"Punch discovered a misprint in one of my peace poems in the Irish Times, Alfred Noyes once recalled. "My verses had depicted a family dreaming of the homecoming of their soldier from the wars while 'All night he lies beneath the stars, And dreams no more out there.'
"The Irish Times printed it as 'All night he lies beneath the stairs' and made matters worse by adding: 'Only a true artist could achieve this effect of quietly hopeless tragedy.' Punch seized upon this and said that if I could express a wish for the New Year, it would probably be to meet the editor of the Irish Times. Oddly enough, a week or two later I found myself sitting next to him at a public dinner and, as an opening gambit to our conversation, remarked that we had recently been in Punch. To my surprise he blushed violently and said something about having dismissed two printers, for it was the fourth time in the last month or two he had found himself in Punch." --The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes
Perhaps Pound was trying to commit bad German, imagining Imagistes* to be a genitive form?
*verbal wordplay is intended only if you like it; otherwise it is disowned as purely accidental.
Unfortunately, it's a somewhat careless job
Yeah, the first poem I opened at random, Amy Lowell's "In a Garden," had a bad typo too:
"I wanted to see you in the swimming-pool,
White and shinning in the silver–flecked water."
Very different image.
I did bookmark the site, though. So thanks!
Posted by jamessal at December 17, 2008 09:07 AMIt was interesting for me to see Imagism in context. Except for what's in Pound's "Personae" I haven't read much of it for a long time. The unevenness is pretty striking, and H.D., stands out for the flawlessness of what she does, which is really necessary for that kind of poetry.
Modernist as it was, it often still has a lingering Edwardian or pre-Raphaelite flavor.
I recently looked at Tristan Corbiere again, and realized that that's where Pound got his chatty / scrappy / slangy style from. I don't especially like it in either poet, though I enormously admire Corbiere's best stuff.
Posted by John Emerson at December 17, 2008 09:46 AMIsn't it a play on, e.g. Les Symbolistes? Ez sez
... we thought we had as much right to a group name, at least as much right, as a number of French “schools” proclaimed by Mr. Flint in the August number of Harold Munro's magazine for 1911.The 1911 incarnation of the Poetry Bookshop's magazine would be Georgian Poetry, I think. Doesn't seem to be scanned online, though the rare book room of the library down the hill seems to have Hilaire Belloc's former copies.
I did bookmark the site, though. So thanks!
Posted by Чеширский кот at December 17, 2008 01:19 PMIs that Cheshire cat in Russian?
Posted by Krown, A.J.P. at December 17, 2008 02:10 PMMMcM:
Did you serve in the Sussex Yeomanry in WW2? Were you a member of Kensington Borough Council in the early fifties? AREN'T YOU, IN FACT, the late Maurice Macmillan, grandson of the Duke of Devonshire; son of Harold Macmillan, British Prime Minister in the early sixties and first Earl of Stockton?
I've been on to you for a while now. It was the initials that gave you away.
Posted by A. J. P. Crown at December 17, 2008 02:26 PMThere was a possibility you could have been Mick McManus, British nineteen-sixties television wrestler well known for using short range forearm jabs in matches, but since he now works for Uxbridge-based Anixter Wire and Cable, in public relations, and you live in Boston, I just thought the commute was too long for an eighty-year-old.
But don't say I didn't do the research.
Posted by A. J. P. Crown at December 17, 2008 02:43 PMMick Mc Manus's wife, Mrs Mc Manus, was in charge of finding students cheap housing when I was an art student in the early seventies. It was hard to see her married to a wrestler, she just didn't seem the type. She never found me any housing.
Posted by A. J. P. Crown at December 17, 2008 02:52 PMIs that Cheshire cat in Russian?
It is indeed. And it's used by a nasty Russian spammer, but I deleted the spam URL and kept the comment because the name was so charming.
By the way, I've been offline for a couple of days; sorry about the influx of spam and lack of new material!
Posted by language hat at December 18, 2008 11:17 AMEverybody is busy this time of year, but of course we missed LH, as well as our daily chew toy. I was forced to read several books instead.
Posted by Nijma at December 18, 2008 09:47 PMOh, I wasn't any busier than usual, it's just that my service provider stopped providing service, allegedly because of the winter storm.
Posted by language hat at December 19, 2008 09:29 AM