Roxana Preda, 2013. All rights reserved.

Constantin Brâncuşi Vorticist: sculpture, art criticism, poetry

The marble form in the pine wood,

The shrine seen and not seen
(Ezra Pound CX/801)

Grown weary with London, sometime in 1920, Ezra Pound finally decided to let the
English save their souls as they knew best and move out. The reasons for the move were
various: the artistic mediocrity of the milieu, the political climate, the cost of living, all
contributed.1 Paris, the center of multicultural modernism, seemed the obvious choice for an
artist who sought to be at the core of a cultural vortex. However, in order to play a significant
role in this pot of divergent modernisms, Pound had to develop his already existing
connections to the other artists living and working in the city.
The encounter between the poet Ezra Pound and the sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi in
1921 in Paris highlights significant interactions between modernist poetry and the visual arts
and illuminates aesthetic crossroads that are important for the understanding of modernist
strategies of expression. Their relationship was marked by a rather one-sided admiration of
Pound’s towards a more mature fellow artist, who unlike himself seemed to have arrived at a
final artistic vocabulary full of beauty and repose, two qualities which Pound was also
striving to create in his poem, The Cantos. Though engaged in totally different artistic
medium and methodology, Pound was not unprepared to receive and understand correctly
what the sculptor had to say: he brought Brâncuşi’s artistic project together with his own and
integrated both in a general modernist aesthetic.
Ezra Pound had schooled himself in art criticism in London in the years leading up to
World War I. His interaction with painters and sculptors of the modernist avant-garde,
especially Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, resulted in his attempt to articulate
the differences between art and poetry and to formulate the principles of Vorticism, which he
presented in the journal Blast (1914, 1915) that he was co-editing with Lewis. Pound’s aims
and methods in poetry were to develop in parallel with his activities as an art critic and
manager of artists. The encounter with Brâncuşi happened at a time when Pound was taking
final decisions concerning the form of his long poem; his interest in art, which had receded
into he background since 1915, flourished again upon the ruins and memories of the old. By
juxtaposing Brâncuşi’s artistic practice and Pound’s methods of poetic composition, we gain
an insight into two versions of modernism, which may seem to have little in common at first
glance, but which on closer examination can be seen to share important strategies of
expression and much agreement on general principles. The contact between Pound and
Brâncuşi became very slight after 1924, when the poet moved to Italy and ceased to write art
criticism. Nonetheless, the sculptor’s importance made itself felt at key moments of the poem.
The harmony between Brâncuşi’s life and his artistic vision, his devotion to formal perfection
and beauty, and the sacred aura of his objects showed ways in which the temporal and the
eternal, the mundane and the artistic could be reconciled. This set the blueprint for Pound’s

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personal paradise, the oases of stillness and contemplation that he created as spaces of retreat
from history, repose, and happiness in the later sections of his poem.

Vorticist London, 1913-1915

Pound’s art criticism began in London before the Great War, emerging as a result of
his interaction with a circle of artist friends: the painter Wyndham Lewis and the sculptors
Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.2 All of them were part of a wider circle of
intellectuals and artists who met regularly at T.E. Hulme’s lodgings on Tuesdays during 1913
and 1914. Hulme’s lecture, “Modern Art and Its Philosophy,” delivered at the Quest Society
on January 22, 1914, was a powerful incentive for Pound to print his own understanding of
the work of his friends.
Hulme’s lecture was derived from his reading of Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction
and Empathy (1908) and closely followed the German historian’s views on the relationship
between primitive man and his art. In Worringer’s view, primitive abstraction was not the
outcome of a lack of craftsmanship, but an aesthetic choice expressing the horror of space that
characterized man’s relation to the universe. In considering Palaeolithic paintings, Worringer
described them as providing oases of repose for human beings constantly subject to the
dangers of wild beasts and the fury of the elements (Abstraction and Empathy, 15).
Abstraction derived from the necessity for contemplation; it was a resting point which the
spirit, bewildered by the mutations and diversity of nature, needed. Primitive abstraction was
hieratic, impersonal, and public – it provided the guidelines that the modern artist needed in
order to loosen the ties that connected art to the imitation of nature and to personal
expression. Worringer maintained that the sense of fulfilment the primitives sought in art
consisted
in the possibility of taking the individual thing of the external world, out of its
arbitrariness and seeming fortuitousness, of eternalizing it by approximation to
abstract forms and, in this manner, of finding a point of tranquility and a refuge
from appearances. Their most powerful urge was, so to speak, to wrest the object
of the external world, out of its natural context, out of the unending flux of being,
to purify it of all its dependences upon life, i.e. of everything about it that was
arbitrary, to render it necessary and irrefrangable, to approximate it to its absolute
value. (Abstraction and Empathy, 16-17)
Following Worringer, Hulme argued that the modern interest in primitive art was a
symptom of a new sensibility, imbued by a similar separation between the individual and the
world. This sensibility generated an artistic impulse, which veered away from humanism and
the mimetic presentation of the human body and preferred abstract designs, which emulated
the mechanical perfection of engineering draughts (Speculations, 97). Pound was greatly
impressed by Hulme’s exposition (North, Final Sculpture, 113) and was moved to write his
first article on art, “The New Sculpture,” which appeared in the Egoist on February 14, 1914.
Pound had become aware of the universe of forms, which Epstein and Gaudier had created, as
a world apart from the convulsions of history, a realm where stillness and certitude gave
meaning to sculptures which “did not strive after plausibility” (Visual Arts, 181). In a further

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article, published in the Egoist on March 16, 1914, Pound commented on Epstein’s latest
work:
The green flenite woman expresses all the tragedy and enigma of the germinal
universe: she also is permanent, unescaping.
This work infuriates the superficial mind, it takes no count of this morning’s
leader; of transient conditions. (Visual Arts, 183)
In later articles, published between 1914 and 1919, Pound articulated his conviction,
derived from Epstein and Gaudier that modern sculpture diverged from the tradition in its
reliance on the formal treatment of its subject. The new sculpture did not strive to represent
nature but was to be understood solely as a disposition of masses and planes. In Pound’s view,
three-dimensional form was the essential principle of sculpture and should be the only
criterion by which its merits were to be judged. An artist’s repertory of forms stood by
themselves as expressions of his pure creative energy, as eruptions of the sculptural feeling
proper to his personality. He quoted Epstein as having said: “Form, not the form of anything”
(Visual Arts, 13).
Pound emphasized Epstein’s and Gaudier’s preference for carving directly in stone
rather than molding in plaster, a preference which they had in common with Brâncusi, whom
they had both met.3 Carving directly was of primary importance as an axis of reference, which
distinguished the work of the London avant-garde not only from the tradition of sculptural
mimetic representation best embodied in the work of Rodin, but also from Futurist and
Impressionist art. Molding involved a provisional, ever changing view of the yet unfinished
object: in the process of production, the sculptor could change his original design, be
influenced by external factors, and allow new ideas, or impressions to impinge on his work.
Molding allowed more room for expressing subjectivity, emotions, and spontaneity; it was
more personal and mimetic. In contrast, carving consisted in paring down every element that
did not belong to the design. It allowed no going back, no mistakes, hesitations, or
corrections. Accidentals, contingencies, and excrescences were eliminated in order to arrive at
an essential statement of an idea in stone. Carving was necessarily impersonal and public –
the effort of its practitioners to reduce detail naturally brought them to a presentation of the
essential and the abstract (North, Final Sculpture, 124).
In his articles on modern art, Pound indicated that his comments were not based upon
prior study, but were rather the result of conversations between friends, emphasizing that real
criticism can only be made by practitioners, on their own terms. He championed the value of
carving over molding, praised the reliance of modern sculpture on form, and articulated its
allegiance to contemplation, stillness, and impersonality. At the same time, he was careful to
delimit and define the separation between poetry and sculpture by saying, as far back as his
article “The Caressability of the Greeks” of March 1914, that:
If I were more interested in form than in anything else I should be a sculptor and
not a writer. Epstein working in form produces something which moves me who
am only moderately interested in form. (Visual Arts, 185)
This separation, which had begun to outline itself in Pound’s confrontation with the
work of his sculptor friends, became clearer as a result of his involvement with Blast, a
journal of Modernist art and literature edited by Wyndham Lewis. Pound is credited with the

