Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

When did modern poetry begin? And how? And what is it? These questions sound impossible to answer and so, instead of replying to them, I should like to record some events which can be accurately dated and leave it to the reader to decide how far they are relevant.

     One thing is certain, modern poetry exists; it has claimed new areas for its own, it has developed a new sensibility and enlarged our consciousness; there is something intelligent and energetic about it, an integrity, a depth of imagination which we recognize immediately and whose absence we are quick to detect.

*       *       *

     The winter of 1907 was a cold one. One night the lecturer in French and Spanish at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana (he had taken a master’s degree in Romance languages at the State University of Pennsylvania), went out late into a blizzard to post a letter. On the streets he ran across a girl from a stranded burlesque show, penniless and hungry. He fed her and took her to his rooms, where she spent the night in his bed and he on the floor of his study. (We can believe this in 1907.)

     When he left in the morning for his eight o’clock class, the two maiden landladies, the Misses Hall, went up to do the cleaning. They discovered his visitor and at once telephoned the President of the College and several trustees. The dismissed lecturer (he was then twenty-two) took a cattle-ship to Gibraltar and then walked through Spain and Southern France to Venice, where he published his first book of poems, A Lume Spento. Later in the same year he came to England, where he was to remain until 1921.

     Ezra Pound had two very remarkable qualities: he was a poet and, despite his passion for the past, a deeply original one. He was also something rarer than a poet — a catalyst, an impresario, a person who both instinctively understood what the age was about to bring forth and who helped it to be born. We recognize this quality in Apollinaire, in Cocteau, in Diaghilev, in André Breton. Apollinaire also combined a backward-looking vein in his own poetry with a flair for discovering what was forward-looking in others; he was five years older than Pound and grew up at the centre of the modern movement, instead of having to find his way there from the periphery.

     Arrived in London in 1908, Pound produced two more books the next year, one of which was reviewed by Edward Thomas in The English Review, and he began to throw his weight about (1). He founded a cenacle of promising writers who lunched once a week to discuss poetry, and very soon met Yeats, who was regarded as the outstanding poet of the Nineties, a devotee of all that was aesthetic and occult: ‘a great dim figure with its associations set in the past’, Pound called him.

     In these early books of Pound’s the influences are from the Nineties and the early Yeats, and Browning, especially the latter’s method of introducing fully-drawn character studies by casual conversation (‘That’s my last Duchess’) — and, of course, the formal rhyme-structures from the Provençal. Yeats was twenty years older than Pound and, for all his success, was becoming deeply dissatisfied with his work and his life, long sacrificed to an unhappy love-affair. There is no doubt that Pound’s peculiar serum immediately began to take: ‘This queer creature Ezra Pound, who has become really a great authority on the troubadours,’ wrote Yeats to Sir William Rothenstein in December 1909. ‘A headlong, rugged nature, and he is always hurting people’s feelings, but he has, I think, some genius and goodwill.’

*       *       *

1912 was an important year for Pound. He brought out his fifth book of poems, Ripostes (dedicated, incidentally, to William Carlos Williams), in which his authentic voice began to be heard. It is a tone of cool, relaxed dandyism, playing with the forms of the Greek and Latin epigram, yet capable of a deeper magic — as in ‘Portrait d’une femme’ (‘Your mind and you are our Sargasso sea’ or ‘The Tomb at Akr Caar’, or his bleakly alliterative adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon ‘The Seafarer’). At the end of the book Pound included the ‘poetical works’ of a new friend, the youthful T. F. Hulme.

‘They are reprinted here for good fellowship; for good custom, a custom out of Tuscany and Provence; and thirdly, for convenience, seeing their smallness of bulk; and for good memory, seeing that they recall certain evenings and meetings of two years gone, dull enough at the time, but rather pleasant to look back upon.

This dates the poems between 1910 and 1912. Here is one of them:

A touch of cold in the autumn night
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
with white faces like town children.

