Ian F A Bell and Meriel Lland, 'Silence and Solidity in Early Anglo–American Modernism: Nietzsche, the Fourth Dimension, and Ezra Pound. Symbiosis 10.1 and 10.2 (2006)

A major essay originally published in two parts, in successive issues of Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, Volume 10.

Essay topics and key terms:

Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Vorticisism, Wyndham Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, Wassily Kandinsky, The Art of Spiritual Harmony, Edward Carpenter, The Art of Creation, occultism, Claude Bragdon, A Primer of Higher Space, Four-Dimensional Vistas.

Two extracts from this essay:

"It is silence that orchestrates Pound’s first use of the word ‘vortex’ in the opening stanza of ‘Plotinus’ a poem of 1908: ... The immediate context is theosophical—the familiar story of the occult arcanum so prevalent in Pound’s literary London and itself an accommodating host to fourth dimensional interests...."

"Stillness and silence out of noise, promoted by vortical fourth-dimensional thinking, supported by non-Euclidean geometry and theosophical possibilities for tranquillity, found another seemingly incompatible bedfellow in one of the great ideological debates of the Vorticist period—the extensive discussions of Nietzsche in the little magazines with which Pound was most closely associated during the mid-1910s."

Ian F A Bell and Meriel Lland

Ian Bell is Professor of American Literature at Keele University