VORTICISM •

— by Eyna Pound

The air crackles and flames with spears and challenges.
Reporters insult the dead and lurch with ineffective
ridicule toward the living members of the vorticist movement.
Mr. Briceske is the "guts", Mr. Lewis, the mystery, and as I
may be called, by comparison, the discretion of the vorticist
camp, I am perhaps as fit as anyone to "explain" vorticism.

"It is no more ridiculous that a person should receive or convey an emotion by means of an arrangement of shapes, or planes, or colours, than that they should receive or convey such emotion by an arrangement of musical notes."

I suppose this proposition is self-evident. Whistler
said as much, some years ago, and Pater proclaimed that "All

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arts approach the conditions of music."

Whenever I say this I am greeted with a storm of
"Yes, but . . .". "But why isn't it futurism?" "Why isn't?",
"Why don't?", and above all: "What in heaven's name has it
got to do with your Imagiste poetry?"

Let me explain at leisure, and in nice, orderly old-
fashioned prose.

We are all futurists to the extent of believing with
Guillaume Appollonaire that "On ne peut pas porter partout
avec soi le cadavre de son pere." But "futurism" when it
gets into art is for the most part a descendent of impressionism.
It is a sort of accelerated impressionism.

There is another descent via Picasso and Kandinsky;
via cubism and expressionism. One does not complain
of neo-impressionism or of accelerated impressionism and
"simultaneity", but one is not wholly satisfied by them.
One has perhaps other needs.

It is very difficult to make generalities about three
arts at once. I shall be, perhaps, more lucid if I give, briefly,
the history of the art with which I am most intimately connected,
that is to say poetry. Vorticism has been announced as including
such and such painting and sculpture and "Imagisme" in verse.
I shall explain "Imagisme" and then proceed to show its inner
relation to certain modern paintings and sculpture.

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Imagisme inso far as it has been known at all, has
been known chiefly as a stylistic movement, as a movement of
criticism rather than of creation. This is natural, for,
despite all possible celerity of publication, the public is
always, and of necessity, some years behind the artists'
actual thought. Nearly anyone is ready to accept "Imagisme"
as a department of poetry, just as one accepts "lyricism" as
a department of poetry.

There is a sort of poetry where music, sheer melody,
seems as if it were just bursting into speech.

There is another sort of poetry where painting or
sculpture seems as if it were "just coming over into speech".

The first sort of poetry has long been called "lyric".
One is accustomed to distinguish easily between "lyric" and
"epic" and "didactic". One is capable of finding the "lyric"
passages in a drama or in a long poem not otherwise "lyric".
This division is in the grammars and school books and one has
been brought up to it.

The other sort of poetry is as old as the lyric and
as honourable, but until recently no one had named it. Ibycus
and Liu Ch'e presented the "image". Dante is a great poet
by reason of this faculty and Milton is a wind-bag because
of his lack of it. The "image" is the furthest possible
remove from rhetoric. Rhetoric is the art of dressing up some
unimportant matter so as to fool the audience for the time

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being. So much for the general category. Even Aristotle
distinguishes between rhetoric, "which is persuasion", and the
analytical examination of truth. Modern "Imagisme", that is
to say the "Imagisme" of 1912 to '14, considered as a "critical"
movement, set out "To bring poetry up to the level of prose,
and to make it once again a means of communication between
intelligent men." No one is so quixotic or so naively idyllic
as to believe that contemporary poetry holds any such position...
save perhaps for a few half known specialists.

Such a movement is long over due. Stendhal formulated
the need of it long since in his "De L'Amour":

"La poésie avec ses comparaisons obligées, sa mythologie
que ne croit pas le poète, sa dignité de style à la Louis
XIV et tout l'attirail de ses ornements appelés poetique,
est bien au dessous de la prose dès qu'il s'agit de donner
une idée claire et précise des mouvements du cœur, or dans
ce genre on n'émeut que par la clarté."

Flaubert and De Maupassant lifted prose to the rank
of a finer art, and one has no patience with contemporary poets
who escape from all the difficulties of the infinitely
difficult art of good prose by pouring themselves into loose
verses.

