D.H. Lawrence (b 1885). A more complete writer than Pound (b 1885). A better free verse poet than WC Williams. Why is he snubbed today in the History of Modernism?
There’s only two real types of lived philosophy: the religious and the utilitarian.
Ezra Pound (he lived off his dad) was a utilitarian; he got behind fascism because Pound believed fascism “produced,” while at the other end, communism only redistributed. The middle ground for Pound were the helpless phonies like Harriet Monroe at Poetry, who Pound was always trying to boss around because she didn’t do enough for him.
D.H. Lawrence (a frail man) was religious, instinctual, psychological. He couldn’t boss anyone around. His wife, the busty German baroness (niece to the Red Baron of WW I fame) slept with whomever she wanted. But she did remain with Lawrence until his death in 1930—and left her three children and husband (Lawrence’s ex-professor) to be with him.
Lawrence opposed the mechanical horror of World War One—because he believed in nature and free love.
Pound supported World War One—most likely because Amy Lowell (his rival) opposed it and because the British aristocratic establishment Pound and T.S. Eliot and H.D. were trying to get in good with, were for it.
The conservative New Critics, who found influential gold in a school textbook, Understanding Poetry, they produced which every school boy studying literature in America read between the late 30s and the mid 70s, featured Pound prominently, as well as his friend, “Bill Williams” (the white petals and the red wheelbarrow) while Amy Lowell (Pound’s Free Verse/Imagism rival) was not mentioned, haiku (from which Pound stole Imagism) was not mentioned, and D.H. Lawrence (Pound’s other Free Verse/Imagism rival) had one poem (“The Piano,” not his best) tucked away in the back without commentary.
In the wake of Pound’s literary, Avant-garde King, reputation triumph, Americans look at him strangely.
Pound is bi-part.
Pound’s followers (every poet in America born after 1940) 100% hate “his ideas” which strangely feeds into a stubborn 100% adoration of his literary work.
It’s high time we integrate these two halves and see Pound as one.
Lawrence is even more complex and divided, and it’s high time we simply see Lawrence again—and bring back this working class writer to share Modernism’s stage.
In 1927, Pound wrote to Glenn Hughes, a university press publisher, from Rapallo:
“Lawrence was never an Imagist. He was an Amygist. [Ford Maddox -ed.] Ford dug him up and bloomed him in Eng. Rev. before Imagism was launched.”
Imagine the cruelty here. Amy Lowell has passed away recently. Lawrence, whose first novel, The Rainbow, saw every copy burned in 1915 by a court in London (obscenity—the book was not obscene; British Society simply hated Lawrence for being anti-war) and who was in 1927 literally dying from illness, a man (the same age as Pound) who was just as responsible for free verse modernism and aesthetic progress as Pound was, snubbed as an “Amygist.”
Was Pound betrayed by “certain ideas?” Or was his problem more that he was simply a jerk?
In a letter to Glenn Hughes, discussing Japanese poems in translation, Pound confesses to Hughes, in a rare moment of humility from Rappolo, that his own project was “the scattered fragments left by a dead man, edited by a man ignorant of Japanese.”
Pound (who rode a reputation for being a linguistic wizard but didn’t know any languages besides English terribly well) was ambitious. Modesty was not a trait we associate with him. Here he is (Dec 29 1927) lecturing Harriet Monroe, not quite on politics or literature—but a clever, caustic, ranting, version of both. This is the “real” Pound—mistaken and silly as usual, but well, funny, and nicely unified:
“In our several thousand of nearly useless institutions of learning no student has ever been known to reject a scholarship or fellowship or any form of endowed sop. In fact, budding millionaires often grab them with great joy in order to slew off an inferiority complex and show that they are just as good as the sons of the proletariat.
If you wd. once divest yourself of the notion of the author as an object of charity or of the feeding of authors as a force of preservation of the unfit and arrive, even slowly, at the idea of ‘aiding production.’ Confound it: PRODUCTION!
Am I expected to respect either myself or anyone else because some graduated ribbon-clerk offers me 75 bucks for writing blah in a false-pearl and undies monthly?
Did any 100% Ohioan ever offer Burbank a large salary to interrupt his work and write ads for the local florist?
There is one source of confusion, namely that a man can get more for doing rotten writing than he can for doing rotten chemistry. The standards in science are easier for examiners to get at: or at least they are supposed to be. The confusion between the scientist and the fake is less likely to occur. But this should not be allowed to obscure the whole and main difference between stimulating production and pampering the producer.
Between definite individual desire to stimulate the arts (which means Maecenism) [Maecenas was a generous art partron, ed.] and pure communism there is only a middle ground of muddle, blah, sentimentality. Pure communism seems unlikely to affect the U.S. in our time, pending which I suggest emergency measures on a line known to be quite efficient. But for gawdzake cut out the idea of the high school boy and his gilded metal.”
Note that Pound, here 42 years old, is embarrassingly obsessed with endowed college kids. Obviously feeling sorry for himself, Pound avers that chemistry is a field considered more authentic than his: writing. Pound concedes writers have an easier time faking it than chemists, but says this shouldn’t distract us from the fact that “production” is the overriding aim of the writer. “Rotten chemistry” is Pound’s odd phrasing: Pound the poisoner? Or Pound the poisoned? Axis propaganda and the ranting in The Cantos. Rotten chemistry?
From another letter from Rapallo (1929) to James Vogel, (a young writer who reached out to Pound purely out of ambition) this describes Pound’s anti-Democratic personality quite well:
“It takes about 600 people to make a civilization.”
The correspondence from the late 1920s finds Pound in middle-age bitterly reflecting on the failures of his youth.
In another missive to Vogel in 1928, Pound wrote:
“The group of 1909 [Imagism -ed.] has disappeared without the world being much the wiser. Perhaps a first group can only prepare way for a group that will break through.”
But notice how Pound sounds a note of perseverance and hope, as well. I wonder if he knew that his next “group” would “break through” with Panzer divisions? Or that the New Critics “group” would make him an Imagist star in a popular school textbook?
In 1927, Pound won the Dial Prize which carried with it a large cash award. The Dial magazine was Emerson’s transcendentalism journal from the mid-19th century which Scofield Thayer, Eliot’s pal from prep school, ran in the 20s as a Modernist journal. Thayer, heir to a wool fortune, gave out annual prizes to his friends: Eliot, for the first American publication of “The Waste Land,” e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, WC Williams, and Pound.
That year Pound wrote to Hughes that “even this amount of reminiscence bores me exceedingly” as he briefly discusses his Imagism group, whose publications had very few readers. Pound was not proud of his London, Imagist years, and considered them a failure. The Dial, as well as Ford Maddox Ford’s English Review, published the best of Modernist writers (American and European, including Lawrence) but their circulation was small.
Pound’s two most important literary rivals may have been Amy Lowell and D.H. Lawrence. Pound actually sued Amy Lowell for stealing “his” Imagism (haiku) movement.
Lawrence wrote a travel book, Etruscan Places, unfavorable to the Italy of Pound’s beloved Mussolini.
Pound went on to outlive Lowell (d 1925) and Lawrence (d 1930) by many years. Otherwise, literary history might have been quite different.
The complexity of Lawrence (he wasn’t perfect, either) is captured extremely well in this interview with D.H. Lawrence biographer, Frances Wilson. Give it a listen, won’t you?
This Pound/Lawrence tempest is not about choosing favorites—it’s merely a hope some lightning might restore a balance.
Salem, July 23rd 2023