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76 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
find a copy may read in Ezra's 'Ripostes' the five or six poems
Hulme wrote to illustrate his theories. They are pretty good,
especially the one about the moon like a red-faced farmer looking
over a gate. Ezra's note on Hulme's poems contains the ominous
threat: 'as to the future, that is in the hands of the Imagists.'
"But at that time who and where were the Imagists? My own
belief is that the name took Ezra's fancy, and that he kept it in
petto for the right occasion. If there were no Imagists, obviously
they would have to be invented. Wherever Ezra has launched a
new movement—and he had made such a hobby of it that I always
expect to find one day that Pound and Mussolini are really one
and the same person—he has never had any difficulty about finding
members. He just calls on his friends." 5
As Pound's Imagist movement took hold in London, T. E.
Hulme and Wyndham Lewis made an effort to reassert themselves
in it. They announced a series of lectures at the Kensington Town
Hall to discuss this new development in poetry, but Ezra was
not asked to speak. Michael Roberts, in his biography of T. E.
Hulme, describes the first of these lectures:
"Hulme was not a good lecturer and Wyndham Lewis read a
paper supporting Hulme and came off pretty badly himself, mumbling
in a husky voice, with his head buried in his manuscript.
The audience felt as if they could snatch the papers from the
poets and read them for themselves—there was so obviously something
very worthwhile buried in all their abstract mumbling. To
end it all, Ezra Pound stood up, all self-possessed, complete with
velvet coat, flowing tie, pointed beard, and a halo of fiery hair.
Lolling against the stage, he became very witty and fluent, and
with his yankee voice snarled out some of his poems. Somehow,
such a voice rather clowned verse." 6
Pound emerged as the victor that evening, still the leader of
the Imagists. He now occupied a dominant position, due to his
role as foreign editor of the leading American magazine of verse,
Poetry, and to his free hand in editing the literary section of The
Egoist. His department had mushroomed until it had all but pushed
Miss Marsden and her suffragette propaganda out of the magazine.
She still held forth on the front page and a few paragraphs inside,