Newly Translated Letter From Ezra Pound Clarifies Imagist Movement

Jared Spears presents and dissects a heretofore untranslated 1928 letter from Ezra Pound to French scholar and critic René Taupin:

The letter was prompted by Taupin’s analysis of Imagism, the avant-garde movement Pound, an American expatriate, had helped found in London after the dawn of the new century. Taupin, then chairman of romance languages at Hunter College, asserted that Imagism was almost inseparable from earlier French Symbolists (an argument which would culminate in his 1929 book, The Influence of French Symbolism on Modern American Poetry). For Pound, Taupin’s assertions belittled what he believed to be the unique accomplishments of his own literary movement.

More from Jacket2:

Pound’s letter to Taupin serves as his rebuttal. Due to Pound’s scattered, almost stream-of-conscious writing style, passages of the letter are dissected here to better follow his logic, beginning with his opening:

Of course, if you permit an inversion of time, in some Einsteinian relativity, it would seem likely to you that I’d received the idea of the image from the poems of Hilda Doolittle, written after that idea was received. See the dates of the various books.

To lay the base for his argument, Pound painstakingly makes a case for a less direct influence on Imagism from modern French writers, asserting that he and his cohorts arrived at their conclusions more or less independently. He describes trademarks of his own style as “[v]ery severe self-examination  —  and intolerance for all the mistakes and stupidities of French poets.”

Pound goes on to trace the general flow of poetic innovation from French writers of the late nineteenth century through Symons, Baudelaire, and Verlaine. “Certainly progress in the poetic technique,” he admits. But it is from Arthur Rimbaud that Pound traced the origin of modernist writing, a fact in general consensus today.

That which Rimbaud reached by intuition (genius) in some poems, created via (perhaps?) conscious aesthetic  —  I do not want to ascribe him any unjust achievement  —  but for all that I know. I’m doing an aesthetic more or less systematic  —  and could have named certain poems of Rimbaud as example. (Yet also some poems of Catullus.)

And it is certain that apart from some methods of expression  —  Rimbaud and I have but a point of resemblance. But almost all of the experimentation, poetic technique of 1830-up to me  —  was made in France.

Experimentation perhaps, but not progress, continues Pound in signature frankness.

Find the full essay and the letter here. Check out the initial publication, in its original French, in Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907–1941 (New Directions 1971).