Mary Barnard, American Imagist

Chapter Two: Late Imagism

23 Chapter Two Late Imagism 2.1 “The Only Really Worthwhile Piece of Poetry Criticism I Had Ever Read”: Pound’s Imagism Pound changed everything. Although Barnard was drawn to the same Greek forms that appealed to the early Imagists, there was little to suggest, at first, that she would become part of his modern movement, even if she had clung to traditional form, as Pound once had, during her early days at Reed College. As a member of the Gawd-Awful Society, named, tongue-in-cheek, after the “gawd-awful silence” that greeted the end of their poetry readings, Barnard realized that she was “the only rhyming poet on campus. Everyone else wrote free verse. . . . I was still using conventional meters and end-rhymes in my poetry,”1 as is evident in the opening stanzas of her appearances in the GawdAwful Society’s anthologies of 1928–1929 and 1929–1930: The Carver O the night’s a carver, carving worlds of ivory, Carving towns and villages with a silver spoon, Carving gleaming landscapes of the world of Faery With the hard, bright chisel of the thin-edged moon.2 Disillusionment I shall go a princess    But clad like a young knight, And striding through my chambers    Shall put my maids to flight.3 24 / Mary Barnard, American Imagist Over the Hill with the Moon I sat in a glen in the hour after dark    When the fern-fronds were dripping with dew, And I played all my tunes on my old fairy fiddle,    The strangest and sweetest I knew.4 Against such traditional form, however, can be detected the strains of Barnard’s emergent modernist disposition, as well as her propensity to articulate, or “carve” out, the landscape. “The Carver” (here given in its entirety), for example, is reminiscent of the measured intensity of an early Imagist poem about the moon that featured in an appendix to Pound’s Ripostes in 1912, T. E. Hulme’s “Above the Dock.” Although “The Carver” is largely in iambic pentameter, it is difficult for any listener to force the iambic beat of the first three lines onto the unusual rhythm of the final line, heavy with concrete images of the “hard, bright chisel” of the “thin-edged moon,” each phrase comprising three consecutive stresses.5 The weighted voice of the poem thus becomes commensurate with the solidity of the “ivory” that substantiates the worlds “carved” by the night. As Hulme had explored in “A Lecture on Modern Poetry,” the new technique of the “vers libre” that inspired Poundian Imagism demanded that the prosodic form be governed more by the images used by the poet rather than by syllable counts or line endings; Barnard’s poem is a step toward this program. Just as Hulme galvanized Pound’s Imagist aesthetic, so did Pound galvanize Barnard’s. The arrival of a new literature professor at Reed, Lloyd Reynolds, provided the impetus. Taking Reynolds’s creative writing course in her junior year, Barnard began, sometime between 1930 and 1931, to read “the poets I think of as the real moderns: not Masters, Sandburg, the Benets, but Eliot, Pound, H.D., Edith Sitwell, Hart Crane, and . . . Cummings ,” although “I am sure we did not get as far as W.C. Williams,”6 who at this point was not much known in the United States beyond the little magazines.7 She found herself drifting toward Pound because he was not as remote to her as Eliot, whose earlier work and religious poetry “was foreign to me.”8 The choice of wording was not accidental; for Barnard, poetry was to become deeply connected to ideas of “the native,” so it is unsurprising that Eliot, an American living in Europe with tenuous poetic ties to his homeland, held limited appeal. Pound, on the other hand, always energetically maintained his links with America and cared for its poetry, even if he chose not to live there. In Pound’s Personae, Barnard reflected in her memoir, “I was beginning to know at last the country I wanted to explore,”9 particularly the “country” of free verse metric, as will be seen later. Exploration of “Pound’s country” took up almost all of Barnard’s remaining time at college, resulting in a collection of poems that made up Late Imagism / 25 her senior thesis, “The Horae of Mary Ethel Barnard” (“The Hours of Mary Ethel Barnard”), which she had pleaded...