Founding a Movement with Ezra Pound (Imagist Mini-Series)

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Joe: [00:00:00] Welcome to Beyond the Verse, a poetry podcast brought to you by the team@poemanalysis.com and Poetry+. I'm Joe, and I'm here with my co-host Maiya. And today we have the first episode of a brand new miniseries about the Imagist poets. And today we're gonna be focusing on the great 20th century poet Ezra Pound.

And today's episode, we're gonna be covering a lot of themes, but we're gonna be focusing on Pound’s status as a figurehead of the Imagist movement, the principles of the movement itself, before we look at some key perfect examples. But Maiya, before we talk about Pound, can you just outline the scope of this miniseries and what we're gonna be discussing over the next few episodes?

Maiya: Absolutely Joe, and thank you very much for that intro. So for the Imagist movement, we are going to be taking the next three episodes to explore some of its key poetic figures that includes Ezra Pound, who we’ll be talking about today. Our next episode will be on Hilda Doolittle, affectionately known as H.D., and our final episode will be on William [00:01:00] Carlos Williams.

Now, that is not to say that they are the only Imagists that matter, but of course we will try and tie in other Imagists where we can these three poets represent really the foundation of the Imagist movement. Now to touch briefly on the Imagist movement, before I go on, to explain a little bit more about Ezra Pound, our focus for today. So in 1908, T Hu formed the School of Imagists, brought together a huge variety of poets who were interested in poetry. Its kind of conventions, its interests, and Ezra Pound was really at the epicenter of this. They used the school to discuss new ideas, new movements, and one of the movements that came out of this was the Imagists. So in 1912 and 1913, Ezra Pound published a manifesto called A Retrospect, where he sort of rejected the sentimentality and the overly lush romantic poetry, including its diction, its meter in favor of something a little bit more pared back and instead focused on the kind of resonant emotions that you feel when you read a [00:02:00] poem as opposed to taking away from the content of it. Ezra Pound was an early champion of modernist poetry. And I will say before launching into this episode is that he had a very interesting life, I would say outside of just his poetic career. He was known to be incredibly right-wing. He wrote propaganda for Mussolini. Obviously, look at the period we're in, we're kind of in the early 1900s, so we're talking about world wars here. but he lectured, he had a very divisive feedback from his lecturing style and very complex love life as well. So he's a really interesting figure and I think he's someone that was so incredibly talented and we'll go on to discuss some of the ways in which he formed this really, impactful moment of the time, but also had this baggage, let's say, that came with his personal life. He was born in 1885, died in 1972, so you know, all things considered, he lived a pretty long life and published consistently through it. You know, we're looking at the years between kind of 1908 and 1950. And from 1925 onwards, a real focus [00:03:00] on Cantos. He was born in Idaho, went to university in Philadelphia, but he spent really the majority of his life in Europe, so primarily England, France, Italy, And this is where he met and spent time with so many of his other poetic friends. Now. Pound edited.

The first collection that really solidified what the Imagist movement was is Des Imagistes (1914) and excuse my atrocious pronunciation there. which again, like we say, it sets the groundwork for what Imagist poetry looks like. And I know I keep talking about what Imagist poetry is, but we have to get into it to really understand it.

So, Joe, I'm gonna throw to you, do you want to tell us about what the guiding principles are?

Joe: Yeah, I'd love to. So it's important to remember with all of these literary movements, that there is conflict within the group itself. There are some members of the group who want to prioritize other elements and vice versa. But if we're talking about guiding principles of the movement, there were three that were written out in March of 1913.

Written by Pound in an article that was titled A Few [00:04:00] Don’ts by an Imagiste, and he specified these three things in particular. Firstly, Imagist poetry should strive to

Treat the thing directly, whether it's abstract or literal, that sense of clarity, that sense of absolute focus on the poetic subject matter rather than kind of writing around it.

The second principle is to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to what the poem is trying to do. As Maiya mentioned, pared back. I mean, really it's even more severe than that. It's about stripping poetry back to its absolute essentials and nothing more. And the third principle is to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, rather than relying on metronomes.

And if anyone's unclear about what that means effectively, iit means that poetry, in Pound’s eyes, and in the eyes of many of the Imagists was too regimented, too focused on, traditional poetic meters. And actually poetry should strive to retain something of the musical or something of the natural patterns of speech, which is why a lot of the Imagist poems were written in free verse.