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coining of the word “Vorticism,” which gave the artists contributing to Blast an emblem and a
banner. The metaphor of the vortex, which Pound had used for the first time in his poem
Plotinus in 1908 (Materer, Vortex, 15), enabled Lewis, Gaudier, and Pound to articulate a
manifesto for their work and give definitions of the vortices of their specific arts.4
In his own contribution, “Vortex,” which appeared in the first issue of Blast in June
1914, Pound unexpectedly abstained from delivering a proper definition of the term and
introduced a new concept, that of the primary pigment:
Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some
primary form. It belongs to the art of this form. If sound, to music; if formed
words, to literature; the image, to poetry; form, to design; colour in position, to
painting; form or design in three planes, to sculpture; movement to the dance or to
the rhythm of music or of verses. (Blast, 154)
This was Pound’s first attempt to classify the arts, understand the defining quality of
each, and carve out a place for poetry in their midst. The true artist was to rely solely on the
essential principle of his art and not look for qualities that are strange to it. Pound saw himself
involved in the effort to talk about each of these arts on its own terms and promote an
interpretation based on the “primary pigment,” on the distinguishing trait or capacity of that
particular art.5 He repeated for emphasis:
The vorticist will use only the primary media of his art.
The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.
The vorticist will not allow the primary expression of any concept or emotion to
drag itself out into mimicry. (Blast, 154)
In this way Pound defined the fundamental difference between sculpture and poetry:
sculpture had a different primary pigment than poetry, it was based on three-dimensional
forms, masses and planes, and had to be defined in terms of that criterion alone. Moreover,
sculpture had to be non-representational in order that attention be concentrated on form alone
and not be lured away by what the form might be imitating or suggesting. At the same time,
Pound staked out the province of poetry by stressing the status of the image as its primary
pigment. He came closer to what his own poetry would finally become when he presented the
idea of the “turbine”:
All experience rushes into the vortex. All the energized past, all the past that is
living and worthy to live. All MOMENTUM, which is the past bearing upon us,
RACE, RACE-MEMORY, instinct charging the PLACID,
NON-ENERGIZED FUTURE
The DESIGN of the future in the grip of the human vortex. All the past that is
vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex,
NOW. (Blast, 153)
The concept of form as primary pigment, together with the absolute rejection of
representation, remained the fundamental axes for describing and praising modern sculpture.
At the same time, the idea of the turbine pointed in a totally different direction: that of
creating a vortex of significant past characters, events, and narratives, which would be
meaningful for a future still waiting to be created. The turbine was the blueprint for the
“Vorticist” poem Pound intended to write, for his yet unformed “histoire morale

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contemporaine.” A first group of three Cantos, written in September 1915, were to be his first
attempt at recording this energized past. Not satisfied with the results, he would start revising
them immediately after their publication in Poetry in 1917 and finally discard them. In 1919
he would go on to write four more Cantos (IV-VII) and establish his poetical method as a
collage of fragments relating the historical world to the mythical realm (Bush, Genesis, 183).
As structural principle, Pound would institute the “subject rhyme,” a practice of analogies
linking the fragments together in a tenuous balance of narrative and suggestive presentation.
The image remained the basic unit of design throughout. However, Pound’s first attempts in
the Three Cantos resulted in a pageant of historical and mythical figures whose relevance for
the modern world was not easily apparent. Though intensely visual, the world sketched in
these Cantos did not seem to hold together and was obviously derived and “literary,” staged
as it was as a personal dialogue with Browning and his poem Sordello:
Hang it all, there can be but one Sordello!
But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks
Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the things’s an art form,
Your Sordello, and that the modern world
Needs such a ragbag to stuff all its thought in:
Say that I dump my catch, shiny and silvery
As fresh sardines flapping and slipping on the marginal cobbles?
…
Give up th’intaglio method. (Personae, 229)
For Pound, the image was a form of maximal intensity: it served, like good prose, for
the examination of truth through direct presentation. “Vorticism,” Pound had declared in
1914, “is art before it has spread itself to flaccidity, into elaboration and secondary
application.” (Gaudier, 102). Still, as was obvious from the Three Cantos, Pound had to face a
transition from the unit of composition, the image, to the question of how to relate these small
units together in an architecture of design that should be give a meaningful statement of the
world he lived in.
The Great War changed the fate of the Vorticist avant-garde and finally destroyed it.
Gaudier and Hulme were killed in the trenches. Lewis went to the front and was no more able
to edit Blast, which ran only two issues in June 1914 and July 1915. In the new post-war
climate he and Epstein turned away from abstract art, fundamentally revising their artistic
strategies of 1913-1914.6 Gaudier’s death was Pound’s most severe personal loss of the war.
After publishing his memoir of him in 1916, there seemed no further reason to be interested in
English art.
Dissatisfaction with his own poetry leading to a desire to turn away from an aesthetics
that seemed too small-scale and abstruse, led Pound to writing Hugh Selwyn Mauberley that
he would conceive as a farewell to London and to the kind of work he had done in the past.
The imperative was to “give up th’ intaglio method,” the well-wrought shorter poem
conceived as an aesthetic object, and turn his attention to the messy material of history. The
idea of the turbine, the dynamic presentation of the energized past relevant for the present and
future, would underlie the collagistic form his poem was to take.

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Paris, 1921-1924

After the exhaustion of the London avant-garde7 and his move to Paris, Pound was
actively looking for new contacts he could use for his position of associated editor with The
Dial and The Little Review. His earlier interest in sculpture, as well as his acquaintance with
John Quinn,8 prompted him to seek out Constantin Brâncuşi.9
Their first meeting in April 192110 gave Pound a renewed opportunity to play roles
that were by now familiar to him. In his London years he had been the helper, promoter, and
critic of his artist friends – he wanted to be the same for Brâncuşi. His most important move
in this direction was to use his contacts with The Little Review, which was due to re-appear as
a quarterly in the fall of 1921, to organize a special number dedicated to the sculptor. This
issue, containing 24 photographic reproductions of sculptures and an essay by Pound, marked
the emergence of Brâncuşi criticism and was to form the foundation for the art studies
devoted to him. The essay, however, displeased the sculptor, who did not wish others to
publicize him, whether through articles, books, or photographs. He found Pound’s later
intention to write a book about his art particularly offensive: the poet felt obliged to send him
a letter of apology for having had this “infamous” idea.11 “Ils sont empoisonnés par la gloire,”
the sculptor commented about “the others.” His own solution to the thorny question of self
promotion and sales was to stay away from the fray of competition and control the process of
viewing from his studio. Because of the scandal surrounding his Princess X at the Salon des
Indépendants the previous year, when his sculpture had been removed by the police because
of indecency, he had ceased exhibiting his work in Parisian galleries; he did not want articles
or books written about him; he forbade viewers or even friends to take photographs of the
sculptures in his studio. Brâncusi chose to perform roles that other artists usually delegated to
others: he was his own curator, critic, photographer, and dealer. For exhibitions in America,
he relied on old friends like Edward Steichen, Walter Pach, and Marcel Duchamp;
nevertheless, he felt that the presentation of his sculpture in his immediate environment was
his own responsibility and he controlled it with an iron hand. Since Brâncuşi was no writer,
his reflections on his own work are restricted to orally transmitted maxims or to statements
written down by people with whom he had a personal acquaintance. He did not permit others
to comment on his work or explain it. His antipathy towards commentary on his art was so
extreme that when in the late 1940s, Carola Giedion Welcker told the sculptor that her
monograph about him was about to come out, his reply was “Give me the name of the
publisher so that I may take action.”12
Avoiding glory meant in principle turning the studio into the only valid museum of his
work. Brâncuşi’s unpleasant experience with exhibitions13 gradually convinced him that no
other collection could show his sculptures in a legitimate manner. In the studio, his pieces did
not have to compete with other art for attention as in museums; they did not primarily serve
decorative, status, or investment purposes as in the house of a collector; no curator could
determine their manner of display; they could be shown to their utmost advantage in the ever-
changing phases of light and shade proper to their place of origin. The studio functioned as a
sanctuary to his art in which the sculptures acquired a hallowed, religious aura. Viewing was

