The geometry of modernism: Vorticism and its translations in Lewis, Pound, H.D., and Yeats.

Abstract

This study explores a little-considered rhetorical practice of several Anglo-American literary modernists: their use of geometrical tropes to articulate their aesthetic programs and the philosophical and political values involved in those programs. Employing a combination of rhetorical analysis, archival work, and textual scholarship, I consider the significance of their use of the geometrical idiom. Geometrical formulae, metaphors, diagrams, and images appear most notably in their work devoted to philosophical pronouncement: manifestoes such as Lewis's Blast, exhortatory texts like Pound's Jefferson and/or Mussolini, visionary projects like Yeats's A Vision or H. D.'s Notes on Thought and Vision, and theoretical moments in their essays, letters, and fiction. Given the close association during the 1910s between the geometrical trope and the Vorticist movement, the pervasiveness of geometric terms in the work of these writers, I argue, indicates the persistence of Vorticist principles within modernism long after Vorticism had supposedly faded from the avant-garde scene with the onset of WWI. Thus I examine how Vorticist values of 1914 as advanced by Lewis--especially those emerging from Vorticism's seminal struggle against the effeminate and the wandering and slack--come to be translated into the terms of the late 1920s and 1930s by Pound, H. D., and Yeats. Chapter one considers the role of the geometrical trope in Vorticism's foundational campaign against effeminacy; chapter two addresses how Pound's early Vorticist commitments influence his later arguments for Mussolini's Italy in the 1930s, as manifested by his preference for geometrical streamlining; chapter three treats H. D.'s Vorticist uses of geometry in the 1930s to imagine an ideal body conducive to transcendent states of consciousness; and chapter four examines H. D.'s and Yeats's use of geometry in their projects and interrogates the relationship of these projects to Vorticism. This study aims not only to foster a richer understanding of the work of these writers, but also to revise our received notions of Vorticism, to challenge the critical tendency to separate H. D. from her male contemporaries, and more generally, to reconsider the value of using terms like Vorticism to parse the events of modernism.