From: "hugh bone" <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: Pound
Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 13:03:13 -0400


See two comments:  ****

Hugh

~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!



----- Original Message -----
From: Mary Murphy&Salstrand <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
To: <lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Saturday, May 27, 2000 6:46 AM
Subject: Re: Pound


> Ian:
> >
> > An irritating aside but one that I'd like to briefly follow:
> >
> > Not at all - I would be curious to know more about your interests in
Pound.  I disagree completely with his politics, but still consider him a
great poet!  ****Some years back, a friend of
mine considered Pound a great poet.  I tried then, and later, to
read, understand, be interested in Pound's poetry, but it didn't happen***
>
> Anyway, I hope this answers your basic question. Pound was affliated
> with a movement know as Vorticism which flourished briefly in the years
> 1912-1915. The other major figures associated with it are the
> painter/novelist Wyndham Lewis, the sculptor Henri Guadier-Brzeska, T.S.
> Eliot, Pound and several other artists.  It main vehicle was a
> short-lived publication entitled Blast (which was reprinted in book form
> a few years back).
>
> It orientation in the visual art was related to cubism and futurism
> (which Pound labeled as accelerated impressionism), but also attempted
> to establish itself as a new aesthetic, the basis for a new Renaissance
> in London (which WW1 managed to undermine completely.)
>
> In literary term, Pound used the term Vortex primarily to distinguish
> himself to distinguish himself from the likes of Amy Lowel who had
> appropriated his earlier theory of imagism.
>
> His is Pound's best know quote on V:
>
> "The image is not an idea.  It 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.'"  ****This vortex sounds like a "self",  not a single image, or
idea, but a locus, node, to which and from which lines of a network of
various  other nodes communicate.****
>
> This comes from the book "A memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska" by Pound which
> includes his entire essay on the topic.
>
> Source-hunters says that Allen Upward may have been an inspiration for >
this term.  He was a kind of renegade theosophist whose writings were  very
influential on Pound and he mentions the concept of the vortex in > his book
"New Word."
>
> Hope this helps.
>
>