Maiya: Just to jump in really quickly on that, I really want to urge [00:05:00] readers to understand that just because we're saying kind of pared back and stripped back here, we don't mean non-descriptive in this kind of do's and don't essay that Pound published, he notes that with rhythm and rhyme. For example, in Shakespeare, sometimes it can be quite easy to dissociate vocabulary from the cadence, and for him, when you mix the abstract with the concrete and then you have this kind of overly lush language, overly lush rhythm on top of it, it can really take away from what is trying to be described now. I think what's really important here is that the Imagist movement was not kind of advocating for. The basicness of things, but it was advocating for showing things as they truly are.

Joe: 100%. I mean, let's try and get into the head of kind of these early Imagist poets. In order to do that, I think it's really important that we understand the kind of poetry and literature that they are writing against and. You know, any long-term listeners of the podcast will [00:06:00] know that I'm really interested in this period of literary history.

the kind of birth of literary modernism that kind of really comes to the fore in the early 1920s. And Ezra Pound is absolutely central to this entire period of literature. I mean, it's incredibly hard to overstate his influence on This literary moment. I mean, we've mentioned him in a previous episode.

Probably the one we talked about him the most was in our episode on T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which Ezra Pound edited extensively. He also, you know, worked with the likes of William Butler Yates. He was influential in the publication of James Joyce's early novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I mean, this is somebody who is as embedded in European and world literary culture as it is possible to be for the, certainly this kind of 10 to 15 year period in the early 20th century.

So. Why Imagism, and why the early 20th century? And this is a question I'm really curious about. I think, and I'd love to get your opinion on this, Maiya, but if I could just kind of give listeners an outline. This is a period of literary history, which is all about breaking from the past.

Modernism's famous Maxim is make it new break with, literary traditions in order [00:07:00] to create something that is fresh, that is original, that is often fragmented, that is often strange, but that crucially does not resemble the poetry or literature of the past. Now, why? What is it about this moment that causes this kind of rupture, this fracture in the poetic and literary landscape, and we have to view.

This moment as a conflation of lots of different things. Some of them political, some of them social, some of them technological, because let's focus on where we are in the beginning of the 20th century. You have a sense that the old world is crumbling and. Isn't up to scratch anymore. I mean, another poem that we've discussed on the podcast was, William Butler Yeats is the second coming, which very much captures this sense that the world is in transition.

There is something yearning to be born out of the old world in terms of poetry. These writers are looking back at Victorian poetry and romantic poetry, and to them it is outdated. It is overly verbose, and often it's very moralistic. It's trying to instruct, and these poets are writing at a point where they don't want that kind of moral instruction.

So [00:08:00] there is an element of the Imagist movement that feels kind of. Adolescent in its outlook, it's about rebelling against the authority of a kind of parental figure.

But to only view it in that light, I think underestimates the importance of what's going on around the world, because that's not the only factor.

It's not only that they're kind of grumpy teenagers writing back against their parents. We also have. The development of new technologies. you know, all of our listeners will understand that, the century prior to this is the industrial revolution and the increasing urbanization in countries like Britain where the movement is centered.

So you have growth of cities, you have buildings that are springing up, you have new technologies, the telephone, the railway, all of these things disrupt. The historic way in which life had been lived. And when you disrupt life, you disrupt the way that life is portrayed In art, we also have massive kind of social, political, philosophical change.

I mean, think about the kind of 50 years before, the movement comes to the fore. You have Darwin's. Publication of on the Origin of Species, which massively rattles the moral framework of, the world, you know, [00:09:00] the Christian framework of the world because it challenges, the view that God created the world.

So you have all of the moral framework that we have all lived our lives by suddenly seems less certain than it had been. You have the rise of psychoanalysis, particularly with the works of Sigmund Freud. So people are suddenly interrogating and considering kind of an internal landscape, an internal mental framework in ways that hadn't been done before.

And one of the key things about modernist writing is its interiority. Its focus on the internal experience of life rather than the external experience. And that owes a huge debt to the likes of Freud. You have the writings of Nietzsche at the end. Of the 19th century, which again, shake the framework, shake the assumptions, you know, rattle the cage of the Victorian landscape increasingly in Britain, people are asking questions about Britain as a colonial force and kind of the ethics of having, such an empire as they did.