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tuned to this sacredness; it was a rite of initiation. Brâncuşi’s practice was to select guests by

recommendation; he led them through the studio and patiently explained to them his views on
art. Restricting himself to his immediate environment, the sculptor was often able to
orchestrate the viewing experience on a one to one basis. He could also determine what the
initiates were allowed to see and the way they saw it. By turning the studio into a temple with
himself as the only officiating priest,14 he offered a new concept of sculpture as collage,
where the arrangement of individual pieces could be seen as parts/fragments of a whole and
where light, the framing of the studio’s walls, and the interaction between the artwork and
domestic life became part of an overall concept. He was thus able to control the disposition of
objects and their relationship to one another; he could provide a picture of their embeddedness
into their context of production, and create an image of himself as an artisan-peasant-priest,
whose life was devoted to the sacred ideal of beauty and perfection. The studio became itself
a total work of art. Like all the other guests, Pound was very sensitive to its magic spell:15
The effect of Brancusi’s work is cumulative. He has created a whole universe of
FORM. You’ve got to see it together. A system. An Anschauung. Not simply a
pretty thing on the library table. (Visual Arts, 308)
In spite of his apparent unwillingness to deal with the sordid, terrestrial details of sales
and advertising, Brâncuşi assumed them and very reluctantly allowed Pound promotional or
managerial functions, the way the poet’s other friends, Wyndham Lewis, Gaudier Brzeska,
T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce had done. Maybe the age difference also played a role: Brâncuşi
was nine years older, having come of artistic age in 1907; he was disinclined to relinquish
control over his work like a beginner. Moreover, at the time when Pound met him, Brâncuşi
had already established channels for patronage, sales, and foreign exhibitions. His work was
selling, his friendships were established. He trusted Marcel Duchamp to organize the

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American exhibitions in New York and Chicago. His friend Henri Roché was aiding him in
his sometimes difficult relationship with his main patron, John Quinn. Pound came on the
scene late in Brâncuşi’s life, and besides, he was a writer and part time art journalist,
occupations which the sculptor fundamentally distrusted. Despite these negative
considerations, he did agree to supply the photographs for The Little Review number and later
for The Dial (January 1922 issue) even though he was deeply averse to Pound’s comments as
a critic.16 In retrospect, Brâncuşi’s attitude did much to boost the poet’s position as his first
commentator. Since he was one of the very few to print his observations in the sculptor’s
lifetime, Pound’s ideas acquired a foundational status in Brâncuşi studies as a first and
influential position on his art.
In his dealings with sculpture in his London years, Pound did not count himself among
Brâncuşi’s admirers. In a letter of September 1917 he commented to the editor of the Little
Review, Margaret Anderson, that the sculptor was “sperm untempered with the faintest touch
of intelligence” (Scott, Pound/Little Review, 124). Once he had seen the studio, however,
Pound changed his mind and came to regard Brâncuşi as a fellow Vorticist: he recognized in
the sculptor’s work the same concept of created, non-imitative form he had seen in Epstein
and Gaudier before the war, the same allegiance to carving directly in stone, metal or wood,
the same allure of the contemplative retreat from the chaos of the modern world. There is
therefore a continuity between Pound’s sculpture criticism of 1914–1917, his Brâncuşi article
in The Little Review (1921), and his comments scattered in The Dial (1922) and elsewhere.
Pound himself declared openly, writing in his “Paris Letter” for The Dial that “Brancusi,
contemporary of Epstein or somewhat older, is in many essentials in agreement with the best
work of Epstein and of Gaudier” (Visual Arts, 171).
Developing his practice separately from the Vorticists, Brâncuşi’s inner artistic
impulse had led him to a similar aesthetic: he had started his apprenticeship in art doing busts
and naturalistic representations of the human body. He soon found this kind of sculpture
deadly, and henceforth disparagingly called it “beefsteak.” From 1907, at roughly the same
time with Picasso’s gradual move towards Cubism, Brâncuşi started mutilating his objects,
carving fragments, erasing the particularity of the sitter to arrive at a de-naturalized statement
which he felt to be his personal expression. Effacing the markers of the natural and particular
became a lifelong procedure in Brâncuşi’s art. Considering the various versions he provided
for certain sculptural ideas such as “the bird,” or “the sleeping muse,” the viewer can follow
the turn from mimesis to the abstract idea, from the mutilated, stylized imitation to the
artefact presenting the visual correlative to a concept.
The banishment of “meaning” was closely related to the rejection of mimesis. To a
Vorticist like Gaudier or Epstein, the interest of the work of art consisted in the external
disposition of surfaces and masses, rather than in a subject matter for which the form could
serve as representation. The viewer was supposed to appreciate the quality of the sculptural
statement spontaneously, on the basis of an intuitive response to its formal merits. Brâncuşi
seemed to concur with this view when he said: “Do not hunt for obscure formulae, nor for
mystery. It is pure joy that I give you.” The sculptor was looking for innocent viewers who
would have a gut reaction to his art and not philosophize, weave stories, or hunt for symbols.
The ban on other people’s criticism and commentaries during his lifetime was an integral part

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of Brâncuşi’s anti-intellectualist bias and expressed the sculptor’s total allegiance to the
concept of form in his art.
Apart from the exclusive attention to the disposition of masses and planes, the
Vorticist artist respected the material in which he was working and did not demand from it
qualities or effects alien to its nature (Literary Essays, 442). This respect for the material,
which Pound had noticed in Epstein’s use of flenite and Gaudier’s of alabaster, loomed large
in Brâncuşi’s statements and aphorisms about his work and was congruent with his rejection
of mimesis. The sculptor aimed to work in the direction dictated by the material, suiting his
idea to its requirements, even allowing it to suggest the theme of his art. When subjecting it to
his purpose, he saw it as continuing its life through his effort. If working in marble, for
instance, he used its veining (Mademoiselle Pogany 1920, 1931), if carving in wood, (The
Sorceress, Nancy Cunard), he used the grain to enhance the visual impact. The viewers were
meant to intuit the natural language of the material and learn to discern its contribution to
expression.17 In an unsent letter to Quinn, which was preserved among his papers, he
declared:
All I am trying to do is attune what is in my mind to the materials that come my
way. Each material has a particular language that I do not set out to eliminate and
replace with my own, but simply to make it express what I’m thinking, what I am
seeing, in its own language, that is its alone (which is part of the beautiful). So,
you will understand that wood, or for that matter marble, is by no means the result
of a fluke; it comes from very hard and very long work and from a concern for
absolute impartiality. (qtd. in Chave, Brancusi, 206)
As a guest at the studio, Pound also observed another similarity with the attitude of
sculptors he had known in London: the retreat into contemplation. In his article “The
Caressability of the Greeks,” (March 1914) Pound had commented that Vorticist sculptures
existed in and for themselves, entirely removed from the mundane superficiality of modern
life. They represented the “immutable, the calm thoroughness of unchanging relations”
(Visual Arts, 183). In his retreat from the world, Brâncuşi was even more radical than the
Vorticists since he lived in his studio, used carving tools to cook, ate and slept on slabs of
stone. During his visits Pound observed this continuity between life and art, which were both
brought into harmony with the contemplative ideal. As Pound pointed out in his “Paris Letter”
to The Dial, “Brâncuşi had created a universe, a cielo, a Platonic heaven full of pure and
essential forms, and a cavern of a studio which is, in a very old sense, a temple of peace, of
stillness, a refuge from the noise of motor traffic and the current advertisements” (Visual Arts,
172). The studio seemed to have the antidote to the diseases of the age, the war, the hurry, and
the ugliness. Pound would later write that its beauty could wash the soul clean like a bath in
the Gulf of Tigullio in the sunlight of a June day (Visual Arts, 307).
In his essay about Brâncuşi (Little Review, September 1921), Pound naturally drew
parallels to the Vorticist work he had known in London. At the same time, he was aware of
elements that made the Romanian sculptor include, yet somehow at the same time transcend
the Vorticists. He remarked that Brâncuşi seemed to integrate all forms into one form – in his
ovoid shapes in particular, the sculptor had found “the master-keys to the world of form - not
‘his’ world of form, but as much as he had found of ‘the’ world of form. They contain or

