Chapter 3 discusses the verse and criticism of Ford Madox Ford and the poets later styled as ‘the forgotten school of 1909’. It explores how Ford, along with other Edwardian writers like Edward Storer, T. E. Hulme and F. S. Flint, began to use ideas about impressionism to conceive of what ‘Modern Poetry’ (to use the title of Ford’s important essay of 1909) might look like. Specifically, it examines the forgotten school’s shared use of the language of impressionism as a vehicle for accommodating new subjects and metrics within English poetry, with a particular focus on how this language shaped their arguments about vers libre. The chapter ties the metrical experimentation of the pre-imagist avant-garde to their broader conceptions of modernity and selfhood. It suggests that, if impressionism was the gravitational term which attracted several quite different poets, it also enabled them to pull together an interest in modern urban subject matter, a metaphysics associated with Pater and Bergson, and a range of ‘free’ poetic forms which anticipate some of the major achievements of modernist verse.

Starting from the observation that impressionism is one of the forms to which Ezra Pound responds most frequently in his early writings about art and poetry, Chapter 4 examines the vacillation between admiration and disinheritance which characterises Pound’s remarks about impressionist aesthetics, with a particular focus on how this ambivalence shaped his prescriptions for imagist poetry. Reading Pound’s early verse alongside his essays on visual art and his critical dialogues with Ford, Flint and others, the chapter suggests that his efforts to segregate imagism from certain forms of impressionism camouflage a considerable debt. Indeed, it argues that Pound’s responses to impressionism become inseparable from his theory of the Image, even (or perhaps especially) when he attempts to dissociate the two ideas. The emphases of these responses frequently change, but they are always drawn towards a central term, with which they are in productive, if divided, tension. The chapter suggests that it is partly out of this tension that Pound’s concept of the Image begins to emerge, acquiring its own mirrored ambiguities in the process.

This Preface begins with a passage from Pierre Auguste-Renoir’s diary, in which he records the following aphorism: ‘Everything that I call grammar on primary notions of Art can be summed up in one word: Irregularity.’ Taking Renoir’s idea of irregularity as a starting-point, this chapter sketches out the historical origins of impressionism and gives a brief outline of its formal and thematic variety, before gesturing to its significance as a cultural and stylistic reference point for writers at the turn of the century, including the group of British, Irish and American poets at the heart of the present study.

This Introduction offers a historical survey of the relationship between impressionism and literature, especially poetry. The chapter foregrounds the stylistic variety of the visual form – what Renoir called its ‘irregularité’ – as well as its wide range of cultural connotations during the period. It then explores how this irregularity was replicated in literary responses to impressionist art. Tracing the word’s passage out of the Paris salons, into contemporary French writing and across the Channel, it charts how various important ideas in the history of modern poetry – ideas such as decadence, symbolism, vers libre and imagism – were formulated as expressions of (or sometimes as antidotes to) impressionist aesthetics. In doing so, it suggests that ’impressionism’ was one of the crucial terms – often the crucial term – through and against which verse of the period was defined. The Introduction concludes by discussing the drawbacks of recent attempts to propose unified theories of ‘literary impressionism’, and suggests that the relationship between impressionism and literature might more fruitfully be conceived as one of irreconcilable irregularity, particularity and self-difference.

Chapter 1 explores the links between the early verse of Arthur Symons and the definitions of literary impressionism put forward in his important essay on French writing, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (1893). The chapter begins by discussing the language of sanity and wholeness (or their absence) in which the essay’s conception of impressionism is grounded, as well as its emphasis on formal fragmentation and strenuously subjective effects. It suggests that this theory furnished Symons with a rationale for his lyric experiments of the 1890s and early 1900s, which, in turn, provided models for some of the most recognisable forms of early modernist poetry. But it also draws attention to a shift in the manner and matter of Symons’s writings in the years leading up to his nervous breakdown in 1908, when a theory of literary form self-consciously preoccupied with the unstable and the fragmentary seemed to disintegrate under the pressure of its own impulse to fracture. The chapter concludes by considering the causal link Symons retrospectively drew between his conceptions of impressionism and his experience of mental instability.

