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EZRA POUND 97
one of Mr. Pound's poems in Blast; that, of course, is their
affair, but the amusing thing to me is that this poem was obviously
written with a strong moral purpose. It is not my business
to abuse Mr. Pound—he gets enough of it from other people—
and I shall probably be called all kinds of sad names if I say
that his contributions to Blast are quite unworthy of the author.
It is not that one wants Mr. Pound to repeat his Provençal feats,
to echo the 90s—he has done that too much already—it is
simply the fact that Mr. Pound cannot write satire. Mr. Pound
is one of the gentlest, most modest, bashful, kind creatures who
ever walked the earth; so I cannot help thinking that all this
enormous arrogance and petulance and fierceness are a pose.
And it is a wearisome pose."
In addition to a couple of very orthodox pieces by Ford Madox
Ford and Rebecca West, Blast also contained some individual
Manifestoes on the state of the Vortex. Pound wrote, in part, "The
Vortex is the point of maximum energy. It represents, in mechanics,
the greatest efficiency."
Gaudier-Brzeska's excellent definition of the Vortex has been reprinted
in full in Pound's biography of him. It begins,
"Sculptural energy is the mountain. Sculptural feeling is the
appreciation of masses in relation. Sculptural ability is the defining
of these masses by planes. . . . The sphere is thrown through
space, it is the subject and object of the vortex." 15
A full page advertisement of the new magazine that appeared in
The Egoist, June 1, 1914, hailed it with the motto "No Pornography,
No Old Pulp, End of the Christian Era."
The Morning Post greeted Blast as "full of irresponsible imbecility,"
but the good grey Times was more sympathetic, saying "Blast
aims at doing for the arts and literature of today what the Yellow
Book did for the artistic movement of its decade."
The New York Times on August 9, 1914, devoted a full page
to the Vorticists, referring to Pound as "the ex-American poet".
The reviewer declared that the Vorticists were simply jealous of
Marinetti and the strength of his Futurist movement in England,
and that Vorticism was merely a native English version of Futurism.
Pound referred to Marinetti, a well-known Fascist, as a
corpse.