Modernism/modernity

Imagism occupies a special place in the history of Anglo-American poetry. In classrooms it is commonly taken to represent the impulses of modernism in poetry. The modestness of the poems by Pound, H.D., Williams, and others in Pound’s Des Imagistes (1914) and later anthologies is acknowledged at the same time that the impact of Imagist tenets on subsequent poetry is shown to have been decisive and far-reaching. This approach to Imagism presents the effects of modernism as technical: the elimination of indefinite descriptive language, the fragmentation of syntax, the breakdown of meter, and the banishment of discursive language. Since we have known for some time, however, that literary movements even more than individual literary creations are never merely technical, never void of ideology, one obvious interpretive task has been to infer the implicit political significance of poems such as H.D.’s “Heat,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” or his prose accounts of Imagist doctrine. This critical procedure, though, has several unattractive consequences. First, the process of inference is often guided by essentialist conceptions of political positions—a “fascism,” most importantly, that one understands retrospectively as implicit in poems of 1913. Second, when some recognizable political position can be inferred by a process of extrapolation, one may not work hard enough to reconstruct the less recognizable aspects of the ideological context of the text, in this case of London in 1913–14. In the case of Imagism, the political positions that did not survive the years just before World War I are obscured by those that, after World War II, have become crucial to literary historians. [End Page 63] Third, this procedure presents Anglo-American modernists as having suppressed their political motivation under a cover of formal proposals, whereas the truth is more that formal procedures were understood by poets and readers as implicitly but importantly expressive of political ideas.

The most trenchant statement of the political significance of the Imagist method was Donald Davie’s in 1952:

By hunting his own sort of “definiteness” (truth only in the particular) he [Pound] is led to put his trust not in human institutions but in individuals. Similarly he pins his faith on individual words, grunts, broken phrases, half-uttered exclamations (as we find them in the Cantos), on speech atomized, all syllogistic and syntactical forms broken down. Hence his own esteem of the definite lands him at last in yawning vagueness, the “intuitive” welcome to Mussolini

(he “plays his hunch”). . . .

  It would be too much to say that this is the logical end of abandoning prose syntax. But at least the development from imagism in poetry to fascism in politics is clear and unbroken. ¹

There is much about these remarks that is revealing still, and some of it (pertaining to individuals and institutions) is very close to the historical context I want to reconstruct. But what is obscured by this view of the techniques of Imagist poetry is the fact that this poetry was written and initially interpreted in an intellectual context that included not protofascism but some other—not altogether unattractive—derivatives of anarchist and syndicalist, thought, to which Pound and others directed Imagist poems and the publicity on their behalf. My point is not that there are no connections between Imagism and Pound’s later fascism, or among anarchism, syndicalism and fascism, but rather that one can tune one’s understanding of Pound’s pre-war political affiliations and those of his collaborators more finely than is usually done, and that the politics of modernism was more complicated than is usually acknowledged. Davie’s claim was always that the taste for Imagist techniques in poetry after World War II was unwittingly complicitous with the impulses that promoted Italian fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. My own sense is that the techniques of Imagism carry no necessary political valence beyond that attributed to them by readers and writers in a particular place and time. But whether techniques are essentially neutral, as I believe, or not, the question I wish to raise is whether Imagism was not libertarian or antisocialist rather than protofascist in its political significance...