9
imply, or should, the triangle and the circle” (Literary Essays, 443). This last reference was to
the geometry used by Gaudier in his Red Stone Dancer, a piece that Pound much admired.
Brâncuşi had not only gone farther in conceptualizing primary essential forms but had given
to his work an aerial, spiritual quality that was missing in Vorticist sculpture, which by
contrast, tended to be compact, squat, and massive. Pound interpreted this as a “revolt against
one sort of solidity” (Literary Essays, 443) as an anti-rhetorical statement implying a greater
simplicity, modesty, and impersonality.
However much Pound was championing the concept of form in sculpture at this time,
his own poetic practice was diverging fundamentally from the requirements of this ideal. In
his last important London poems, Homage to Sextus Propertius and Mauberley, he had
pondered the terms on which he could transform his work from small-scale detached
aestheticism to involvement in history and modernity. He did not choose to withdraw from
the world but engage in it. Though the first Cantos were only hesitantly historical and political
meshing myth, the troubadours, antiquity, and medievalism liberally with a protest against the
war, Pound chose to refine his involvement in public affairs and use rhetorical strategies to
match it. This meant a radical departure from the contemplative stance he so admired in
Brâncuşi. He declared: “The symbolist position, artistic aloofness from world affairs is no
good now. It may have assisted several people to write and work in the 80’s but it is not, in
1921 opportune or apposite” (Contact I Summer 1921). This did not mean that he aligned
Brâncuşi with the symbolists, he was too much aware of the sculptor’s status as a radical
innovator; rather, he rejected the retreat from the public as incompatible with a post-war
writer who has something interesting to say.
During his sojourn in Paris, Pound revised the Cantos that he had already written in
1919 and added new ones to form the first instalment of his long poem, which he published in
1925 under the title of A Draft of XVI Cantos. The method that he chose for what was to
become his master opus was diametrically opposed to the sculptural form he championed in
his art criticism. While admiring a sculptor whose work represented essential forms lifted out
of history, Pound introduced a wealth of historical detail into his poem. Whereas Brâncuşi
was committed to turning the presentation of the natural object into the esential embodiment
of an idea, Pound affirmed his total allegiance to the concrete and the particular. By
condensing, simplifying, and erasing particularity, the sculptor was creating a repertoire of
separate, clearly delineated forms, which in their turn suggested abstract ideas: beginnings
(Newborn), repose (The Sleeping Muse), flight (Bird in Space), gliding (Fish). A similar
process of condensation resulted in Pound’s case in a jagged configuration of apparently
heterogeneous particulars. The same Modernist practice of paring down the redundancies of
the tradition had ended up creating two visions of modern art: in the case of Brâncuşi, it was
the single form, one sculpture, one idea; in that of Pound’s, it was the luminous detail, the
fragment that acquired its meaning by being placed in relation to others in a collage.
In the divergence between Pound’s and Brâncuşi’s artistic practices, we may follow
two opposing trends in the movement and development of modernism: On the one hand, the
reliance on form as unit, where expression concentrates upon giving visible shape to a single
idea; on the other hand, the disjunctive practice of bringing together bits and pieces, the
collage principle that Picasso and Braque had brought to the attention of artists and public in

10
1912.18 As one might expect, Brâncuşi and Picasso had little respect for each other.19 The
former strove for the truthful shaping of a few forms, limited in number, whose various
versions would approximate perfection and beauty; the latter experimented with the visual,
ephemeral artefacts, which could be later discarded. If Brâncuşi worked humbly at the shrine
of art, Picasso was questioning and deconstructing it by undermining art’s claim to
permanence and beauty. Both artists used the cut as starting point in their endeavors: while
Brâncuşi was cutting away and simplifying so as to create an effect of harmony and repose as
a retreat from the turmoil and ephemerality of history, Picasso conveyed a sense of
disjunction without redemption where neither continuity nor resolution could be achieved, or
even expected (Chave, Brancusi, 63). The process of discarding traditional art assumptions
through the technique of the cut, evident in the work of both artists, served different aims: for
Brâncuşi, it was a road to overcoming the fragmentariness and incoherence of the outside
world in a realm of certainty and rest. Cutting served the endless refinement of the polished
surface into unity and perfection. Picasso used cutting in a different way: he foregrounded the
procedure so as to exhibit mutilation and fragmentariness. The viewer of Brâncuşi’s work
could have a single startling epiphany and an intuition of mystery, whereas a viewer of
Picasso’s collages was meant to be an “analytical” viewer/reader who could make sense of the
agglutination and superposition of particulars.
It is obvious that Pound’s understanding of the cut as a method in his long poem is
analogous to Picasso’s. When the poet took it up, collage was a new visual form, and a
technique that the cubists had invented. In spite of the diversity of practices and instantiations
in all art forms throughout the successive decades of the 20th century, it is nevertheless
possible to isolate characteristics that are common to all forms of collage: the cut as basic
invariant and procedure; flatness, i.e. the reliance on surface and texture, not on depth of
perspective; and finally, heterogeneity, the constant tension between fragments, or rather
between the new, alien element and the rest of the composition. Pound was one of the first
experimenters with the form in literature and developed it over the years to a true
encyclopaedia of techniques. While composing the so-called Malatesta Cantos, which he
published in July 1923, he went one step further in combining Cubist strategies with the
Vorticist requirement of greater intensity. In attempting to make poetry as well written as
prose, Pound decided that historical documents had the virtues of simplicity, directness, and
truth; they possessed therefore the qualities of the image, hence of poetry. He included
quotations of documents in his poem without poeticizing them, but rather foregrounding their
mundane, functional, prosaic, even fragmentary and context-bound qualities. In his
presentation of historical events, Pound turned his attention from image to action, from noun
phrases to verbs, thereby shifting his diction from a poetic, contemplative vision to the
journalistic testimony of an eye-witness:
Down here in the marsh they trapped him
in one year
And he stood in the water up to his neck
to keep the hounds off him,
And he floundered about in the marsh
and came in after three days (IX/34)

11
 Pound’s thorough immersion in the mutability of history, his changes of method and
deliberate use of the prosaic subjects and prose-like lines gave the texture of the Cantos the
character of ragged materiality teetering on the brink of chaos. At the same time, however,
Pound strove to create a sense of coherence and hoped to achieve it at the end of his effort,
when his poem was to be considered completed. He was deeply disturbed by the demands for
form and hoped to be able to clarify ambiguities, order ideas, and resolve the dilemmas of the
disjunctive texture within a larger harmony. In this sense we must understand his repeated
attempts at providing keys to understanding The Cantos as a whole (using various tropes like
‘tale of the tribe;’ ‘periplum;’ ‘Dante’s journey’) as well as his injunctions to his readers to
have patience and evaluate the opus when it is finished. His commentary on W. C. Williams’s
work (1928) tells us much about Pound’s own defensiveness concerning the path he had
chosen:
Very well, he does not ‘conclude’; his work has been ‘often formless’,
‘incoherent’, opaque, obscure, obfuscated, confused, truncated, etc.
I am not going to say: ‘form’ is a non-literary component shoved on to literature
by Aristotle or by some non-literatus who told Aristotle about it. Major form is
not a non-literary component. But it can do us no harm to stop an hour or so and
consider the number of very important chunks of world-literature in which form,
major form, is remarkable mainly for absence. (Literary Essays, 394)
Pound could defend the standpoint that form was not necessary on the ground of his
Vorticist conviction that every art has to rely on the “primary pigment.” In his view, it was
only sculpture that had form as its fundamental procedure. In poetry, it was the image which
was the primary pigment. The reliance on the concreteness and particularity of the image as
the necessary fundamental ingredient of poetry led Pound quite naturally to small,
heterogeneous units of presentation as soon as his decision to write a long poem started to
take shape. The allegiance to the image may also explain Pound’s emphasis on the particular,
on the item of perception, an emphasis which may have led to a certain literality, a refusal to
interpret the given as a metaphor for something else (Perloff, 181-182).
This apparent absence of form was perceived by Pound’s first critics as a fundamental
failure and was one of the main causes for the rejection of his poetry. The “unbridged
transitions,” the “nervous obsession,” and the “stammering confusion” noticed by W.B. Yeats
when reading the Cantos, emerged into a poetic landscape where the “full, sphere-like,
single” form was felt to be ideal (Yeats, Oxford Book of Modern Verse, xxiv). Since
heterogeneity and ruptures, not coherence and unity were the prime elements of Pound’s
poem, New Critics like Richard Blackmur and Yvor Winters observed that disjunctiveness
was the aesthetic principle of a man who was “neither a great poet nor a great thinker” and
who “at his best is a maker of great verse rather than a great poet” (Blackmur, Language as
Gesture, 124). The incoherence was simply the surface of a deep lack of logic, a characteristic
of The Cantos that the New Critics were quick to notice and condemn.
Blackmur realized that The Cantos was an explicit literal poem, that it had no depth:
one needn’t “pierce” language to a level of meaning hidden behind it: in short, after the
edifice of allusion was elucidated, the poem did not require interpretation. All its difficulties
were related to the surface, to the verbal texture. The New Critics felt deeply uncomfortable