Queen Victoria had been a constant for decades. Her death in 1901 meant there was a period of instability and uncertainty, and as we all know, of course, in 1914. You have the [00:10:00] advent of the first World War and the kind of carnage that that unleashed. So there's so many factors that effectively serve to.

Make this world feel fundamentally different from the world that came before it. I mean, if you take all those things at once, the technological changes, the political changes, the kind of academic work that was being done, the early 20th century must have felt less certain, more frightening than almost any period of Western history up to that point.

Now for Pounds specifically, you have all of those factors as I've mentioned, but you also have the increasing prevalence of non-Western art forms in the West. And this is so interesting. We talked about this I think in our episode on Japanese poetry because the influence of eastern forms of poetry, particularly from Japan.

Really, really strong on Ezra Pound, and one of the poems we're gonna discuss later is sometimes regarded as the first ever Haiku published in English by Pound. So Pound is also getting an artistic source of inspiration that he hadn't had previously. So all of those factors go into the [00:11:00] formation of the Imagist movement, but I think we can't overestimate the importance of Pound himself as a figure.

And you know, we don't normally like to dwell on personalities too much on the podcast. Of course, we're interested in the poets as well as their poetry, but I think in the case of Pound, it's so important for listeners to have a sense of what this guy was like because otherwise a lot of the the decisions he made, the relationships he had don't really make sense.

I think we have to remember that this guy is academically absolutely brilliant. I mean, every single poet that I admire from this period admires Ezra Pound. He was clearly of immense intellect. That doesn't mean that ever Pound wasn't divisive. I think he had an enormous ego. I think he was very, very opinionated. He didn't like relinquishing control, and all of these things are really important because the movement does not last very, very long. This isn't a coherent movement that spans decades.

These poets fell out. They made up and we can view at least some of the movement as kind of briefly held together by the presence of Ezra Pound himself only for it to fall apart when he inevitably [00:12:00] moved on to other things. And the other thing I would focus on just before I throw back to Maiya, and this is jumping off from that point I made about these aren't adolescent needlessly rebelling against the authority of their parents? These people are radical poets. They are breaking with traditions that were very, very strong, but they're not doing so out of. Ignorance or out of spite or out of laziness. This Isn't the case, that they simply couldn't replicate the poetry of the Victorian era and so decided to do something different.

This is a group of people who are incredibly educated, who are incredibly versed in the poetry of the Victorian, near the romantic era, the classical era. And they are making very deliberate decisions, very informed decisions about which parts of those legacies they want to be a part of, and which they want to reject.

So as I've mentioned, and as Maiya mentioned earlier on Pound and we're gonna talk in the next episode about Hilda Doolittle as well. They're very interested in capturing something about the classical world, but they're less interested and perhaps less inspired by more recent poetry from the Victorian era.

So bear in mind as we go through this. There are [00:13:00] so many factors that play into the Imagist movement, as I mentioned, because of the historical moment in which it was born. Ezra Pound is brilliant and Ezra Pound's brilliance sometimes causes problems because he's aware of his brilliance and I think all too willing to tell other people about it.

And thirdly, these people when they are rejecting elements of the past, they're not doing so out of ignorance. Quite the opposite. They are incredibly knowledgeable about the literary past, including the parts of that legacy they wish to reject.

But Maiya, I'm sure I've jumped around a lot there, but is there anything you wanna pick up on about Pound as a character or perhaps some of the early factors that led to the formation of the Imagist movement?

Maiya: I think the best way that we can really jump into like how the body of this works is by exploring the work. But just before we jump into that, I do want to pick up on that note you made about the fact that these are all incredibly educated people. You know, these poets are not just.

All over the world kind of choosing to write a poem and then calling it part of a movement. They [00:14:00] are gathering in rooms, they are discussing, they are forging new paths. They are actively making decisions that will go on to shape the future of poetry. Now that is no small feat, especially given that the kind of key figures of this movement. Were relatively small. I mean, you could probably fit all of these people in one large sitting room.

But they were getting together and they were actively choosing to make these huge breaks from tradition. You know, many of these poets, as we say, yes, they were educated, but they probably were formally educated in poetry. The poetry that they learned was probably that of the romantics. They had an innate knowledge of how to write that way, how to express that way.

