Ford Madox Ford and the Christina Rossetti Influence

FORD MADOX FORD AND THE CHRISTINA ROSSETTI INFLUENCE By Grover Smith (Duke University) In introducing the Collected Poems of Ford Madox Ford (1936), William Rose Benêt misconstrued Ford's praise of Christina Rossetti as an admission that she had been "his greatest early [poetical] influence."1 From admiration to influence may represent to the remote observer no unwanantable step in the reasoning of a critic. But nice distinctions of fact in Uterary history have greater importance now than they had fifty years ago: truth has become infinitely precious in an era of post-structuralist tosh. And so (to pass through the strait and nanow)~Ford certainly was influenced by Christina, though he did not describe how, but left the fact for others to document.2 The influence was a curious one, going against the grain of Ford's temperament and nevertheless accommodating it. Ford said in the Preface to an earlier Collected Poems (1913) that after finding the principal Victorians (and Pope) to be umeadable in his adolescence, he had discovered" Christina Rossetti. (Swinburne was his godfather, Christina a connection of his mother's by marriage.) He regarded her still, he declared, "as far and away the greatest master of words and moods that any art has produced"-though (shrewdly) looking on her "as being far more a prose writer than a poet at all." The utter nonsense with which the critique begins has given way to good sense. Christina's voice is indeed, as Ford pursued in his account, a still, small, private" one. Many times muted in its rhetoric, it escapes, as Ford saw, the portentousness of the male competition. The lines he valued in her work eschew intimate emotions; instead they create emotions through objective details. Ford's judgment, developed in inexact citations and compansons, is itself exact: Such a phrase describing lizards amongst heath as: "like darted lightnings here and there perceived [But] nowhere dwelt upon" ["From House to Home"], or such a sentence as: "[Said] one, tomonow shall be like to-day [B]ut much more sweet" ["At Home"]—these things gave an exquisite pleasure, but it was a Pleasure comparable rather to that to be had from reading laubert. It was comparable rather to that which came from reading the last sentences of Hérodias. "Et tous trois ayant pris la tête de Jokanaan s'en allait vers Galillée. [Et tous les trois, ayant pris la tête de Iaokanaan, s'en allèrent du côté de la Galilée.] Comme elle était très lourde[,] ils la portaient alternativement." [And all three of them, having taken the head of Iaokanaan, went away in the direction of Galilee. As it was very heavy, they carried it by turns.] I do not presume to say exactly whence the pleasure comes except in so far as that I believe that such exact, formal and austere phrases can to certain men give a pleasure beyond any other. And it was this emotion that [I] received from Christina Rossetti.3 That Ford (in those days still Hueffer) had derived something from Christina attracted little comment when the first Collected Poems appeared, but the 287 attention it had was distinguished: it came from Ezra Pound, himself not yet distinguished. Pound, self-appointed acolyte at Ford's unfrequented but conspicuous altar, reviewed the Collected Poems twice, in 1913 for England in the New Freewoman (later the Egoist) and in 1914 for America in Poetry.4 In his second review, "Mr. Hueffer and the Prose Tradition in Verse," he picked up Ford's description of Christina as "more a prose writer than a poet' in order to convey his sense that Ford "even in verse" insists "upon clarity and precision, upon the prose tradition." Not that Ford, who "brings to his work a prose training such as Christina never had," should go unchallenged for implicitly laying so much weight on her influence, with whatever truth to his remembered impressions. Cnnstina, Pound granted, has "in places" "a certain limpidity and precision" that are the "properties" of poets greater than she— of Arnaut Daniel, of Guido (Guinizelli), of Dante-from whom presumably she learned them. Pound thus traced to...