12
with the flatness and explicitness of The Cantos and searched for underlying structures that
would overcome and suspend disjunction. They felt that a poem in need of no interpretation
cannot be important, that a surface without depth left readers only with a bag of rhetorical
tricks ennobling themselves with the help of historical allusions. Their discourse was marked
by a desire for resolution, and a wish to overcome ruptures within a vision of formal unity and
wholeness. To conclude, what a New Critic like Allen Tate required from The Cantos was a
certain version of modernity that was best represented by Brâncuşi’s art:
a coherent form […] There is nothing mysterious about coherent form. It is the
presence of an order in a literary work which permits us to understand one part in
relation to all the other parts. What should concern us in looking at the Cantos is
the formal irresponsibility. (Essays of Four Decades, 511)
At first sight, the differences between Brâncuşi’s formal principles and Pound’s are
obvious. The one created abstract, apparently whole, unified objects, the other collated
fragments partly taking them from texts written by others; one retreated from the turmoil of
history to the eternal realm of essential forms, the other immersed himself in the particularity
of the outside world. The contrasts prevail: between the a-temporality of the sculpture and the
historical approach of the poem; between the unity of object and the threading together of
fragments; between the mystery and the mythical aura of the sculpture and the factuality and
literalness of the texts. Pound had found in Brâncuşi a sculptor of prime Vorticist intensity.
On the other hand, his poem, based on the doctrine of the image, was always in danger of
losing that quality in the myriad of fragments and quotations. Though The Cantos is a poem
unified by its method, which is the same and used throughout, the method itself was so
radically disjunctive that it obscured and dislocated the perception of form.
Yet, if we go beyond the surface contrast between their practices, we might discern
certain similarities of aesthetic principles, or at least a kind of convergence that is disturbing
in artists so very different. The use of the fragment, the drive toward simplification, and the
search for underlying meaning were common to both. Pound regarded his fragments as
“luminous details,” as moments of intensity that, when combined in certain ways, would give
an implication of a radiant, significant ideogrammic meaning beyond language. In spite of
superficial first impressions, Brâncuşi too extrapolated from the fragment to the whole, since
his objects, though they gave the illusion of unity and completeness, were in fact fragments.
This was noticed not only by careful art historians, but also by reviewers of Brâncuşi’s
exhibitions in America:
Many of the heads have no eyes, ears or noses. The genitals of a young man have
been lopped off, a young French girl has been left armless and a woman in prayer
has no left eye [misprint for “arm”]. The ‘Sleeping Muse’ has ears placed so far to
the rear that they almost join at the back of the head and a sister muse has a
bulging hypergoitrous throat. And then there are combless cocks, finless fish,
legless turtles and wingless birds (Shirey, qtd. in Chave, Brancusi, 287).
Both sculptor and poet wanted to eliminate what they regarded as superfluous
particularity to aim at signifying the truth of the subject.
In addition to radically reducing and simplifying their artistic statements, both artists
chose to use repetition as a method of composition. Brâncuşi returned to the same sculptural

13
motif over and over again, providing several versions of it at various times. If we take the
theme of sleep as an example, we notice in the very act of versioning, the process of erasure
through which the particularities of the natural object gradually disappeared so as to enable
the representation of the abstract idea. In the first attempt at this theme, (Sleep 1908),
Brâncuşi had made it seem that the human head buried in the marble had just emerged from
the inside of the stone to the outside. This traditional strategy of presentation however, did
injustice to the theme, since it “revealed” the face offering itself directly to the gaze of the
outside world. In his Sleeping Muse series (1909; 1917), the features lightly carved so as to
suggest that the mind turns itself inward and sinks into the world of sleep. If in the first
version the human features are naturalistically represented and clearly carved, in the later ones
they seem to disappear back into the stone.

Brâncuşi’s various versions of the same theme were experiments or necessary steps on
the way to greater simplicity and more precise expression. For Pound, on the other hand,
versioning certain chunks of text was not necessarily a step to greater refinement. Repetition
was important for emphasis, since meaningful details could get lost in the sheer mass of the
work and continuous addition of fragments. One of the themes of A Draft of XXX Cantos, for
instance, was the significance of individual constructive effort, a theme that Pound followed
and illustrated with examples ranging from the Renaissance condottiere Sigismundo
Malatesta to American entrepreneurs. Here is a facet of this ideogram, which Pound repeated
and varied for emphasis:
“J’ai
Obtenu une brulure” M. Curie, or some other scientist
“Qui m’a coûté six mois de guerison.”
and continued his experiments. (XXIII/107)

“J’ai obtenu” said M. Curie, or some other scientist

“A burn that cost me six months in curing,”
And continued his experiments. (XXVII/129)
This example shows that perfecting a certain expression was not Pound’s primary
goal. Rather than polish poetic expression, his purpose seemed rather to remind, re-
contextualize, find a different lighting, choose from the mass of possible formulations the one
that would “get off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader’s mind, onto a part that
will register” (Guide to Kulchur, 51). Various versions of the same statement were placed in
the web of the poem to serve his essentialist goal – the truth of the detail, the process of
discarding the superfluous, the signification of complexity through simplicity.

14
 The process of simplification led both artists away from the pinnacles and barnacles of
“art.” They had both learned the rules and practices of their craft in their youth by working
along traditional lines. With maturity, they arrived at forms in which craftsmanship was so
refined as to become invisible - absolute objectivity became ingrained to their art. Brâncuşi
aimed at sculpting forms so perfect as to seem natural, not made by human hand. His own
constraints forbidding rhetoric, ornament, or signs of authorial expression gave his work an
effect of purpose and serenity. Through endless polishing, the presence of the human was
effaced in his objects, since they had no rough surfaces, holes or bulges to suggest emotion.
As he declared: “there must be none of oneself in it – no impertinence, no pride.”
Approaching something akin to the correct measure meant for the sculptor finally ridding his
work of himself (Teja Bach, 272). Pound, on the other hand, hid artistry behind quotations
and historical documents. He very seldom let himself be seen in his poem; the collage form
and the citationary practice he had chosen undermined the signature of a single writing
authority. He was occasionally “ego, scriptor cantilenae,” “an old man,” the scribe recording
events in history.
Moreover, the view of Brâncuşi as a sculptor correlating a single object to a certain
abstract idea has to be relativized to a certain extent and completed by what Friedrich Teja
Bach called “the combinatorial dimension” (Brancusi, 26). Traditional
Brâncuşi criticism (not least Pound’s) addressed the sculpted figure
and also the bases, but considered them separately, neglecting the
interplay between them. Newer perspectives on the sculptor (Chave,
1993; Teja Bach, 1995) have drawn attention to the tension that is
sometimes present in this relationship. Brâncuşi experimented
continuously with the versioning of the interplay between sculpture
and base by combining forms, colors, and textures. Take the Newborn
of 1916: it is made of polished marble and rests on a wooden base.
This base is taller and larger than the ovoid form of the head. Whereas
the sculpture is made of the noblest stone polished to perfection, the wooden base reminds of
columns and ornamentation used in Romanian peasant houses: it is coarse, with rounded
edges, split and porous, as if damaged by time and rain. The contrast between perfect and
imperfect, light and dark, smooth and rough, eternity-time, artist-artisan split the supposed
unity of the sculptural object.
Brâncuşi would later complicate matters by providing three or
four bases of various shapes and materials to serve as pedestal for
some of his objects. He further adapted those with combinatorial
ideas, for example in the Newborn of 1923. It is made of polished
bronze and mounted on four bases: polished bronze disc, reflecting
the head like a mirror; white marble cruciform; large head-like base
of wood with a huge hole gaping in the middle; low limestone drum.
We find here a similar tension between form, color, and texture as in
the version of 1916. However, the head-like wooden base, being
larger than the bronze ovoid on top, does seem to take the upper hand and usurp all the
attention.

