‘Experiments in Modernity’: Ford and Pound

Abstract

When Ezra Pound arrived in London in August/September 1908, Ford Madox Hueffer was already an established figure in the capital’s literary life. He had published four volumes of poetry, nine novels (including two in collaboration with Joseph Conrad), as well as children’s fiction, ‘sociological impressionism’, art history and biography. Ford’s career had already passed through two distinct phases: there was a period of literary dilettanteism, starting in 1891 with the publication of the children’s story, The Brown Owl;2 and there was his apprenticeship to the literary profession (1898–1905) through his collaboration with Conrad. Above all, he had established his literary identity through the relative success of his books since The Soul of London (1905). According to Goldring, Ford’s ‘burst of productivity’ in the period 1905–7 established him ‘in the front rank of the younger generation of writers’.3 With his subsequent founding and editing of the English Review (from December 1908 to January 1910), Ford moved into the most influential position he was to hold in English literary life.4