     If that is not a modern poem — but we must hurry on. During the winter of 1912-13 Yeats was ill with a digestive disorder and sometimes unable to read. Pound came to read to him in the evenings, and even taught him to fence. (He also knew ju-jitsu and once threw Robert Frost over his back in a restaurant.) Wordsworth and Bridges were among the poets they read and discussed — at a later sojourn they read through the whole of Landor. Pound soon became indispensable and was taken on as Yeats’s secretary. In the autumn of 1913 the pair settled down for the next three winters at Stone Cottage in Ashdown Forest. ‘Ezra never shrinks from work, a learned companion and a pleasant one . . . He is full of the Middle Ages and helps me to get back to the definite and concrete, away from modern abstractions; to talk over a poem with him is like getting you to put a sentence into dialect. All comes clear and “natural”,’ Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory.

     It was then that they planned the selection of letters to Yeats from his father which Pound eventually edited (1917). Yeats passed on to Pound a prize for £5o which he received from Poetry, Chicago (editor, Harriet Monroe). I do not think it is far-fetched to see Pound’s bias towards the ‘definite and concrete as influencing Yeats in the stupendous transformation, which bore fruit in his next book, Responsibilities (Cuala Press, 1914). It begins with the great prelude:

. . . Pardon that for a barren passion’s sake,
Although I have come close on forty-nine
I have no child. I have nothing but a book,
Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.

and ends with ‘A coat’ (first draft 1912):

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
So let them take it
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.

     ‘Yeats,’ said Pound, ‘is much finer intime than seen spasmodically in the midst of the whirl. We are both, I think, very contented in Sussex.’ The main event was a visit to Wilfrid Blunt on his seventieth birthday, when Yeats made a speech and a group of poets, headed by Pound, presented the old poet-squire with a book each in a stone casket made by Gaudier-Brzeska. He regaled them with roast peacock ‘in the pride of his eye’ (2). Pound’s talent as an impresario led him naturally to editing and he was soon occupied with Poetry, Chicago (and Harriet Monroe), The Egoist, London (and Harriet Weaver), and Ford Madox Ford’s English Review. He begins to mention the names of Lawrence, Lewis and Joyce, and by 1915 he is deeply involved in the successful transaction by which Yeats obtained for Joyce, then teaching in Trieste, a civil list grant of £75.

     In 1914 he edited his first anthology, Des Imagistes, with poems by several well-to-be-known writers, Joyce, Aldington, H.D. He had also come to know Wyndham Lewis soon after his arrival and to be associated with him in Blast and also with Cubism and Gaudier-Brzeska about whom, in 1916, he wrote a book. Blast was a large, thick, luscious magazine, the first number of which (1914) is rather disappointing. It held a dinner on the fifteenth of July. ‘We were the first organized youth racket,’ wrote Lewis afterwards.

     In his Gaudier, Pound explains how his poems are written. He once saw several beautiful faces in the Paris Metro and, walking down the Rue Raynouard, ‘found the equation, a pattern, little splotches of colour, like a non-representative painting’. He wrote a thirty-line poem and destroyed it as ‘work of secondary intensity’. Six months later he made a poem half the length. A year later ‘I made the following haiku-like sentence:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet black bough.

I dare say it is meaningless.’

*       *       *

     But his greatest discovery comes in a letter to Harriet Monroe of September 30, 1914: ‘I was jolly well right about Eliot. He has sent in the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American. PRAY GOD IT BE NOT A SINGLE AND UNIQUE SUCCESS. He is the only American I know of who has made what I call adequate preparation for writing. He has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own.’ The poem was ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, which Harriet Monroe sat on warily till June 1915.

     Pound’s own programme was limited to three points, which he had first published in 1913. He had dwelt on the necessity of distinct presentation of something concrete: on accuracy and economy of language — ’to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation’ and, regarding rhythm, on the necessity of composing ‘in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome’. Eliot must have wholeheartedly accepted all three.

*       *       *

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in Saint Louis in September 1888, and is three years younger than Pound. He comes of a distinguished New England family of Wessex origin and went up to Harvard in 1906. He spent a post-graduate year in Paris, 1910-11, and was in Germany with a travelling fellowship in the summer before the war. When the war broke out in 1914 he had moved to England, and was reading Greek philosophy at Merton College, Oxford, at the time he sent Pound his poems, for which Conrad Aiken had tried unsuccessfully to find a publisher.

     As he dates them from 1909, these early poems of Eliot are really contemporaneous with the early Pound and with T. F. Hulme — but the year of his flowering is without question 1915, when ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ at last appeared in Poetry (June). In July the second or war number of Blast contained the two ‘Preludes’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, while a ‘Portrait of a Lady’ was published in Others (USA) in September, and three more short poems in Poetry for October.