The reasons that previous poets expressed the way they did, and they would've read widely as well. So it's a really. Important thing to keep in mind as we go through this episode, as Joe mentioned, that not only are we drawing from a singular kind of Western [00:15:00] tradition, a Western cultural tradition, but we are then starting to bring in. Eastern art forms, forms of conversation, you know, the inspiration from poets who would be literally sat beside them at the time. And every single decision in these poems, at least for the early ones, I would say, was specifically made to break away from that tradition. So when we say radical, we don't just mean, oh, in hindsight, it was quite radical that they did this. It was actively radical. So many of these poets were not just leaning on a hope that perhaps this could be. The start of a new era. They were stepping into the new era and presenting themselves as the face of it. Ezra Pound being the forefather of it. He was the one that wanted to say, this is what the movement looks like.

That's why he writes essays like do's and don'ts, like a retrospect. He's constantly weighing in on. What the form looks like now, how it can move on in the future. And as Joe said, when he was then done with it, he moved on to something else. So that [00:16:00] legacy is then left with someone else and it's really interesting to track those changes.

So I'm really excited for the next few episodes as we go into Hilda Doolittle and William Carlos Williams as well. But I think before we get into too much of a tangent about everything around Agism. Let's focus on the first poem. So the first poem we're gonna talk about today is called In a Station of the Metro.

Now, in a station of the metro is a Pound poem that is focused on a singular moment in a Parisian metro. So the experience of a train, pulling in, seeing a crowd, and it is only two lines.

And this is how the poem goes. The apparition of these faces in the crowd, Petals on a wet, black bough. . So Joe. I know this is very short and I'm, I hesitate to throw to you because I know there's a million things to say about it, but where would you like to start?

Joe: Thank you for that. Reading my brief as it was. strangely, I'd actually like to start with the conception of this poem rather than the poem itself, because we know from subsequent sources [00:17:00] that actually the first draft of this poem came to 30 lines. Pound ruthlessly reduced. He ruthlessly edited down to two lines.

There's only 14 words in this poem. So when we're talking about those Imagist principles of clarity, of directness, of removing every word that does not contribute. We can't say that he wasn't practicing what he preached. I mean, this is an absolute exercise in stripping a poem back to its very core. And that's very much the same attitude he took to, the other work that he edited.

And we talked, in The Waste Land episode about how cutthroat he was with editing the work of T. S. Eliot. But in terms of the poem itself. I think I would like to focus on the setting of this poem because it speaks to that sense of modernity that I was talking about. when I was referring to the many factors that shaped the Imagist movement, because what we have here is an urban space, a metro station, and that might seem kind of banal to many of us.

You know, it's just someone getting on the train. But we have to remember that this notion of inner city train, transport, metro transport groups of people huddled [00:18:00] together, moving at great speed relative to pre-train travel . This is something innately modern and so much of those technologies and that sense of urbanization influences not only the Imagists, but the broader modernist movement, including other kind of subsets of modernism like the futurist movement.

So I would look to really remind readers that we might take that kind of urban space for granted. We mustn't when we're reading the Imagists’ work because the urban setting of the poem is really important. With that in mind, the apparition of these faces in the crowd. I think what I love about it is how brilliantly impersonal that scene is.

And of course it's because he's just in Paris. He sees faces, he doesn't know these people, but it's the proximity to strangers that, again, we take for granted in the modern world, but in a pre urban world, a world pre-public transportation, those kind of intensely, physically close journeys taken with people you don't know, wouldn't have been that normal.

It's not normal a hundred [00:19:00] years before this poem is published to be pressed together with faces that you don't know. And that sense of being pressed with these ghostly figures, I think actually puts me in mind of classical myth. Pound as we're gonna explore in this episode. And also when we talk about Hilda Doolittle very, very interested in classical myth.

Much more interested in going back to the very distant past than he was about the more recent past. And. I think this puts me in mind of the fields of Elysium, which for listeners who aren't aware, is kind of the middling version of heaven or the afterlife In the Greek canon, the ancient Greek canon where there were tiers of the afterlife for the very virtuous, for the majority of people who are neither particularly virtuous or particularly evil.

