As soldiers do when marching into battle, Ezra Pound heralded his progress through London with songs. He arrived from Philadelphia 100 years ago, on a mission to liberate English verse: to throw out the leftover Victoriana - "nine-tenths of all the bad poetry now accepted as standard" - and replace it with "something for the modern stage". Like any other boisterous serviceman, Pound was unfussy about who heard him. "Go, my songs, seek your praise from the young and the intolerant." How to attract such praise? "Come, my songs, let us express our baser passions."
Pound's current heroes were the medieval troubadour poets of Provence, with some Italians and half-understood classic authors mixed in. The 23-year-old novitiate tramped the city's streets, incanting his "songs" in the doorways of literary journals - "Let us deride the smugness of the Times: GUFFAW!" (he means the Times Literary Supplement) - and along the corridors of the weekly magazines: "Go! rejuvenate things! Rejuvenate even the Spectator." After studying in the British Museum by day, he returned to his lodgings at night and wrote in a musical, overwrought, antiquated manner ("When I first saw thee 'neath the silver mist") that is apt to puzzle readers expecting to hear the first soundings of an English-based modernism. Within a year or two, however, the better aspects of the American character were drafted in:
Go in a friendly manner,
Go with an open speech.
He lived in London for 12 years, from 1908 to 1920, gradually widening his poetry to absorb natural forms of speech and, at the same time, the life of the city. If we could unearth Pound's copy of the London A-Z, it would be a heavily thumbed, scribbled-over, asterisked and earmarked volume. On arrival, he spent a few nights at Duchess Street, near the present site of BBC Broadcasting House, before taking lodgings a few minutes' walk away at 48 Langham Street. The house is still there, separated by a narrow alley from a mid-19th-century pub, the Yorkshire Grey, much the same in outline now as it was when Pound frequented it, possibly seeking refuge from "the landlady's doings / with a lodger unnamed". Both house and pub turn up in the Pisan Cantos, written 40 years later, as does a meeting in the street with Henry James.
However, the densest marginalia in Pound's A-Z would surround 10 Church Walk in Kensington, a small square of Poundography tucked away between the High Street and the Church of St Mary Abbots. Here he lived between the years 1909 and 1914, during which he mobilised all the spare talent in London to further his campaign. Through a window by the side entrance a staircase is visible, which took Ford Madox Ford, William Carlos Williams, DH Lawrence and Pound's former fiancée Hilda Doolittle (baptised by him "HD Imagiste") up to the first floor, where Pound sat by the gas ring, ready to make tea and pronounce on all things, in different languages.
FS Flint recalled him sitting on the bed with a volume of Tacitus on his knee. Can you read that? Flint inquired. "I hope so," Pound replied. Invited to go upstairs by the landlady, Mrs Langley, Robert Frost discovered him in the bath. When reminded of it in later life, Pound confirmed "Frost finding me in tub", adding, in the peculiar idiolect he reserved for letters, "not hip / but more likely byby's bawth".
Outward from Church Walk - his "proper corner" - Pound covered the surrounding streets, "stone by stone ... / by foot thru Ken G Hyde ... / house by house" (from a letter to Patricia Hutchins, author of the enjoyable Ezra Pound's Kensington, 1965). One day early in 1909, he walked over Campden Hill, turned west down Holland Park Avenue, and mounted the staircase of No 84, relishing the smells of the pre-refrigeration poultry shop on the ground floor. Ford Madox Ford had founded the English Review the year before, just months after Pound's invasion, which was to prove the proper corner for his poetry, as Church Walk was for the poet.
Ford was part German; his contributors so far included a Pole (Conrad), an Irishman (Yeats), a Russian (Tolstoy) and an American (James). Unsurprised to learn that the modernist gas spreading from Holland Park Avenue was composed in large measure of foreign elements, Pound left some poems behind, and soon felt himself among a company of allies. Douglas Goldring, Ford's assistant at the English Review, remembered him as a "young revolutionary poet" dressed in a sombrero, intruding into drawing rooms in which top hats, gloves and canes were the accepted code - a violation in consonance with the offence he intended to cause with his verse.
Enemy ranks were stuffed with "third-hand Keats, Wordsworth, heaven knows what". The focus for his ire was the group known as the Georgians, which included John Masefield, Rupert Brooke, JC Squire, Lascelles Abercrombie and others. Tilting sombrero to top hat, Pound challenged Abercrombie to a duel, on the basis that "stupidity carried beyond a certain point becomes a public menace". Permitted a choice of weapons, Abercrombie suggested the two poets attack each other with unsold copies of their own books. Even Pound saw the joke. But the point was serious enough: to unseat the metrical inverts of empire. In a letter to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry Chicago, one of his earliest champions, Pound urged her to tolerate "nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say".
The most mature collection from his London years is Lustra, a book of exhilarating range, including versions from Chinese and Provençal, as well as manifestos, epigrams and love poetry. It was published in 1916, by which time Pound had married Dorothy Shakespear and moved round the corner to 5 Holland Park Chambers. However, most of the poems were written in Church Walk. The book opens with "Tenzone":
Will people accept them
(ie, these songs) ...
