unit’ and the ‘arrangement of forms’, it creates also the Image. The Image can be of two sorts. It can arise within the mind. It is then ‘subjective’. External causes play upon the mind, perhaps; it so, they are drawn into the mind, fused, transmitted, and emerge in an Image unlike themselves. Secondly, the Image can be objective. Emotion seizing up some external scene or action carries it intact to the mind; and that vortex purges it of all save the essential or dominant or dramatic qualities, and it emerges like the external original.
In either case the Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy. If it does not fulfil these specifications, it is not what I mean by an Image. It may be a sketch, a vignette, a criticism, an epigram or anything else you like. It may be impressionism, it may even be very good prose. By ‘direct treatment’, one means simply that having got the Image one refrains from hanging it with festoons.
From the Image to Imagisme: Our second contention was that poetry to be good poetry should be at least as well written as good prose. This statement would seem almost too self-evident to need any defence whatsoever. Obviously, if a man has anything to say, the interest will depend on what he has to say, and not on a faculty for saying ‘exiguous’ when he means ‘narrow’, or for putting his words hindside before. Even if his thought be very slight it will not gain by being swathed in sham lace.
Thirdly, one believes that emotion is an organiser of form, not merely of visible forms and colours, but also of audible forms. This basis of music is so familiar that it would seem to need no support. Poetry is a composition or an ‘organisation’ of words set to ‘music’. By ‘music’ here we can scarcely mean much more than rhythm and timbre. The rhythm form is false unless it belong to the particular creative emotion or energy which it purports to represent. Obviously one does not discard ‘regular metres’ because they are a ‘difficulty’.
Any ass can say:
‘John Jones stood on the floor. He saw the ceiling’ or decasyllabicly,
‘John Jones who rang the bell at number eight.’
There is no form of platitude which cannot be turned into iambic pentameter without labour. It is not difficult, if one have learned to count up to ten, to begin a new line on each eleventh syllable or to whack each alternate syllable with an ictus.
Emotion also creates patterns of timbre. But one ‘discards rhyme’, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet, but because there are certain emotions or energies which are not to be represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns; just as there are certain ‘arrangements of form’ that cannot be worked into dados.
Granted, of course, that there is great freedom in pentameter and that there are a great number of regular and beautifully regular metres fit for a number of things, and quite capable of e
The discovery that bad vers libre can be quite as bad as any other sort of bad verse is by no means modern. Over eleven centuries ago Rihaku (Li Po) complained that imitators of Kutsugen (Ch’u Yuan) couldn’t get any underlying rhythm into their vers libre, that they got ‘bubbles not waves’.
Yo ba geki tai ha Kai riu to mu giu.
‘Yoyu and Shojo stirred up decayed (enervated) waves. Open current flows about in bubbles, does not move in wave lengths.’ If a man has no emotional energy, no impulse, it is of course much easier to make something which looks like ‘verse’ by reason of having a given number of syllables, or even of accents, per line, than for him to invent a music or rhythm-structure. Hence the prevalence of ‘regular’ metric. Hence also bad vers libre. The only advantage of bad vers libre is that it is, possibly, more easy to see how bad it is ... but even this advantage is doubtful.
By bad verse, whether ‘regular’ or ‘free’, I mean verse which pretends to some emotion which did not assist at its parturition. I mean also verse made by those who have not sufficient skill to make the words move in rhythm of the creative emotion. Where the voltage is so high that it fuses the machinery, one has merely the ‘emotional man’ not the artist. The best artist is the man whose machinery can stand the highest voltage. The better the machinery, the more precise, the stronger, the more exact will be the record of the voltage and of the various currents which have passed through it.
These are bad expressions if they lead you to think of the artist as wholly passive, as a mere receiver of impressions. The good artist is perhaps a good seismograph, but the difference between man and a machine is that man can in some degree ‘start his machinery going’. He can, within limits, not only record but create. At least he can move as a force; he can produce ‘order-giving vibrations’; by which one may mean merely, he can departmentalise such part of the life-force as flows through him.