What is home without
Plumtree’s Potted Meat?
Incomplete.
With it an abode of bliss.- My missus has just got an engagement. At least, it’s not settled yet.
Eliot welcomed Ulysses as a masterpiece, Forster and Virginia Woolf turned up
their noses. Although it has a medical student’s sense of humour – frank, smelly,
even disgusting – it lacks disdain for contemporary common life. The unedifying
Bloom has finer feelings too, chiefly for his family, and is kind to Stephen. Regarding
his wife’s adultery, he feels ‘the futility of triumph or protest or vindication’.
Finnegans Wake, the work of seventeen years, extends Molly’s half-asleep mono-
logue into a phantasmagoria of names and initials who change identity. Much of it
is dreamed by a drunken Dublin publican called H. C. Earwicker (HCE, ‘Here
Comes Everyone’). Another character is Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), who is also the
river Liffey. A long interlingual pun on world literature, it is a good write rather than
a good read. The right book for those who believe that there is no right reading, it is
also a long joke played on its readers.
Ezra Pound: the London years
In his years in London, 1908–20, the American poet Ezra Pound(1885–1972)
collaborated with W. B. Yeats, published Joyce, ‘discovered’ T. S. Eliot and edited The
Waste Land. In thanks,Eliot dedicated the poem to him in a phrase from Dante,il
miglior fabbro(‘the better workman’). In compliment to the beauty of his transla-
tions in Cathay, Eliot called Pound ‘the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time’.
Pound also invented the influential poetic movement which he called ‘Imagism’. ‘In
a very short time’, Ford wrote of Pound, recalling the palmy days ofThe English
Review, ‘he had taken charge of me, the review and finally of London.’ ‘Most impor-
tant influence since Wordsworth’ read the headline in the London Observer on
Pound’s death. A justified judgement, yet at T. S. Eliot’s memorial service in
Westminster Abbey in 1965, few recognized Pound. In the intervening years, he had
returned to London only in the memories recorded in the Pisan Cantos(1948).But
the Kensington Pound changed the course of English literature, hence the blue
plaque on the wall of his little triangular flat in Church Walk, Kensington.
Pound’s Imagism called for verbal concentration, direct treatment of the object
and expressive cadence – as against the long-winded rhetoric and metrical regular-
ity of the Victorians, the style in which he had himself grown up. Other Imagists
were the American poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and her husband Richard Aldington;
ec hoes can be heard in the poems of T. E. Hulme and in Eliot’s Preludes. Today
Pound’s critical impact on Yeats and Eliot, and on what was required of any poem,
is better recognized than the poetry he wrote in England:Pe rsonae (1909),Ripostes
(1912),Lustra and Cathay (1915),Homage to Sext us Propertius (1917),Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley (1920).
An Imagist fragment in the volume Lustra is ‘Fan-Piece, for her Imperial Lord’,
written by a Chinese emperor’s courtesan. The effect of the poem lies in its unstated
but implied comparison between the discarded fan and its owner, now also
discarded. To temper emotion, Pound often uses remote literary masks or modes,
from Pro vençal, Latin or Chinese, or the Anglo-Saxon ‘Seafarer’. His translations
‘MODERNISM’: 1914–27 349