The tenets of Imagiste faith were published in March 1913,
as follows.

I. Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or objective

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II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

III. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

There followed a series of about forty cautions to beginners, which need not concern us here, These have been a good deal quoted on both sides of the Atlantic, and almost misquoted. I mean to say that people have detached a few of the clauses, and other people have attacked the detached clauses as if I had written them as a complete ars poetica. I, at no time, pretended to be able to make poets where there were no poets before. After twelve years' study I gave out a list of faults, or of habits which were likely to impede a writer in his attempt to express his own meaning effectively.

That, and the question of the "exact nature of vers libre" may be for the present left out of the discussion.

One has no quarrel with Cicero's platitude that all the arts have "some sort of common bond, some inter-recognition."

Certain emotions or subjects, however, find their most appropriate expression in some one particular art. The work of art which is most "worth while" is the work which would need a hundred works of any other kind of art to explain it. A fine statue is the core of a hundred poems. A fine poem is a score of symphonies. There is music which would need

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a hundred paintings to express it. There is no synonym for
the Victory of Samothrace or for Mr. Epstein's fancies.

There is no painting of Villon's "Freres Humains". And Myson
Such works are what we call works of art. They are eminently correct when he said: "Things come before words."

"First intensity."

A given subject or emotion belongs to that artist, or to that sort of artist who must know it most intimately and most intensely before he can render it adequately in his art. A painter must know much more about a sunset than a writer, if he is to put it on canvas. But when the poet speaks of "Dawn in russet mantle clad" he presents something which the painter can not present.

I said in the preface to my "Guido Cavalcanti" that I believed in an absolute rhythm. I believe that every emotion and every phase of emotion has some toneless phrase, some rhythm-phrase to express it.

( This belief leads to vers libre and to experiments in quantitative verse. )

To hold a like belief in a sort of permanent metaphor is, as I understand it, "symbolism" in its profounder sense. It is not necessarily a belief in a permanent world but it is a belief in that direction.

Imagisme is not symbolism. The symbolists dealt in "association", that is, in a sort of allusion, almost of allegory. They degraded the symbol to the status of a word. They made it a form of metonomy. One can be grossly "symbolic"

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for example by using the term "cross" to mean "trial".

Again, for reasons of convenience, one does not want to be called a symbolist, because symbolism in verse has usually been associated with mushy technique.

Imagisme is not Impressionism, though one borrows or could borrow much from the impressionist method of presentation. But this is only negative definition. It is definition from the outside. If I am to give a psychological or philosophical definition "from the inside" I can only do so autobiographically. The precise statement of such a matter must be based on one's own experience. Also, I find, that people understand me better if I give them the history of my own thought than if I give them my bare conclusion.

In the "search for oneself", in the search for "sincere self-expression" one gropes, one finds some seeming verity. One says "I am" this, that or the other, and with the words scarcely uttered one ceases to be that thing. I shall not apologise for autobiography at this point, for I have found that the only way to make people understand what I mean by "the image" is to go through this long autobiographical narration.

I began this search for the real in a book called "Masks". Personae? In poems like "La Fraisne" I have, as it were, sloughed off a mood, or a "complete self" and presented it.

, casting off as it were complete masks of the self in
each poem . I continued in translations, in
long series of translations which were in each case but
more elaborate more historic masks.
Secondly I made poems like " The Return "

( connect p. 11 )

We furnish the void with images. Whether consciousness survive
the body or not, is of no consequence in this argument for
it is certain that this creation or reception of images in
the mind is perhaps the finest pleasure we can have even in
such a life as we live.

What I have to say boils itself down to this. I have
made three kinds of poems, first, masks like "La Fraisne",
secondly poems like "The Return", which is an objective reality
and has a complicated sort of significance like Mr. Epstein's
"Sun God"; or Mr. Brzeska's "Boy with a coney". Thirdly, I
have written "Heather" which represents a state of consciousness,
or "implies", or "implies" it.