And then of course, their version of hell, which was Tartarus for people who were evil. Now, the Fields of Asphodel is where the vast majority of people go because.

As I think is fair, most people are neither particularly good or particularly bad. And effectively this is a great field full of spirits of formerly living people who are now dead. Now, they don't have a memory of their lives. They're sort of just wandering aimlessly forever.

They're not being punished, [00:20:00] but neither are they being rewarded. It's this really kind of ambivalent space, and what I love about this poem is in Pounds context, the fields of Asphodel, which is this great outdoor space, as I've mentioned, is brought into the urban landscape into the metro station because when you are passing by so many lives that you don't know, it's reminiscent of that kind of afterlife scene. And again, that's my interpretation of the poem. I have no idea at all if Pound was looking to explore that. But given what we know about his interest in Greek myth, who knows if it could have been an influence?

But I've gone on too long. There are only two lines, as you mentioned. What do you wanna focus in this poem?

Maiya: Oh, well, really I wanted to focus on, the inverse. I think instead of what this poem says about the people, I want to focus on what it says about the technology here, because as you say, this is an urban space, and what we're exploring is the moment at which people are waiting for the metro to arrive.

And I really find. The most striking thing about this poem is the suggestion of the oncoming technology. It's the suggestion of the oncoming train, [00:21:00] and I really want to laser focus in specifically on the sounds in this opening line, the apparition of these faces in the crowd. Now, this is incredibly plosive. The word itself indicates that there is this kind of churning movement. Yes. Now we can sit there and say that, you know, the tube's not the best thing in the world, but it's not the loudest thing.

Whereas a hundred years ago, this technology was still very new. You would've heard cogs and steam and the screech of the tracks. It would've been a very overstimulating environment, and I love that this poem immediately brings in that moment of stillness versus that movement because you have the indication that there is something coming. And the reason I say this is because it's offset. By the speed at which the poem slows down, you have the apparition of these faces in the crowd, has a really nice sense of lively movement to it, but it's immediately followed. But a colon by petals on a wet, black bough, I even find myself reading it, drawing back, slowing down. You get the impression that this is the [00:22:00] metro pulling up and at that moment. Of silence.

As things slow down, as things quiet down, you then get the influx of nature petals on a wet, black bough a beautiful descriptor for these people. However, it focuses on the people, not the nature, the are the petals and the landscape. The urban landscape, the train platform, the train pulling in are the wet, black bough.

So there again is this offset of. Mechanization and technology against human. There is also an offset of human against nature, and there are so many things at play, and as we say, this is a 14 word poem, and yet there are so many different things we can pick out from here. It's one of the key things that I always focus on whenever I read this poem, which is that. Mechanization is at the heart of it. But what comes out of it is an exploration of what it is to be human. because of course when this was written, it's an age of innovation, of technology, of exciting new [00:23:00] developments, but it's also an age of working those things out. And the damage and the danger that comes with that. so when we talk about the approach of this metro, it's not just the approach of the promise of something that's going to take you somewhere else. It's not purely exciting, as Joe says, there's something more spectral that plays into it.

There's not quite an acknowledgement that the spirits that stand on this platform. Aren't necessarily interpreted to be solely positive. There is an indication that there's a heaviness and a weight that accompanies them and accompanies these travelers because of that sense of danger.

But what do you think, Joe? Am I going off on a tangent there? 

Joe: No. Well, if you are, it's a brilliant tangent 

And I, you're a little bit harsh on the tube. I think you've blown our chances of getting a transport for London sponsorship transport for London. If you're listening, we love you. I mean, I'm so interested in what you were talking about, , that relationship between speed and slowing down, and I had exactly the same reaction when I read the poem, and it was only upon rereading it that I was struck by the fact there are no verbs [00:24:00] in this poem. So that sense of impending movement, impending arrival, speeding up, slowing down, is all achieved without action. Nothing happens in the poem.

There is no movement, there is no verb. And yet Pound is able to capture the anticipation of movement, which I think is just, it's masterful. And this is one of those poems where we can. Absolutely see the influence of the haiku form of translated Japanese poetry into English. Like I said, some people regard this as the first haiku in English, although it doesn't follow the line syllable pattern of traditional haiku.