     In November, Pound brought out his Catholic Anthology (catholic in taste, he meant), being ‘determined to get Eliot between hard covers’. This is an astonishing book and certainly the first in the canon of modern poetry, containing, besides five poems by Eliot, a new poem by Yeats and poems by Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Maxwell Bodenheim and others. In 1914 Pound had married the daughter of Yeats’s friend, Mrs Shakespear. In 1915, Eliot too got married. This was also the year of Lawrence’s Rainbow and Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out.

     In 1916 Eliot published four more poems in Poetry (including ‘La Figlia che piange’), but his great year was 1917, when his first book, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published at a shilling by the Egoist Press, London, while his second, the anonymous Ezra Pound, his Metric and Poetry, came out in New York (November). 1915 had been the year of Pound’s adaptations of Chinese poems, Cathay, and 1916 of his first volume of truly modern work — chiefly songs and epigrams — ’Lustra’, a light-hearted narcissistic essay in linguistic deflation.

Dawn enters with lithe feet
Like a gilded Pavlova
And I am near my desire,
Nor has life in it aught better
Than this hour of clear coldness,
The hour of waking together.
                                              [in a garret]

*       *       *

     It will be seen that there is now an increasing acceleration, that the Pound-Eliot streams have become a river and that the whole movement, first of ‘Imagists’, then of ‘Vorticists’ (names chosen by Pound), like Cubism in France, was well under way by 1914, only to come up against the blind holocaust of the war. Hulme was killed, so was Gaudier-Brzeska; Lewis became a bombardier; Ford joined up; Joyce remained in Trieste and Zurich, although the ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ continued to appear in The Egoist; Lawrence suffered persecution; neither Pound nor Yeats took any part in what the latter called the ‘bloody frivolity’ of the war. Eliot was trying to earn a living by journalism but eventually volunteered.

     So this movement, in all its energy and subtlety, was maimed and permanently slowed down by the ‘march of events’. These young men were denied the insouciant gaiety and freedom of experiment to which every new generation is entitled and also the opportunity of slow self-development through scholarly research. Yeats, however, found his voice in the Easter rebellion of 1916 and wrote his magnificent ‘I have met them at close of day’ in September of that year. His new-found realism dominated the next slim volumes, The Wild Swans at Coole and Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Cuala Press, 1917 and 1920). But Pound and Eliot by now were without a country, and it was to be ten years before these patriarchs of the Lost Generation finally adopted erastian England and fascist Italy as their spiritual homes. Pound in England, with his shock of hair, red beard, ten-gallon hat and velvet jacket, striding about the streets with head thrown back and shouting out lines of his poetry, ‘Damn it all! All this our South stinks peace’ in Bellotti’s, was, according to Lewis, always a fish out of water.

     ‘Ezra started out in a time of peace and prosperity,’ wrote Aldington, ‘with everything in his favour, and muffed his chances of becoming literary dictator — to which he undoubtedly aspired — by his own conceit, folly and bad manners. Eliot started in the enormous confusion of war and post-war England, handicapped in every way. Yet by merit, tact, prudence and pertinacity, he succeeded in doing what no American has ever done — imposing his personality, taste and even many of his opinions on post-war England.’

*       *       *

These first books of our brief literary renaissance have a particular beauty. They come before the more self-conscious era of limited editions from costly private presses or the uniform assembly line of modern poets which we associate with Faber’s. The Catholic Anthology (Elkin Mathews, 1915), with its Cubist cover, opens with Yeats’s ‘Scholars’ (‘Bald heads forgetful of their sins’) and then goes straight into Prufrock:

Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go through certain half-deserted streets . . .

     I can never read the opening of this marvellous poem without feeling that it is a piece of modern music, that I am sitting back in my seat at the first hearing of the Debussy Quartet — of which I am reminded by that sudden shatteringly discordant metaphor, ‘like a patient etherized upon a table’, in the third line. And as for the end —

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each,
I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves,
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By seagirls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

— though we know it so well, the changes of mood — the flat beginning, the gathering crescendo with the harsh, astonishing vowel-sounds and rhymes, and the bold repetition of ‘white’, leading to the lovely dying cadence where ‘red and brown’ replaces the ‘white and black’ of the storm — never cease to intoxicate; like the three ‘Preludes’ and the ‘Rhapsody’, on the enormous thick blotting paper of Blast. How many realized that here was an urban lyricism, an absolutely original sensibility, something serenely new?