15
 Moreover, this is a form that the careful viewer has seen before: it
is the enlarged head of Socrates that Brâncuşi had made the previous year.
In this reading, the Newborn acquires narrative and analytical qualities: it
is a creation of Socrates’ mind, since it is mounted on his large speaking
head and is reflected there in the mirror of the disc. The low limestone
drum at the bottom could be considered a neck or a collar, rather than a
support. The attention of the viewer is therefore no longer concentrated on
the ovoid head, for which the four bases serve as a support: sculpture and
bases are taken in together and are parts of the same idea. Since the
Newborn is made of fragments taken from sculptures made before, one
may consider it similar to a collage. Socrates itself owes something to this impulse: in that
work, two heads are poised on top of a column of the same shape that Brâncuşi had used to
make the legs of The Little French Girl (1914). Parts of former sculptures could be used as
components for another. Brâncuşi was quoting himself.
His combinatorial impulse took another form in arranging sculptures into ensembles.
One example of this experiment was John Quinn’s purchase of 1916: The Kiss, made of stone,
was placed at the center of a space delineated by Gate, Bench, and Caryatid, carved in wood.
Another combination, to be seen in a Brâncuşi photo, was Little French Girl with Column and
Cup, which the sculptor wanted to call “The Child in the World: Mobile Group” (Teja Bach,
154). But if one is looking for a fully developed instance of the collage principle in Brâncuşi’s
practice, one can find it in his studio – there he combined wholes and fragments, finished and
unfinished work. Household objects and sculptures lost their fixed boundaries and served as
items in each other’s domains. Ideas and materials, sculptures and tools, bases and furniture
made up a collage Gesamtkunstwerk. The idea of the studio in which finished objects
emerged as foci of intensity amid a chaos of work in progress, discarded material, and
unformed materiality is similar to the Cantos, in which plateaus of coherence stuck out of the
jagged territory where textual elements often in foreign languages, might not seem to combine
at all. Both studio and poem were defined by their provisionality, the ever-shifting balance
between old and new elements, constantly revised placements and lighting.
The continuous experimenting with the forms and principles they worked with
eventually led Pound and Brâncuşi to grapple with structures that defied closure. In the case
of the unified object, the open form could be achieved through the repetition of the single
unit, as in the sculptor’s Column of the Infinite; in collage, through the consistent application
of the same principle of cutting. In an additive structure like The Cantos, the final cut is
forever deferred, since no fragment can sum up all the preceding ones and be an adequate
representative for everything that had been written before. In Pound’s formulation, “there is
no substitute for a lifetime” (XCVIII/711). Though creating open structures was not
Brâncuşi’s primary purpose in art, he envisaged the perfection of his objects as open-
endedness and regarded his Column of the Infinite as his best achievement. As he declared:
I think a true form ought to suggest infinity. The surfaces ought to look as though
they went on forever, as though they proceeded out from the mass into some
perfect and complete existence. (Soby, Brancusi, 50)

16
 Brâncuşi became aware relatively early that his striving for perfection would bring
him to the representation of the infinite, since in the catalogue to the Brummer exhibition in
1926, he referred to his column as an object, which, if enlarged, could touch the sky. In
contrast, in spite of continuously experimenting with the collage principle, Pound was unable
to foresee its implications—his conclusion, “it coheres all right/ even if my notes do not
cohere” (CXVI/817) showed that his desire to signify a unified whole through a configuration
of brilliant particulars ran against the form he had hit on: a form that is fundamentally open
and virtually infinite, a matrix whose additive impulse admits local structuring but not closure
or coherence.
The critical literature has often commented on the unfinished character of The
Cantos.20 Critics and editors have sought to fix the poem, to ascertain its beginning and
ending, locating the latter in the Drafts and Fragments volume, especially in Canto CXVI, in
the Olga fragment, which Pound would have liked as a closing statement, or else in Canto
CIX, the last poem of Thrones. Following Pound’s own desire for conjuring coherence, the
critical tradition has sought a thematic continuity and a sense of resolution in the poem. None
of these readings have provided a stable basis for giving sense to the poem as a whole. The
reason may be that the method itself, which from 1927 Pound started calling “ideogrammic,”
does not admit of resolution, since one cannot find at the end of the poem a formulation or a
fragment that might include and redeem all the others.
Similarly to Pound, who started The Cantos somewhat tentatively, naming its first
cycle “A Draft of XVI Cantos,” Brâncuşi started his magnum opus, The Column of the
Infinite, in 1917 and versioned it to the end of his career. The column idea had a humble
origin, since it evolved from a wooden base that the sculptor used for Chimera in 1917 and
then for later sculptures, like Golden Bird, Bird in Space, or the Torso of a Young Man. By
1925, Brâncuşi had made four columns of wood (Miller, 205). A further column in plaster
was made in 1930-31, inaugurating an opening towards other materials, textures, and colors.
For a long time, the sculptor played with the idea of putting one of his cups or birds on top.
There are six columns in all (Miller, 205), which were heightened progressively. The tallest is
the monument at Tg. Jiu, Romania (1938); it is made of cast iron and about 30 meters high. It
consists of 15 rhomboidal modules, which Brâncuşi called “beads,”
held together by an invisible pole of metal running through the middle
(Miller, 202). The sculptor never ceased dreaming of erecting higher
structures; towards the end of his life he was negotiating a 400 meter
column in Chicago, on the shore of Lake Michigan. Involving himself
with the idea of the infinite meant that he had to go on building ever
higher structures by testing various materials and new environments.
Brâncuşi attempted to go on, as well as up, by producing several
versions of the column and making it higher and higher (Miller, 209).
The Tg. Jiu version was an intermediary phase, but proved to be the
best instantiation of the column idea. Though it is a monument (to the victims of WWI) and
stands in a public place, it subverts the very concept of the monumental. It starts directly from
a flattened base, standing on half a module, whose other half seems to be buried underground.
It “ends” in another half module, open to the sky.

17
 If the column continues by repeating itself, The Cantos proceeded from a fragment to
the next in endless irregular stitching. Coherence and continuations were possible but not
necessary. Not only did the whole body of work have an uncertain and arbitrary ending;
games with open endings were played at the level of individual Cantos. Pound could question
the final cut of his poems, ending some of them in continuations, like “so that” (Canto I),
“and” (Cantos II, VIII), “:” (Cantos LI, LXXXV), “,” (Canto LXXXIX). Sentences begun in a
canto could continue in the next, over the blank space imposed by the book (Cantos XL–
XLI), or else, the last word of a canto could be taken over and repeated at the beginning of the
next (Cantos XVIII–XIX; XX–XXI). The idea of the book as a closed artefact is the enemy of
endless writing and a bad container for the collage method: it was largely responsible for the
attempts to supplement The Cantos with a “transcendence effect,” with a sense of fulfilment,
a conclusion that would embrace and justify the heterogeneity of the poem and provide a
powerful closing statement.
If we disregard the material constraints on the open form, like the book for Pound or
the specific context or material for Brâncuşi, we might spot certain similarities that are
important to signal. Neither structure has a visible beginning: the foundation of Brâncuşi's
monument at Tg. Jiu is a pyramidal steel base encased in concrete, five meters below the
ground. This foundation is invisible, as well as the middle pole holding the modules together
one on top of the other, like beads on a string. The column looks as if it grew, like a tree, out
of the earth. Looking at it, the viewer cannot imagine that there might be something else in
the ground, just a continuation of the module, strung to another invisible one like a kind of
sculptural “and.” Pound’s poem begins with “And” and thus points to older stories and older
poetry which are the invisible part of the written. For his Canto I, Pound went as far as
possible in search of origins: he chose the trip to Hades episode of the Odyssey in the
conviction that this story was older than Homer’s epic. He thus turned Homer from the
originator of literature into a kind of intermediary between our world and a much older
submerged stratum of stories. Moreover, he presented his own rendering of this episode as an
item in a relay, as it had been handed to him in a translation by Andreas Divus, written in the
16th century. Wherever we might look for beginnings in The Cantos, they are deferred and
invisible.
Both the poem and the column have open endings and could proceed at infinitum, on
the strength of their method: repetition of a single unit in Brâncuşi’s case and stitching
together of fragments and luminous details in Pound’s. Both works are governed by the sign
of the “and”; they are additive chains which are virtually endless. The sculptor dreamed of
huge columns in Central Park or on the shore of Lake Michigan, projects which were not
realized. The poet wanted to write about 120 cantos but had to stop at 109, plus some drafts
and fragments. The work of both, as it stands, is an intermediate phase in projects that were
meant to be never-ending, expressions of an ever-repeatable principle.