And if anyone's interested in learning a little bit more about that aspect of the Imagist movement, I would really suggest they go and listen to the episode we did on Japanese poetry because it would form such an interesting background to what Pound is trying to do. But Maiya, let's move on to our next poem, which is an apology in advance for the pronunciation, but we're going to be talking about Pound’s poem ‘L’Art, 1910’, and I will quickly read the poem now.

Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth, crushed [00:25:00] strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes. Now again, a two-line poem.

Very, very short. I'm really interested in the Imagists that he has chosen to use. And again, one, one of the great things about analyzing Imagist poems, you know, sometimes you think, oh my goodness, there isn't much there to look at because they're often very, very short. But the great thing about them is we can be very, very confident in how.

Deliberate, they were about their choice of words, and therefore we can really delve deep into the language that we do have. And I'm fascinated by the color green when it's used in poetry. Anyway, for various reasons, and again, one day I promise for the listeners, one day we'll get on to do more.

Federico García Lorca. We touched on him in our love poetry episode, but his treatment of the color green is absolutely incredible, but. Let's focus on that color green. On the one hand, you have regeneration, you have growth, you have the promise of renewal.

On the other hand, you have decay, you have rot.

You have the symbols of something that is gone too far, and that needs to be done away with. That's such a microcosm of what the Imagists are doing.

They are inheriting a poetic tradition that to them [00:26:00] is baggy and weighty and overripe and ready to be done away with. And yet what the Imagists, movement promises and what modernism promises more generally is the promise of renewal.

That new sprouts, that new plants will sprout from the old, that there will be a new kind of form of literature arising, but by pairing that word up with arsenic, which is of course a poison. Pound is suggesting that this is more heavily weighted to the, death and decay angle than it is the renewal.

So I think that those opening two words are fascinating and the way they play in with the rest of that line, an egg-white cloth, and again, we have that word egg, which is another kind of symbol of renewal, a symbol of hope, new life regeneration, whereas the arsenic itself is actually a noun. The egg white only serves as an adjective. So again, the hint at renewal, implied by the green, implied by the egg are outweighed by the more forthright presence of a symbol of death, the arsenic. And I find that relationship between that decay and death on the one hand, and the hint or perhaps doubt [00:27:00] about renewal on the other to be one of the key tensions in this poem.

But Maiya, what do you think about this one?

Maiya: Well, I have a take, I suppose on this poem that is slightly different to yours, Joe, so I'm interested to talk it through. Intentionality for me in this poem is something I'd really like to talk about primarily because, as you said, when you look at color symbolism, particularly as offset against images of birth, rebirth renewal, it does seem intentional. However, I think there's a lack of focus on the word smeared Smeared indicates that there is a slight mess, something less intentional, something accidental, something that hasn't been put there on purpose. Now I would like to lean into that lack of intentionality for a second. If you'll allow me a moment. Because just again, to clarify for our listeners today, arsenic is a poison that was widely distributed in the Victorian era. However, it was also used as a dye for cloth. Now that dye. Unbeknownst at the [00:28:00] time caused long-term issues because of the poisonous nature of arsenic. But you dye a cloth, you would fully submerge it. You would fully submerge the cloth in the color or the liquid or whatever it is you're using to dye the fabric with. And I think what Pound is doing here is letting us know that this cloth was not intentionally dyed. Cloth has been smeared with the green of arsenic, which means that there is a lack of intentionality to it. And the reason that I think he indicates that is because there is something off about this entire poem. There is nothing entirely whole about this moment.

It's that indication of unsettlement that I think is actually the focus of this poem. And I know we've, said throughout this kind of episode that the intention of images is to focus on things as they are. But what the thing in this poem is I think is still a little obscured, because here we have green arsenic smeared on a cloth.

So, as I've been saying, this is accidental. It's an egg-white cloth, which means already this cloth has been washed a few times. [00:29:00] Usually when we see portrayals of cloth in literature, it tends to be pure white. It represents the virginal and innocent, but this cloth is egg white. As we know, egg white is not pure white. It's slightly off. If you go onto any paint chart, eggshell white is not going to mimic pure crystal white.

It's going to be something that has a little bit of warmth to it. So to me, it says that this cloth has been washed, it's been used, it's either been produced in a way that it looks worn, and then this is immediately followed by crushed strawberries. Not whole strawberries, not the focus of your attention because you are going to eat them because they're going to be delicious.