Already they flee, howling in terror.
Any sign of outrage was welcomed ("Come, my songs, / Let us take arms against this sea of stupidities"). But like the warriors of myth, Pound knew when to display his tender side. "The Garret", written in about 1912, takes us up the side staircase and into the first-floor room, where
I am near my desire.
Nor has life in it aught better
Than this hour of clear coolness, the hour of waking together.
At around the same time, London characters and streetlife begin to feature regularly in Pound's poetry: the "shop girl" who "For a moment ... rested against me"; the "horsefaced lady [walking] down Longacre reciting Swinburne to herself"; the "really handsome young woman ... in Sackville Street" ("prostitute" in the poem's original publication); the waitress in the teashop who had once spread "the glow of youth" about the poet and his friends, who now "does not get up the stairs so easily"; the MP who has "such a caressing air / when he shakes hands"; the shoppers peering into windows filled with "gee-gaws of false amber and false turquoise".
Many poems express sympathy for the working classes. The poem in Lustra that follows "The Garret" (opening line: "Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are") takes the poet into nearby Kensington Park Gardens, where he observes a woman out walking, hugging the rail of the path, "Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall / ... And she is dying piece-meal / of a sort of emotional anaemia".
"The Garden" seems at first merely an unkind portrait of a perhaps involuntarily closeted woman; but Pound's purpose becomes clear in the second part. The woman has emerged from a class that is inbred, having been deprived of contact with the metropolitan swarm. In the park, she is menaced by "a rabble / Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor". The picture is vivid enough to do without the pay-off line that the rebel American, himself excluded from "society", felt it necessary to deliver: "They shall inherit the earth."
The best-known of all Pound's poems of the London years is about Paris, the imagist "In a Station of the Metro": "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough." Less familiar is the two-line poem's London rehearsal, "The Street in Soho", never collected in a book. "Fog is nothing short of murderous," he wrote to his father one November, but even deathly fog could conceal a poem:
Out of the overhanging gray mist
There came an ugly little man
Carrying beautiful flowers.
The unkillable poor did not include Pound himself. The monthly £4 allowance he received from his father would not stretch far, but there was no suggestion of working for a living. At the end of the 19th century, he had made a grand tour of Europe with his mother and an aunt. Later, married to Dorothy, who had modest independent means, he was in a position to offer financial help to TS Eliot. The plans came to nothing, but in 1914 Pound arranged the publication of "The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry Chicago.
By then, he had succeeded in stealing a little of the modernist fire that blazed in Paris and spreading it in London. He had mobilised support, mostly literary but sometimes financial, for Joyce, Lewis, Williams, HD and others. He had lit a bonfire of "the obscure reveries / Of the inward gaze" that littered the garden of English poetry, and smashed the poetic ornaments in "alabaster / Or the 'sculpture' of rhyme". By the time he came to write his own farewell to London in 1920, the long poem "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley", Pound could depict himself resuscitating "the dead art / Of poetry", and presenting literary society with "an image / Of its accelerated grimace" - something, after all, "for the modern stage". In the year of the poem's publication, he left for Paris.
Pound's politics developed malevolently, from the Londoner's sympathy for the less well off to a hatred of banking practices, with a particular animus against lending at rates of interest. In the mid-1930s, approaching his 50th year, he became a committed supporter of Mussolini, and repeatedly heaped all society's ills on to the machinations of "a few big Jews" ("Canto 52"), specifically the practice of "usury". In May 1945, after years of pro-fascist broadcasts on Radio Rome, Pound was arrested and held in a US army prison camp. For his radio programmes, he adopted, in the words of Richard Sieburth, editor of the superb Library of America Poems and Translations (2003), "an exaggerated cracker-barrel idiom laced with antisemitic slurs". He was transferred to St Elizabeths mental hospital in Washington DC, where he remained until 1958.
There, he took succour in conjuring up his own London A-Z in memory, recalling the White Heather teashop in Holland Street where the waitress once spread "the glow of youth", the kindness of Mrs Langley and her greengrocer husband in Church Walk - "positively the best that England can produce" - and the unkind bells of St Mary Abbots, which aggravated his incipient derangement. These and other details, included in letters or in the sprawling, notebook-style Pisan Cantos, made the ground beneath his feet, the landmarks of what Thom Gunn called "that marvellous first decade of publication".
In Paris, the modernisation of art was a fact in a way that was not then, and never has been, true of London. Thirty-five years before Pound's campaign, Arthur Rimbaud had made assaults of a similar character on French poetry, in the course of which he had snatched Paul Verlaine from the protection of the genteel Parnassian poets and crossed over to London, where his most adventurous work was written: A Season in Hell and portions of Illuminations. By the time Pound arrived, Rimbaud was only beginning to be published properly, and Pound the Londoner makes little mention of him. He almost certainly did not know that in the early 1870s, Rimbaud had lived a few yards from where he did when he landed, across the road from the Yorkshire Grey, at 25 Langham Street (the building is gone, replaced by another). So it is that the two fiercest street-fighters of modern poetry, one French, the other American, shared the same London local.