18
Afterword

Both artists had begun experimenting with the ideas on their master opus before they
met in 1921. The trajectories of their lives and the development of their artistic careers were
already leading them in opposite directions, away from each other. However, the encounter
with Brâncuşi consolidated Pound’s Vorticist convictions and healed part of the pain and loss
caused by Gaudier’s death and the failure of the English avant-garde. The sculptor had
survived the war and had stayed true to his commitment to form. He had not been bent by
hardship and had not recanted on the modernist experiment. Brâncuşi’s work was a luminous
instance of what Gaudier might have become, had he lived. In this sense, the encounter with
the Romanian sculptor bridged the gap between the glorious years of Vorticist sculpture
(1913-1915), which had been the time of Pound’s first theoretical groping towards a new
direction in his poetry, and 1921-1924, when the first cycle of The Cantos was actually
completed. Pound’s take on Brâncuşi as a Vorticist has proved to be an original and unique
contribution to criticism – it has value both on its own and as a means of clarification by
contrast, configuring an artistic way that he admired but would not follow.
By the time they met, both artists had shaped a few units of design, which they would
attempt to combine into larger structures. Brâncuşi had created his bird, fish, ovoid, and
sleeping muse, designs which he would repeat in various materials and recombine in various
locations with several types of bases. The sculptor’s studio was the most powerful statement
of the combinatorial dimension of his work, his universe of forms placed in the ideal
environment. At that time, Pound’s units of design had by far not the same degree of
certitude. By 1921 he had only written four Cantos which would retain a stable form through
the process of revision. It was only after he had consistently applied his principle of making
poetry as factual and precise as prose in the Malatesta Cantos that he achieved the degree of
Vorticist intensity that would enable him to establish his own provisional studio of forms. By
1924, A Draft of XVI Cantos had taken a shape that included and superseded Pound’s earlier
work. The cycle established a form in which the contingency of everyday life was connected
to the historical recurrence and the permanence of myth through a vast constellation of
analogies. By means of this form, Pound arrived at a degree of certitude similar to that which
he had admired in Epstein and Brâncuşi. At the same time, this method would be potentially
infinite, permitting a virtually endless addition of units of design. Sculpture itself would be
integrated into this constellation and associated with permanent, spiritual values.
However, Pound’s decision to turn his poem and all his intellectual activity towards
the public sphere, though generous in intention, proved disastrous. His involvement with the
economics of Social Credit and the combination of its principles with the realities of
Mussolini’s Italy led him to embrace and defend Fascism in his journalism of the nineteen
thirties and finally in the radio broadcasts he made during the war. The consequences are
well-known – an indictment for treason, a plea of insanity and thirteen years spent in a mental
institution. Pound was forcibly cut off from the realm of the public, locked away and denied
any responsibility of rational utterance.
This may be the reason why after the great public and personal disaster of WWII, the
importance of Pound’s memories of Brâncuşi, his atelier, his work, his take on art and life

19
became again poignant. The cutting away from the public was sudden and absolute, but
Brâncuşi’s example had shown Pound the supreme ways in which he could heal this rift.
The darkness and unhappiness of his internment in a cage at Pisa made Pound turn
inward and search for the possibility of finding a way out of hell and creating a personal
paradise on earth. For that he needed to remember the beauty he had experienced in his best
moments and invoke it, recreate it in words, combine it with everything he knew and
recontextualize it in his imagination. The memory of Brâncuşi’s work would not be just an
element of Pound’s late paradise, but its very blueprint (North, 160; Beasley, 184). Spots of
stillness and beauty would occur at various points in the texture of the poem. Abstract modern
art was an oasis of repose; the contemplation of a man-made object in a certain natural
environment brought forth a revelation of the transcendent, a spiritual experience. The pure
form, especially that of The Bird, the combination between perfection and roughness, polish
and porousness, the man-made and the natural remained in Pound’s memory:
And for one beautiful day there was peace.
Brâncuşi’s bird
In the hollow of pine trunks.
(Notes for CXVII et seq/821)
Brâncuşi’s life had been a luminous instance of the way an artist could live in a self-
made private paradise away from the turmoil of the world. His shrine of marble left its trace
in the Cantos as a place of happy certitude, a portal through which coherence, meaning, and
transcendence could again be recovered.

List of Illustrations

Fig. 1. The Brancusi Museum, 2001. Photo by Roxana Preda.

Fig. 2. Sleep. 1908. Bucuresti: Museul national de arta al Romaniei.
Fig. 3. Sleeping Muse (I) 1909-10. Marble. Washington D.C: Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden,.
Fig. 4. Sleeping Muse (III). 1917. Veined marble. Private collection.
Fig. 5. Newborn (II). 1920. White marble. Stockholm: Moderna Museet. Photo by Brancusi.
Fig. 6. Newborn (II). 1923. Polished bronze. Paris: Musee national d’art moderne. Centre
Georges Pompidou.
Fig. 7. Socrates. Wood. New York: MOMA.
Fig. 8. Column of the Infinite. Tg Jiu: Monument to the heroes of WWI.

Works Cited

Bach, Friedrich Teja, Margit Rowell, and Ann Temkin. Constantin Brancusi 1876-1957.
Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995.
Beasley, Rebecca. Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007.
Blackmur, Richard. Language as Gesture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.

20
Blast. Review of the Great English Vortex. Ed. by W. Lewis. London: John Lane, 1914, 1915.
Bush, Ronald. The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1976.
―. “‘Unstill, Ever Turning.’ The Composition of Ezra Pound’s Drafts and Fragments.” Ezra
Pound and Europe. Ed. Richard Taylor and Claus Melchior. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993.
223–241.
Chave, Anna. Constantin Brancusi. Shifting the Bases of Art. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993.
Cockram, Patricia. “Ezra Pound and France.” Paideuma 35 (1&2): 133-55.
Contact. Ed. by Robert McAlmon and W.C. Williams. New York: 1920-1923.
Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Ed. by Valerie Eliot. Vol.I: 1898-1920.
London: Faber, 1988.
Epstein Jacob. An Aubiography. London: Vista Books, 1963.
Giedion-Welcker, Carola. Constantin Brancusi. New York: Georges Braziller, 1959.
Hulme, T.E. Speculations. Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art. London:
Routledge, 1958.
Hulten, Pontus, Natalia Dumitresco, and Alexandre Istrati. Brancusi. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,
1986.
Janis, Harriet, and Rudi Blesh. Collage. Personalities, Concepts, Techniques. Philadelphia,
New York: Chilton, 1962.
Materer, Timothy. Vortex. Pound, Eliot, and Lewis. Ithaca: Cornell, 1979.
Moody, David. Ezra Pound: Poet. Vol. I: The Young Genius 1885-1920. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007.
Miller, Sanda. Constantin Brancusi. A Survey of His Work. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
North, Michael. The Final Sculpture. Public Monuments and Modern Poets. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1981.
Pound, Ezra.
–––. Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts. Ed. Harriet Zinnes. New York: New Directions, 1980.
–––. Gaudier Brzeska A Memoir. London: John Lane, 1916.
–––. Guide to Kulchur. 1938. London: Peter Owen, 1978.
–––. Literary Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1968.
–––. Personae. The Shorter Poems. Ed. by Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz. New York: New
Directions, 1990.
–––. Pound, Thayer, Watson, and the Dial: a Story in Letters. Ed. Walter Sutton. Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 1994.
–––. Pound/The Little Review. Ed. Th. L Scott. New York: New Directions, 1988.
–––. The Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1998.
–––. The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941. Ed. D. D. Paige. London: Faber & Faber, 1951.
Preda, Roxana. Ezra Pound's (Post)modern Poetics and Politics. Logocentrism, Language,
and Truth. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
Shirey, David L. “The Essence of Things.” Newsweek 8 Dec.1969: 137-139.

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Soby, James Thrall. “Constantin Brancusi.” Saturday Review 3 December 1955: 50-51.
Stoicheff Peter. The Hall of Mirrors. Drafts & Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound’s
Cantos. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995.
Tate, Allen. Essays of Four Decades. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Temkin, Ann. “Brancusi and His American Collectors.” Bach, Rowell, and Temkin 50-73.
Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraction and Empathy. A Contribution to the Psychology of Style.
London: Routledge, 1953.
Winters, Yvor. Forms of Discovery. Denver: Swallow, 1967.
Yeats, William Butler. “Preface.” The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Oxford: Clarendon,
1936.