A Russian correspondent after having called it a
symbolist poem, and having been convinced that it was not
symbolism said slowly: "I see, you wish to give people new
eyes, not to make them see some new particular thing."

The two latter sorts of poems are impersonal, and that
fact brings us back to what I said about absolute metaphor.
They are Imagisme, and in so far as they are imagisme they
fall in with the new pictures and the new
sculpture.

Whistler said somewhere in the Gentle Art, "the picture
is not interesting because it is Trotty Veg, but because it
is an arrangement in colour." The minute you have admitted
that, you let in the jungle, you let in nature and truth and
abundance and cubism and Kandinsky, and the lot of us. Whistler
and Kandinsky, and some cubists were set to getting extraneous

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is not our affair. It is our affair to render the *image* as
we have perceived or conceived it.

Browning's Sordello is one of the finest *masks* ever
presented. Dante's Paradiso is the most wonderful *image*.
By that I do not mean that it is a perseveringly imagistic
performance. The permanent part is Imagisme, the rest,
the discourses with the calendar of saints and the discussions
about the nature of the moon, are philology. The form of
sphere above sphere, the varying reaches of light, the minutiae
of pearls upon foreheads, all these are parts of the Image.
The image is the poet's pigment, with that in mind you can go
ahead and apply Kandinskij, you can transpose his chapter on
form and colour and apply it to the writing of verse. As
I can not rely on your having read Kandinskij's "Ueber das
Geistige in der Kunst", I must go on with my autobiography.

Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train
at La Concorde and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then
another and another and then a beautiful child's face and then
another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words
for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words
that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion.
And that evening as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was
still trying, and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not
mean that I found words, but there came an equation... not in
speech but in little splotches of colour. It was just that,

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a "pattern", or hardly that, if by "a pattern" you mean something
with a "repeat" in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for
me, of a language in colour. I do not mean that I was unfamiliar
with the kindergarten stories about colours being like tones
in music. I think that is nonsense. If you try to make notes
permanently correspond with particular colours, it is like
tying narrow meanings to symbols.

That evening in the Rue Raynouard I realized quite
vividly that if I were a painter, or if I had, often, that kind
of emotion, or even if I had the energy to get paints and brushes
and keep at it, I might found a new school of painting, of
"non-representative" painting, a painting that would speak
only by arrangements in colour.

And so, when I came to read Kandinski's chapter on
the language of colour, three years later, I found little that
was new to me. I only felt that someone else understood
what I understood and had written it out very clearly. It
seems quite natural to me that an artist should have just as
much pleasure in an arrangement of planes or in a pattern of
figures, as in painting portraits of fine ladies or in portraying
the Mother of God as the symbolists bid us.

When I find people ridiculing the new arts, or making
fun of the clumsy odd terms that we use in trying to talk of
them amongst ourselves, when they laugh at our talking about
the "ice-block quality" in Picasso, I think it is only because

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they do not know what thought is like, and that they are
familiar only with argument and gibe and opinion. That is to
say, they can only enjoy what they have been brought up to
consider enjoyable, or what some essayist has talked about in
mellifluous phrases. They think only "the shells of thought",
as De Gourment calls them; the thoughts that have been already
thought out by others.

Any mind that is worth calling a mind must have needs
beyond the existing categories of language, just as a painter
must have pigments or shades more numerous than the existing
names of the colours.

Perhaps this is enough to explain the words in my
"Vortex":

"Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the
vivid consciousness in some primary form. It belongs to the
art of this form."

That is to say, my experience in Paris should have gone
into paint. If instead of colour I had perceived sound or
planes in relation I should have expressed it in music or in
sculpture *respectively*. Colour was, in that instance, the
"primary pigment", I mean it was the first adequate equation
that came into consciousness. The Vorticist uses the "primary
pigment". Vorticism is art before it has spread itself into
flacidity, into elaboration and secondary applications.

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Appearing in the July number of "BLAST".

What I have said of one vorticist art can be transposed
for another vorticist art. But let me go on then with my own
branch of vorticism, about which I can probably speak with
greater clarity. All poetic language is the language of
exploration. Since the beginning of bad writing, writers have
used images as ornaments. The point of Imagisme is that it
does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the
speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.