The winter evening settles down
with smell of steaks in passage ways
Six o’clock
The burnt out ends of smoky days . . .
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle,
Infinitely suffering thing . . .

*       *       *

To heighten the effect of these poems, or of a purely cubist experiment like Pound’s ‘Dogmatic Statement on the Game and Play of Chess’ (which is really a ‘vorticist’ painting), or of the general Picasso-awareness of Blast under Lewis’s dominating personality, one should contrast them with the ordinary poetry which was currently produced. ‘The situation of poetry in 1909 or 1910 was stagnant to a degree difficult for any young poet of today to imagine’ (T. S. Eliot). There was Bridges, to whom (in 1915) Yeats sent Pound’s Cathay, and academics like Binyon and Sturge Moore, and there were the first two series of Georgian Poetry (1911-12 and 1913-15) edited by Edward Marsh. These were particularly disliked by Pound. The contributors to both series were Lascelles Abercrombie, Gordon Bottomley, Rupert Brooke, W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, John Drinkwater, James Elroy Flecker, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, D. H. Lawrence, John Masefield, Harold Monro and James Stephens. Ralph Hodgson appeared in the second, G. K. Chesterton in the first.

     I have read through both volumes but, grisé par l’art moderne, found them all lush or arid, whimsical or insipid. Pound thought Brooke the best of the bunch and his ‘Fish’ is, I think, an interesting poem, but to enjoy these warblers it is essential to forget Pound’s three points and to like obsolete words with false sentiments and to listen to the metronome. There is no melodic line. There is one border-line case: Harold Monro, owner of the Poetry Bookshop and publisher of the Chapbook (not to be confused with Harriet Monroe, editress of Poetry, Chicago), who greatly encouraged the modern school and was gradually influenced by them. He alone appears on both ‘Georgian Poety’ and ‘Catholic Anthology’, and Pound and Eliot eventually wrote articles on him, treating him as a sincerely repentant late-comer. His poem ‘Suburb’ is already (1914) both pure Betjeman and a trailer for part of ‘The Waste Land’, or a story by Huxley.

. . . In all the better gardens you may pass
(Product of many careful Saturdays),
Large red geraniums and tall pampas grass
Adorn the plots and mark the gravelled ways

Sometimes in the background may be seen
A private summer-house in white or green.

Here on warm nights the daughter brings
Her vacillating clerk
To talk of small exciting things
And touch his fingers through the dark.

He, in the uncomfortable breach
Between her trilling laughters,
Promises, in halting speech,
Hopeless immense Hereafters.

She trembles like the pampas plumes,
Her strained lips haggle. He assumes
The serious quest . . .

Now as the train is whistling past
He takes her in his arms at last.
It’s done. She blushes at his side
Across the lawn — a bride, a bride.

*       *       *

The stout contractor will design
The lazy labourers will prepare
Another villa on the line;
In the little garden-square
Pampas grass will rustle there.

*       *       *

It will be seen that I have not attempted to explain why or how Ezra Pound, born in Idaho (though really an Easterner), or T. S. Eliot (a New Englander from Saint Louis), were or became poets. It is our good fortune that some divine restlessness sent them forth on their travels and brought them to our shores, where Yeats and Ford Madox Ford and Harold Munro and Wyndham Lewis were waiting to receive them. Both Pound and Eliot had a very unusual combination of gifts — revolutionary élan, first-class minds, and a most fastidious and critical ear. One is always surprised by Pound’s taste, he is indeed the Catullus (a gamin Catullus, wrote a reviewer) of Yeats’s ‘Scholar’ poem which, I fully believe, was intended for him. De la Mare, too, had such an ear, but belonged, like Graves, to the traditional Georgian song-canon.

