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EZRA POUND 71
ume, Ripostes (1912), under the heading "The Complete Poetical
Works of T. E. Hulme". A bust of Hulme by Epstein also survives.
Poems which could be described as Imagist began to appear in
1911, and they enjoyed a vogue under Pound's inspiration until
1916, when Amy Lowell appeared on the scene. She turned the
movement into a chintzy parlor piece for her New England mansion,
and the images that had seemed so important to the young
poets disappeared in the clouds of cigar smoke in which Miss
Lowell veiled her bulk.
A young American of independent means, John Gould Fletcher,
from Little Rock, Arkansas, had arrived in London a few months
after Pound. H.D., Pound's college friend, came to London in
1911, and an English solicitor's son, Richard Aldington, also joined
the group. They were the core of the Imagist movement.
Fletcher, a shy, neurotic youth who was determined to become
a poet, had taken rooms near George Bernard Shaw in Adelphi
Terrace, but he could never muster the courage to call upon him.
He led a solitary life during his first year in London. He had met
a few would-be writers at Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop, but
they could not afford to dine with him at the expensive French
restaurant where he usually took his meals. He ate alone, reading
at table.
In 1910, Fletcher brought out five small volumes of his poetry,
engaging four separate London publishers for the work. He paid
the entire costs of publication himself, and hopefully sent the books
to critics. There was no enthusiastic reception, such as had greeted
Pound, for the poems, although well-written, offered nothing new.
Most of the recipients did review them, and the unsold copies were
kept in storage until the outbreak of the First World War, when
Fletcher contributed them to the British war effort as paper pulp.
In addition to his duties as foreign editor of Poetry, Pound had
also created for himself the post of literary editor of a suffragette
newspaper, The New Freewoman, which had formerly been known
as The Freewoman. Pound's position on suffragism is not clear; he
once remarked in a letter to me that each new dilution of the suffrage
weakened the entire system on which voting was based. His
alliance with the staff of The New Freewoman may have been