I once saw a small child go to an electric light
switch and say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using
the age-old language of exploration, the language of art.
It was a sort of metaphor but she was not using it as ornamenta-
tion.

One is tired of ornamentations, they are all a trick
and any sharp person can learn them.

The Japanese have had the sense of exploration. They
have understood the beauty of this sort of knowing. A
Chinaman said long ago that if a man can't say what he has to
say in twelve lines he had better keep quiet.

The Japanese have evolved the still shorter form of
the hokku.

"The fallen blossom flies back to its branch:

A butterfly."

That is the substance of a very well-known hokku. Victor Plarr
tells me that once when he was walking over snow with a Japanese

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This particular sort of consciousness has not been
identified with impressionist art. I think it is worthy of
attention. #

Mr. P. M. Hueffer in his review of the Imagiste anthology gives, what will seem to many, a half insane statement. He says that on one occasion he saw a very bright colour, which turned out to be sunlight on a green parrot, and the peace of God descended upon him. It was not until I read his account of this that I believed him to have any understanding of what I mean by imagisme. I disagree with his definition of vers libre, but there is a new or little explored psychology behind this kind of confession.

The logical end of impressionist art is the cinematograph. The state of mind of the impressionist tends to become cinematographical. Or, to put it another way, the cinematograph does away with the need of a lot of impressionist art.

There are two opposed ways of thinking of a man, of an artist; firstly you may think of him as that toward which perception moves, as the toy of circumstance, as the plastic substance receiving impressions; secondly, you may think of him as directing a certain fluid force against circumstance, as conceiving instead of merely reflecting and observing. One does not claim that one way is better than the other,

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one notes a diversity of the temperament. The two camps always exist. In the eighties there were symbolists opposed to impressionists, now you have vorticism which is, roughly speaking, expressionism, neo-cubism and imagism gathered together in one camp and futurism in the other. Futurism is descended from impressionism. It is, in so far as it is an art movement, a kind of accelerated impressionism. It is a spreading, or surface art, as opposed to vorticism which is intensive.

The vorticist has not this curious tic for destroying past glories. They don't get in his way. American hustle is doubtless good for Italy. Having lived in a land of undiluted hustle, I can dispense with hustle undiluted. I have no doubt that Italy needed Mr. Marinetti, but he did not sit on the egg that hatched me, and as I am wholly opposed to his aesthetic principles I see no reason why I, and various men who agree with me should be expected to call ourselves futurists. If one wanted to call oneself a futurist one could base oneself as well on a sentence in Mr. Yeats' essay on Blake as on Marinetti.

Vorticism is an intensive art. I mean by this, that one is concerned with the relative intensity, or relative significance of different sorts of expression. One desires the most intense, for certain forms of expression are "more intense" than others. They are more dynamic. I do not mean they are more

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not of pure or abstract numbers. Another property or quality of life has crept into one's matter. But even this statement does not create form. The picture is given you in the proposition about the squares on the sides of the right-angled triangle being equal to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. Statements in plane or descriptive geometry are like talk about art. They are a criticism of the form. The form is not created by them.

Fourthly,

We come to Descartian or "analytical geometry". Space is conceived as separated by two or by three axes (depending on whether one is treating form in one or more planes). One refers points to these axes by a series of coefficients. Given the idiom one is able <u>actually to create</u>.

Thus, we learn that $(x-a)^2 + (y-b)^2 = r^2$ governs the circle. It concerns all circles. It is the circle. It is not a particular circle, it is any circle and all circles. It is nothing that is not a circle. It is the circle free of space and time limits. It is the universal, existing in perfection, in freedom from space and time. Mathematics is dull as ditch-water until one reaches analytics. But in analytics we come upon a new way of dealing with form. It is in this way that art handles life. The difference between art and analytical geometry is the difference of subject matter only. Art is more

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interesting in proportion as life, and the human consciousness
are more complex and more interesting than forms and numbers.