     Perhaps the war, although it interfered with their natural pattern of growth, gave them both an additional stiffening. But whatever the cause, the two expatriates came of age. The Pound of ‘Lustra’ is still a minor poet. With Quia Pauper Amavi he attains a stature which is worthy of the admiration since bestowed on him. The book was published by John Rodker at the Egoist Press in 1918 — since it was also the publisher of Lewis’s Tarr, Eliot’s Pru frock, Marianne Moore’s Poems and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, the Egoist Press has a claim to fame similar to Elkin Mathews before it, and the Hogarth Press immediately after. The book consists almost entirely of long poems and includes the first three Cantos and ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’. The Cantos have not yet begun to belch forth huge lumps of prose like a faulty incinerator and include the lovely Elpenor passage paraphrased from Homer, while ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’, complete with howlers, grows better at each re-reading, a complete identification of one fame-struck, slightly wearying dandy with his dazzling archetype. The passage of time encrusts the howlers with a hoary rightness.

     In 1917 Yeats got married and Ezra Pound was the best man, while in Chicago Margaret Anderson founded one of the brightest of all magazines, The Little Review, to which Pound was appointed foreign editor. He started her off with a splendid poem by Yeats, ‘In memory of Major Robert Gregory’, and Yeats announced his opinion in a generous letter: ‘When I returned to London from Ireland, I had a young man go over all my work with me to eliminate the abstract. This was an American poet, Ezra Pound.’ Pound also brought them stories by Lewis and the serialization of Joyce’s Ulysses, which began in 1918: both these ended in disaster, for several numbers of the magazine were banned on account of them although Miss Anderson was defended by the Maecenas of the whole group, the Irish-American collector John Quinn.

     The Irish rebellion, closely involving two of the women he loved (Maud Gonne’s husband, John MacBride, was shot), was an extraordinary inspiration to Yeats and events in Ireland continued to arouse him till his visit to Oxford —

When long ago I saw her ride
Under Ben Bulben to the meet
The beauty of her country side
With all youth’s lonely wildness stirred,
She seemed to have grown clean and sweet
Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird;

Sea-borne or balanced on the air
When first it sprang out of the nest
Upon some lofty rock to stare
Upon the cloudy canopy
While under its storm-beaten breast
Cried out the hollows of the sea.

1922 was the year of triumph for Yeats. His Later Poems came out, illustrating his whole development from The Wind among the Reeds to The Second Coming, from 1899 to 1921. He also brought out his autobiography, The Trembling of the Veil, and a volume of his plays and eight more poems, including ‘All Souls’ Night’ (the beginning of his intellectual manner), at the Cuala Press. Although Middleton Murry thought the Wild Swans at Coole (1919) ‘eloquent of final defeat’ and Pound pronounced him ‘faded’ in 1920, the greatest triumphs of his poetic life were all before him.

     Eliot however seemed to be making heavy weather by 1917 and after failing to earn his living from journalism, took up working in a bank. His poetic output fell off slightly. There were four poems (three in French) for The Little Review in July 1917, four more in September 1918, three in 1919, the superb Gerontion in 1920, and then nothing till 1922. These were the years when Eliot was making a reputation as a critic, the years of his first collection of essays in The Sacred Wood (1920), and during which the Prufrock volume, enlarged by the new poems which appeared as the Hogarth Press Poems (1919), became Ara Vos Prec in 1920 (with Gerontion) and Poems 1920 in America.

     In 1918 Sweeney comes on the scene, sensual among the nightingales, and a major difference between Eliot and Pound grows more apparent: Eliot understands suffering, ‘the last twist of the knife’ and becomes a deeper, ultimately Christian writer. Pound remains lightheartedly pagan, open to wonder and moments of lyrical sadness, but never portraying a stronger emotion than indignation, and that very rarely. His Hell, as Eliot was to point out, is for Englishmen he didn’t like, not for himself. In ‘Lustra’ Pound claimed that this cool, formal, elegiac dandyism was the best way to puncture the Georgians, the lush Swinburnian and Tennysonian cadences, the romantic inflation. He called it a ‘work of purgation of minds’. Lacking the tragic sense of life which leads to the understanding of other people, his portraits as a result grow increasingly artificial, ‘an art in profile’. Propertius is there without his anguish; and Pound’s other major poem describes Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, an anglicized Prufrock who has walked out of Henry James to be intaglio’d by Gauthier and who is too much a cardboard man even to be hollow. But Mauberley (Ovid Press, 1920) in which Pound bids his lethargic English audience a disdainful farewell, is a chain of lyrics flung out like a pattern of islands — ‘scattered Moluccas’ which are a perpetual delight.