But something to look at because it's been destroyed from its natural form. Now, these are three elements now that all work in tandem to show us that the center of this poem is not the strawberries, it's not the arsenic on the cloth, but it's something else that represents the decay of these things that should be whole.

The arsenic as a poison should be bottled. But it's smeared [00:30:00] on the cloth. If it was a dye, it should cover the whole cloth, but it's not. It's indicated that the cloth is just an egg-white cloth. The cloth itself isn't clear. isn't pure. So when in the final line of this poem we get, come let us feast our eyes, I think what we are being invited to do is to feast our eyes on the state of things . The way that things have decayed. 

But what do you think about that, Joe?

Joe: Well, I think that's a brilliant point, Maiya, and I, I, I love the fact that we've, got to those final few words, come, let us feast our eyes because the focus on perception of the thing is so crucial here because remember that what the Imagists are doing, as you know we've said already, is whether they're focusing on the thing, whether real or abstract.

But in some of these poems, what he's actually doing is he's focusing on the act of focusing. Come let us feast our eyes as an invitation to the readers, but it's also a call to action for the poets. Let us focus on what we can see before us, not what we wish we saw before us. Let's not lecture, let's not, write a sermon.

Let's not, be overly moralistic in our work. Let us [00:31:00] simply indulge in the vitality of the world we see as it is, not as we would like it to be. And this focus on perception works really nicely with the next poem I want to talk about, which is Ezra Pound’s ‘The Encounter’. And I'll just read the poem quickly now as readers and listeners might be getting a sense of it won't take very long.

All the while they were talking, the new morality; her eyes explored me

and when I rose to go, Her fingers were like the tissue of a Japanese paper napkin. Now I really want to focus on those first two lines. Admire, I'd love to get your thoughts on this poem as well because we have so much in these first two lines that is reminiscent of Pound’s personality, but also of the kind of formation of the movement itself.

That first line, all the while they were talking, the new morality now. there's so much here, but lemme try and break it down. First of all, new morality. I mean, is that oxymoronic? You know, lots of people who are not moral relativists would say no. Morality as constant morality doesn't change. There is no such thing as a new morality.

And yet, the world [00:32:00] as we live in it, you know, has always been morally relativistic. There are things that we believe now to be awful that weren't believed to be awful in the past. And there are things that we all indulge in, in society today that in a hundred years or 200 years, people might look back and.

Think that we were awful to do them. That's normal. That's the development of human history. So the idea that people in academic circles and intellectual circles that Pound moved in might be discussing these very high-minded ideas like morality is not uncommon. What I love about this line is the disdain with which he appears to treat those conversations.

They. It's so dismissive. It's so, offhand and it really belittles the people who are having those conversations because again, what the Imagists are interested in is not moralizing poetry. It's exploring things as they are not as we would like them to be. And that focus is there in this poem. And as a counterpoint to those people who are kind of over intellectualizing in their conversation. The second line is so focused on the act of perception. Other people are talking about the world and perhaps talking about what poetry ought to be. [00:33:00] This figure. In line two, her eyes explored me, is such a kind of condensed love letter to the act of perceiving.

That one can explore with the eyes. One can travel with the eyes. The act of perception can be the act of transformation and the act of exploration as well. And not only does that line offer a hint of romance, but it also offers, I think, a really interesting representation of what the Imagist movement should strive to do. You should explore with the eyes rather than intellectualize with the mind. But what do you think Maiya?

