Ezra Pound's Whistler

On 20 February 1905, Walter Raleigh, Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, addressed the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers who had gathered for a banquet held at the Café Royal in London. They were celebrating the imminent opening of a memorial exhibition of the works of James McNeill Whistler, the Society's first president, who had died a year and a half before.

The Society was a respected group: its current president was Auguste Rodin, and the Honorary Committee included a prince, ten peers of the realm, two foreign ambassadors, and the directors of ten major international art galleries. But in his speech, Raleigh chose to emphasize Whistler's antagonistic relationship with the art establishment and the societies to which he had belonged:

He stood aloof—more completely aloof, perhaps, than most other great artists have done—from the movements and schools of his own time. . . . [I]n the main he was independent and original—in the right sense of that word. That is to say, he began at the beginning; in each of his works he creates afresh, as it were; he accepts every subject as presenting a new problem to be grappled with, a new set of conditions to be studied and subdued, by new devices, to the service of beauty.¹

Raleigh's somewhat euphemistic rhetoric gives an indication of how early-twentieth-century artists and critics could appropriate a nineteenth-century impressionist as the spirit of modernity. Whistler was professionally, as well as chronologically, a Victorian. For Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887, he produced a lavishly illustrated address presented by the Secretary of State. The Queen admired it so much that she granted a royal charter to the association currently enduring Whistler's presidency, the Society of British Artists.² But early-twentieth-century accounts preferred to represent him as one who "flits across the Victorian years—gay, debonair, laughing, quarrelsome, huffy—a dandified exquisite of a man, insolent, charming, unexpected—a wit amongst the chiefest wits—and he drew his rapier upon them all!"³ Whistler's aggressive aloofness, then, seems to anticipate the attitude cultivated by the new century towards its increasingly coagulated notion of Victorianism, and Raleigh's description of Whistler's originality prefigures the self-consciousness of modernist aesthetics more than it recalls the terminology surrounding nineteenth-century artistic practice.

Like his erstwhile antagonist Ruskin, Whistler was part of the landscape of modernism—literary modernism as well as modernism in the visual arts. When T. E. Hulme produced his prescriptions for "modern poetry" in 1908, he referred to Whistler's impressionism as "the spirit of our times," and he commended attempts in poetry to reproduce "the vision of a London street at midnight with its long rows of light."⁴ Even in 1913 Ford Madox Ford described "the real stuff of the poetry of our day" by painting a Whistler nocturne to describe "[t]he strongest emotion" he ever had, an experience that occurred as he emerged from the Shepherds Bush Exhibition and saw "crowds and crowds of people—or no, there was, spread out beneath the lights, an infinite moving mass of black, with white faces turned up to the light, moving slowly, quickly, not moving at all, being obscured, reappearing."⁵

Ford's anecdote is remarkably similar to a more famous statement by Ezra Pound that had been published two months earlier, in which Pound explained how he came to write that archetypal modernist, and very Whistlerian, poem "In a Station of the Metro.⁶ But although Pound's admiration for Whistler is well known, the depth of Whistler's impact on Pound's thought and, as a consequence, on the structures of modernism, has not been adequately appreciated. Pound's indebtedness to Whistler only becomes fully evident in his 1916 memoir of the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, but the cluster of references to Whistler there is baffling: What is an impressionist doing at the heart of a book about vorticism...