     As whole books have been written about these exquisite poems and a Warden of All Souls has devoted much space to annihilating their defunctive music, I will only say that every other one seems perfect. [They include the most bitter anti-war poem ever written.] ‘His true Penelope was Flaubert’: that is what distinguishes Pound from all other revolutionaries; he flies his jolly roger from the ivory tower. Both Quia Pauper Amavi and Mauberley went unsold and uncelebrated and his increasing dislike of post-war England — where the Sitwells had replaced his own shock-troops, and where the gay demobilized second wave with Huxley, Graves, Robert Nichols and Sassoon gathered at the Café Royal and Tour Eiffel instead of Bellotti’s and the Vienna Café — as well as his native restlessness drove him in 1921 on to Paris where he could continue to be foreign editor of The Little Review and discover the novelist Hemingway, the poet Cummings and the composer Antheil all within a year of his arrival. Here Joyce, financed by Miss Weaver at Pound’s suggestion, had preceded him. He there ceases to be the clear-sighted troubadour and becomes the full-blown international exhibitionist, Gertrude Stein’s ‘Village Explainer’, Lewis’s ‘Revolutionary Simpleton’. He had, however, one more midwifery duty to perform.

December 24, 1921: Letter to T. S. Eliot
‘. . . The thing now runs from “April” to “Shantihk” without a break. That is nineteen pages and let us say the longest poem in the English langwidge. Don’t try to bust all records by prolonging it three pages further . . . Compliments, you bitch. I am wracked by the seven jealousies . . .’

March 18, 1922: Letter to William Carlos Williams
‘Eliot, in bank, makes £500. Too tired to write, broke down; during convalescence in Switzerland did “Waste Land”, a masterpiece, one of most important nineteen pages in English. Returned to bank and is again gone to pieces physically . . .

‘Of course I’m no more Mauberley than Eliot is Prufrock. Mais passons. Mauberley is a mere surface. Again a study in form, an attempt to condense the James novel. Meliora speramus . . .

‘Eliot’s “Waste Land” is I think the justification of the movement, of our modern experiment, since 1900. It should be published this year.’

     It was. One should read it every April. In America it won the Dial prize and came out both in the magazine and as a book; in England it appeared in the first number of the Criterion, which Eliot was to edit and which also contained a review of Ulysses. The annus mirabilis of the modern movement was drawing to a close. Yeats’s Later Poems and The Waste Land, Ulysses and Women in Love, Jacob’s Room and Valery’s Charmes, with Le Serpent and the Cimetière Marin — the break-through is complete. I have left out two important minor poets, Marianne Moore (also from Saint Louis), who was first published in 1921, and the war-poet Wilfrid Owen (1920), and one major one — Edith Sitwell, because she deserves a study in herself and grew up in total isolation from any of these influences — a Christina Rosetti crossed with Pope — maturing considerably later. Her early works, especially Façade and Bucolic Comedies, and the poems in Wheels, do belong to this period, but it would not be easy to relate them, because they still tend to be formal exercises in technique until the Sleeping Beauty (1923).

     In fact the Sitwells’ part in the break-through, with their magazines Wheels and Art and Letters, is a separate, almost a self-contained subject. When Wyndham Lewis started to attack her, Yeats wrote to him (1930):

Somebody tells me that you have satirized Edith Sitwell. If that is so, visionary excitement has in part benumbed your senses. When I read her ‘Gold Coast Customs’ a year ago, I felt, as on first reading ‘The Apes of God’, that something absent from all literature for a generation was back again, and in a form rare in the literature of all generations, passion ennobled by intensity, by endurance, by wisdom. We had it in one man once. He lies in St. Patrick’s now, under the greatest epitaph in history. Yours very sincerely, W. B. YEATS.

     In the ‘Pisan Cantos’ (1949) Pound, who has at last become acquainted with grief in his solitary cage at an American prison camp, recalls these formative years and ‘lordly men to earth o’ergiven’ — Hulme and Ford and Blunt opening the door ‘from a fine old eye the unconquered flame’ and his three winters with Yeats

     ‘At Stone Cottage in Sussex by the waste moor’.