Maiya: I think that's a great way to summarize it. To explore with the eyes absolutely hits at the heart of what the Imagist movement was aiming to do. And again, I, agree with you that these first two lines really set up the character that we're exploring in this poem. The sense of ego in that second line, I think is. Unfathomably large for how little is said in that line for how simple and [00:34:00] how pared back. I will say here, that line is her eyes explored me by positioning the individuals in this line as the poet does. Her eyes seem to be the operative, the ones in power, the ones doing the exploring, and yet the finalization of me ending the line on the self recenters, all of that attention back on the poet, back on the speaker of this poem, and I think it's such a clever way to really draw the outside world in. To really bring that focus back onto, what I will say, I guess is the exteriority of the interiority because this is not an intellectual exploration, this is a physical exploration. Her eyes explored me. We are talking about a physical body here, and there is a certain groundedness that comes with that. So let's focus on the fact that this is a physical sensation. Her eyes exploring the speaker. This is not a look at what's inside his mind. This is a look at the speaker's [00:35:00] physical form, the way he presents now, at this moment, we come to understand that they are maybe across a room, across a table, and that they are not in close contact, but there are barriers that are breached. In this poem, as the writer stands to leave, as the speaker stands to leave, Her fingers were like the tissue of a Japanese paper napkin. There is a tactility that's brought in that then tells you that the whole time, the person that was next to him was this woman that was looking at him. It was the person that had her hands somewhere on his skin, and there is a, Kind of immateriality to the Japanese paper napkin. Of course, you know, the Imagists that we know of a Japanese paper napkin, it's a very, very fine tissue. It's something that you almost can't feel between your fingers, and yet it is there. There is a presence to it.

So even though we spend the majority of this poem kind of breaking the berries and understanding that not only is the vision pulled in towards the center of this poem, but you get the impression that the woman of the poem [00:36:00] has been brought closer and closer to the speaker at the end. He still decides to leave, he rises to go. Now, I'm really curious in the choice to do that because of course, if this is a, very simplified love poem about the kind of first touch, the first exploration between two people, surely it would be more romantic. Surely it would be more meaningful to have them interlace fingers, to have them mutually touch and yet. The speaker is the one being touched and moving away from it.

So what do you think the intention behind that is? Joe?

Joe: What I'd like to touch on there is the possibility that they don't touch at all, because one of the things I love about the ending of this poem is the description, the likening her fingers to the, tissue promises tactility, but never confirms it.

Her fingers were like the tissue of a Japanese paper napkin. doesn't specify that he has touched them. And the thing I love about that is its ambiguity. That could be the fact that her hands visibly resemble your hands could [00:37:00] be on the table, and it could be something about the color of her skin or him kind of projecting softness onto them.

But there's a tension there because, as you say, to rise to leave, but then to actually touch the hand would be a slightly odd thing to do because it's not really a traditional way of saying goodbye, particularly not between men and women in this period, shaking hands. And so what I love about the ending is it implies there could be a physical intimacy between these two, but it never confirms it. And in that. Lack of confirmation. There's so much to explore. It could be somebody yearning for physical touch. It could be somebody being titillated by the thought of physical touch, but by not confirming it, Pound kind of allows that tension to remain even after the poem’s conclusion.

Maiya: That's fascinating. 'cause I have always seen this poem as them sitting kind of side by side and the, as the speaker rises to leave, it's almost like the, woman's hands are just brushing his arm or just brushing his shoulder and that there is that kind of moment of loss. So it's interesting to hear from, your side that you've always seen it [00:38:00] as a more ambiguous ending.

And I, I completely appreciate what you mean because. Yes. As you say, it's Japanese paper material is so thin, it is almost immaterial. So there is a question that's raised, I think, by this poem. You know, despite what we say about being literal and about being obvious, the question is, is there love here?

Or is this a rejection? Is it a love poem or is it something. Is it a love poem or is it a poem about unrequited love? Because again, let's re-scan this poem. At no point does this speaker ever say that there is mutual interest. Her eyes explored me. This is very one-way, it's not reciprocal. So again, there are layers here that are being brought about by Pound, and I think it just shows how skillful he is at building these worlds in such short, confined spaces.

Joe: Thanks, Maiya. That was really, really interesting and like I said, we've barely scratched the surface of Ezra Pound's poetry. There's lots more on PoemAnalysis.com for listeners to go and [00:39:00] read more about. and we haven't even touched upon some of the later work. Maiya mentioned the Cantos at the beginning of the episode.

Ezra Pound's, career spanned for many, many decades, including lots of work that is not Imagist. So we haven't covered it in today's episode, but that was really, really interesting. Hopefully listeners have got kind of a sense of Pound as a poet, but also Pound as a figurehead of this fascinating, complex movement.

And I can't wait for next episode where we're gonna be exploring the work of Hilda Doolittle and her particular take on what Imagism looks like. And I'm, for one, can't wait for that episode. But until then, it's goodbye from me.

Maiya: And goodbye from me and the team@poemanalysis.com and Poetry+. Until next time.