NOTES

1
Pound lost sources of income because of his participation in the journal Blast, which
had caused considerable indignation in literary circles. After WWI, it became evident that his
intransigent attitude, criticism and lack of tact had alienated people who could have provided
publishing outlets (Moody, Ezra Pound Poet, 357, 398). T.S. Eliot wrote to John Quinn that
Pound’s poetry was not reviewed and that he was becoming forgotten (T.S. Eliot, 25 Jan.
1920, Letters, 356). In this respect he agreed with A.R. Orage, who in January 1921 wrote in
the New Age that: “Mr. Pound, like so many others, who have striven for the advancement of
intelligence and culture in England, has made more enemies than friends. Much of the Press
has been deliberately closed by cabal to him; his books have for some time been ignored or
written down; and he himself has been compelled to live on much less than would support a
navy” (quoted in Moody, 410).
2
Pound’s lifelong friendship with Wyndham Lewis began in 1909 (Materer, 21). His
acquaintance with Jacob Epstein is first mentioned in his letters in November 1913 (Paige,
Letters of Ezra Pound, 63). Pound met Gaudier at an exhibition at the Albert Hall in 1913 and
praised him in a letter to W.C. Williams in December the same year (Paige, 65). Epstein had
met Gaudier in 1911 (Epstein, Autobiography, 44).
3
Epstein had met Brâncuşi in Paris in 1912, while working on the tomb of Oscar
Wilde (Autobiography, 48). According to Timothy Materer, Gaudier met Brâncuşi in 1913,
when the Romanian sculptor contributed a piece to the Allied Artists Exhibition in London
(Vortex, 95). Materer further maintains that it was due to Brâncuşi’s influence that Brzeska
began carving directly in stone, a practice that was unusual at the time. The young sculptor
perceived carving as a more truthful way of releasing the energy of the object.
4
Lewis’s “Vortex” was a rather unfocussed and anarchistic call to “forget the past.”
By contrast, Gaudier’s manifesto for sculpture, also titled “Vortex,” which Pound reprinted
twice, in his Gaudier Brzeska: A Memoir (1916) and in Guide to Kulchur (1938), started by
giving a formal definition of his art, which Pound would adopt and reiterate in his articles:
“Sculptural feeling is the appreciation of masses in relation. Sculptural ability is the defining
of these masses by planes” (Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 63).
5
The idea of classifying the arts was not simply a youthful impulse. Pound repeated it
in Guide to Kulchur (1938): “my generation found criticism of the arts cluttered with work of

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men who persistently defined the works of one art in terms of another. For a decade or so we
tried to get the arts sorted out. […] For a few years paint and sculpture tried to limit
themselves to colour and form. And this did I believe clarify the minds of a small group or
series of people” (49).
6
From around 1915, Epstein’s main work would consist in moulding clay portrait
busts. His repudiation of his abstract work of 1912-1914 would be so complete that in his
Autobiography he would include only his Rock Drill as illustration for this period. When
Lewis came back from the war in 1918, he too interrupted his participation in formalist
modernism, turning more decisively in the direction of representation, in his later war scenes
compositions and portraits.
7 “The intellectual curiosity of this island [Great Britain] is nil. The desire for more
precise ideation, for better prose, for international standards, is zero; and the young American
who wants external stimulant for this thought would do better to turn his attention to Paris…”
(“Thames Morasses” Poetry XVII (March 1921) 325-29 in EPPP, 147-48).
8
John Quinn was an American lawyer and art collector giving financial and legal
support to the modernist efforts in arts and literature on both sides of the Atlantic. Between
1913 and his death in 1924, Quinn aided not only Brâncuşi and Pound, but also T. S. Eliot,
James Joyce, Gaudier-Brzeska, and Wyndham Lewis by buying their work, lending money,
aiding publishing, and mediating between artists living in Europe and institutions in America.
In 1921, Quinn was also Brâncuşi’s most important patron, having acquired an important
collection of his art since 1914.
9
The following review of the anecdotal side of the Pound-Brâncuşi encounter covers
approximately the same ground as Rebecca Beasley’s chapter on Brancusi in her Ezra Pound
and the Visual Culture of Modernism. Though sprung form the same sources, our arguments
nevertheless diverge, focusing on different aspects and implications of Pound’s relationship
with the Romanian sculptor.
10
Pound met Brâncuşi on April 23, 1921, as recorded in a letter he wrote to Thayer on
the same day (Sutton, Pound, Thayer, 218).
11
The book that Pound intended to write was probably the discarded project Four
Modern Artists (Lewis, Picasso, Brâncuşi, and Picabia). He described the plan in a letter to
Lewis on April 27, 1921, just six days after he had met Brâncuşi (Paige, 230). It was the
sculptor’s opposition, which made him drop the idea a few months later. Pound wrote to him
on October 14 : “Caro mio – J’étais bête, bête, bête vous proposer cette sacré livre. Regrette
beaucoup que ça vous empêché travailler. Je l’ai remis au kalends grecques remis remis. On
est tellement stupide – on veut toujours faire quelque chose – battre un tambour pour faire
pousser les oiseaux. Au fond je sais que ça ne sort à rien = affichage = = on veut être amical.
Aider les étoiles à circuler aider le soleil = c’est bête = je dois écrire des poèmes et de la
musique = et puis et bien. C’est remis” (Hulten, Dumitresco, and Istrati, Brancusi,141).
12
Because of the sculptor’s opposition, Giedion-Welcker was able to publish her
monograph only in 1957, after Brâncuşi’s death. For more information on the sculptor’s
attitude in the matter of his artistic reputation see Chave, 1-4.

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 13
The case of Princess X was followed by less spectacular instances which are just as
significant: in her article “Brancusi and His American Collectors,” Ann Temkin recounts that
at the “Contemporary French Art” exhibition in New York (March-April 1921), Brâncuşi was
grieved because “his sculptures were lined up side by side against the wall, were mixed
among sculptures by others, and almost touched the paintings and drawings that Quinn had
described hopefully to Brâncuşi as ‘background’ [...] the wooden Cup, a gift to Quinn, was
displayed upside down and Chimera was shown without a base” (p. 57).
14
The aura of a temple in the studio was not simply the realization of an aesthetic
ideal or the craving of a religious soul; it had a moral dimension. Brâncuşi declared to Alex
Liberman: “No religion… I took things from Jesus Christ. Love each other. Rid yourself of
evil. Save your soul. If you live well, if you purify yourself, you go up into heavens and stay
there. If you live badly you come back into this earth or another earth. Earth is a hell (qtd. in
Chave, Brancusi, 272).
15
What Pound was privileged to see in Brâncuşi’s studio was not the same as what the
contemporary visitor sees in the small museum dedicated to the sculptor today. Pound was
witness to a work in progress where finished pieces were informally cohabiting with bits of
material, unfinished or discarded work and the tokens of mundane domestic life. What we
now see is a cleaned-up space: the pieces are ready and representative, the tools are in order,
the dust wiped off; all these denote the absence of the sculptor from the work.
16
Quinn incurred the sculptor’s wrath when he respectfully referred to Pound’s
“illuminating article” in a letter (Chave, Brancusi, 286).
17
Art critics like Carola Giedion-Welcker, Friedrich Teja Bach, and Anna Chave have
pointed out that such aims or statements of purpose are not to be taken too literally. Brâncuşi
produced various versions of the same sculpture in marble and bronze, using their different
qualities to create, enhance, or deconstruct effects in his objects. He also struggled to
overcome the weight of the material so as to create an aerial, spiritual effect. The stone often
broke when he attempted to make slender forms poised on a single point, or slim transitions
between object and its base. See Bird in Space (1923, 1924, 1927, 1931-1936) and Fish
(1922, 1926).
18
The career of modern collage officially began with Braque’s Compotier, which he
made at Sorgues in 1912. At that time he and Picasso were working together; the two painters
experimented with the form until 1915, when they gradually came back to painting, keeping
the typical patterns of their collages. By 1920 they had ceased using the technique altogether,
but by then they had already established it (Janis and Blesh, Collage, 15-20).
19
Picasso’s dismissive remark about Brâncuşi is recorded: “a housewife always
scrubbing at his pots.” By the same token the sculptor called Picasso a “cannibal, who
consumed the energy of others” (Chave, Brancusi, 287).
20
Ronald Bush, “‘Unstill, Ever Turning.’ The Composition of Ezra Pound’s Drafts
and Fragments”; Peter Stoicheff. The Hall of Mirrors. Drafts & Fragments and the End of
Ezra Pound’s Cantos; Roxana Preda. Ezra Pound’s (Post)modern Poetics and Politics.
Logocentrism, Language, and Truth 139-154.

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