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Pound also met Madox Ford who would also aid Pound's literary ambitions. Ford was editing The English Review, which had already published Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. Soon it would publish D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound. Pound took over Yeat's 'Monday evenings', and he began to take over the Review. While Pound had not yet become an outrageous rebel during these early London years (ambiguity still clouded his poetry and his thinking), he was on his way.
Pound's restlessness returned in 1910, and he set out for France, Italy, and finally the United States. After a few months in America, he returned to England, but only briefly before heading to Europe with Yeats. When T. S. Eliot met Pound several years later, he remarked on Pound's inability to settle.
…He seemed always to be a temporary squatter. The appearance was due not only to his restless energy- in which it was difficult to distinguish the energy from the restlessness and the fidgets, so that every room, even a big one, seemed too small for him- but to a kind of resistance against growing into any environment. In America he would no doubt have always seemed on the point of going abroad; in London, he always seemed on the point of crossing the Channel.3
Pound finally returned to England in the summer of 1911 and by the end of the year was writing for The New Age. In one of his articles Pound expressed the philosophy that was the essence of his work and the principle of what he believed constituted worthy poetry. "As to twentieth century poetry, and the poetry I expect to see written during the next decade or so, it will, I think, move against poppy-cock; it will be harder and saner…At least for myself, I want it so austere, direct, free from emotional slither."4
Once Pound embraced an idea, whether his or one borrowed, he promoted it with vigor. By 1912 Pound had met Richard Aldington, and Hilda Doolittle had arrived in London. Pound, who had a taste for pastries, informed these writers in a teashop one afternoon, that they were Imagists. Although the Imagist movement only lasted about two years, it gave Pound power and validation. The rules of Imagism were strict. Amy Lowell defined them in one of her many essays on the subject.
Employ always the exact word, not the nearly exact.
Create new rhythms, and although not insisting on free verse…claim it as a principle of liberty.
Allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject.
Present an image.
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