This statement does not interfere in the least with
or with their function in art
"spontaneity" and "intuition". I passed my last exam. in
mathematics on sheer intuition. I saw where the line had
to go, as clearly as I ever saw an image, or felt "caelestem
intus vigorem."

The statements of "analytics" are "lords" over fact,
they are the thrones and dominations that rule over form and
recurrence. And in like manner are great works of art lords
over fact, over race-long recurrent moods, and over to-morrow.
Great Works of art contain, or can be, this fourth sort of equation.
They can cause form to exist. By the "image" I mean such an
equation, not an equation of mathematics, not something
about a, b, and c, having something to do with form, but about
sea, cliffs, night, having something to do with mood.

The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or
cluster, it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX,
from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly
rushing. In decency one can only call it a VORTEX. And from
this necessity came the name "vorticism." Nomina sunt consé-
quentia rerum, and never was that statement of Aquinas more
true than in the case of the vorticist movement.

It is as true for the painting and the sculpture as
it is for the poetry. Mr. Wadsworth and Mr. Lewis are not

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using words, they are using shape and colour, Mr. Brzeska
and Mr. Epstein are using "planes in relation", they are
dealing with a relation of planes different from the sort of
relation of planes dealt with in geometry, hence what is called
"the need of organic forms in sculpture". I do not know
whether Mr. Epstein calls himself a virticist, but I think
what I have said applies to his work and intentions.

I trust I have made clear what I mean by an "intensive
art". I do not know how I can be much more explicit. The
vorticist movement is not a movement of mystification, though
I dare say many people "of good will" have been considerably
bewildered.

23

The organization of forms is a much more energetic and
creative action than the copying or immitating of light on
a haystack.

There is undoubtedly a language of form and colour.
It is not a symbolical or allegorical language depending on
certain meanings having been ascribed, in books, to certain
signs and colours.

Certain artists working in different media have
managed to understand each other. I mean to say they know the
good and bad in each other's work which they could not know
unless there were a common speech.

As for the excellence of certain contemporary artists, all I can do is to stand up for my own beliefs. I believe that Mr. Wyndham Lewis is a very great master of design; that he has brought into our art new units of design and new manners of organization. I think his "Timon" is a great work. I think he is the most articulate expression of my own decade. If you ask me what his "Timon" means, I can reply by asking you what the old play means. For me his designs are a creation on the same motif. That motif is the fury of intelligence baffled and shut in by circumjacent stupidity. It is an emotional motif. Mr. Lewis' painting is nearly always emotional.

Mr. Wadsworth's work gives me pleasure, sometimes like the pleasure I have received from Chinese and Japanese prints and painting, for example I derive such pleasure from Mr. Wadsworth's "Khaki". Sometimes his work gives me a pleasure which I can only compare to the pleasure I have in music, in music as it was in Mozart's time. If an out sider

"Lewis is Bach". No, it is incorrect to say that "Lewis is Bach", but our feeling is that certain works of Picasso and certain works of Lewis have in them something which is to painting what certain qualities of Bach are to music. Music was vorticist in the Bach-Mozart period, before it went off into romance and sentiment and description. A new vorticist music would come from a new computation of

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I am often asked whether there can be a long imagiste or vorticist poem. The Japanese who evolved the hokku evolved also the Noh plays. In the best "Noh" the whole play may consist of one image. I mean it is gathered about one image. Its unity consists in one image, enforced by movement and music. I see nothing against a long vorticist poem.

On the other hand no artist can possibly get a vortex into every poem or picture he does. One would like to do so but it is beyond one. Certain things seem to demand metrical expression, or expression in a rhythm more agitated than the rhythms acceptable to prose, and these subjects though they do not contain a vortex may have some interest, an interest as "criticism of life" or of art. It is natural to express these things, and a vorticist or imagiste writer may be justified in presenting a certain amount of work which is not vorticism or imagisme, just as he might be justified in presenting a certain amount of work which is not vorticism or imagisme, just as he might be justified in printing a purely didactic prose article. Unfinished sketches and drawings have a similar interest, they are trials and attempts toward a vortex.