Chapter 2 considers the desire to escape impressionism which shaped Yeats’s early writings. Yeats’s formative visual interests are usually discussed in terms of the tastes he inherited from his Pre-Raphaelite father, but in his early verse and criticism he would often also express hatred for, and a desire to escape, French art of the later nineteenth century. In his writings of the 1890s and 1900s, it is the paintings of Édouard Manet which most disturb Yeats, appearing repeatedly to threaten his early theories of symbolism. Time and again, Yeats strove to counter them with the art of Titian, which came to serve as a paradigm for his own evolving poetics. The present chapter considers the antagonism in Yeats’s thought between modern French painting and the art of the Renaissance, as well as the cognate binaries (of hard outline against glimmering colour, unity against disunity) this came to encompass, before exploring their formative influence on the symbolist poetics he was developing at the turn of the century.

The Afterword considers a passage from Clive Bell’s seminal book of modernist art criticism, Art (1914), in which he puzzles over whether to describe impressionism as an art-historical end-point, while also expressing a deeper uncertainty about the ends of impressionism itself. In particular, he returns to the question that had baffled critics at the inaugural impressionist exhibition in 1874, and which has been a source of vexation to scholarship ever since: the question of whether impressionism is imaginative and self-expressive, or imitative and bound to the external world. By following the twists and turns in Bell's thought, the Afterword reflects on the irregular significance of impressionism to the writers discussed in the present study, before gesturing to its continued importance for the writers who followed them.

This chapter moves from the macro-level of social and narrative imagination to the micro-level of speaking and seeing. It continues to consider the interplay of inheritance and originality in these practices: the constitutive underdetermination or equivocity of what we see and say. The chapter illuminates the ways in which even at the smallest levels, we construct the world imaginatively. It then begins to discuss how art and poetry loosen the grasp of automated perception and do not impose an alternative vision but rather grant a double vision of our lives, allowing us to see it from new perspectives or in new ways. The chapter concludes with a consideration of liturgical and biblical renewals of perception.

The arts were loosely defined by a plethora of ‘-isms’ in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. None is more often associated with Debussy than Impressionism. Even recent scholarship is still disposed to position him as an Impressionist composer. Whilst much work has been done to disentangle Debussy from the tag and align him in relation to, among others, Hellenistic paintings (around the time of the Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune [it.]), Symbolist painting, and the English Pre-Raphaelites, it is important to understand what has been intended by the term ‘musical Impressionism’, how it came to be associated with Debussy, and his usually hostile response to being thus categorised.

Since the early 1880s, Paris had become a place where it was possible to be ‘modern’. In the arts, by Modernism we mean a vast movement based on the concept of modernity appealing to the notions of evolution, progress, independence, freedom, and also resistance to certain social and economic change. Modernism in art in the broadest sense will constantly evolve and take many forms. Thus, if Symbolism and Impressionism dominated the Debussyan sphere, many other movements marked the period (1880–1914) and they aroused varied reactions on the composer’s part, ranging from the sincerest interest to the most pronounced rejection. To be interested in Modernism in the world of Debussy is therefore to be as interested in Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, Orphism, Cubism, Naturalism, and even in Futurism. Art Nouveau (Modern Style) is given its due in this broad context. Debussy was particularly sensitive to the style and possessed a magnificent Art Nouveau lamp by the English firm Benson & Co., which he probably bought at the Siegfried Bing gallery Maison de l’Art Nouveau (Bing was a great proponent of Art Nouveau).

Just as singing was the foundation of Amy Beach’s musical world, songs formed the backbone for her composing. It was through songwriting that she won her initial fame as a composer, and for which she was best remembered for decades after her death. She composed songs prolifically throughout her career, producing 121 art songs. They predominate her total compositional output, often serving as a proving ground for larger works. They demonstrate her intimacy with the texts she chose to set, mastery of the form, and awareness of trends in current European musical styles. Insightful interpretation of poetic material and a keen awareness of languages’ natural inflections led to creation of melodies that flow as easily as the spoken word. This characteristic sets her songs apart from those of her peers and makes her songs accessible to both amateur and professional musicians. Recent rediscovery of Beach’s songs is due in large part to copyright expirations, making the majority of her songs readily available on the internet.

After revisiting Bohm’s implicate and expliocate orders, the chapter looks into the kinship between the implicate order and both Bergsonian duration and the continuity of the reading consciousness. Articulation and form also particpate intimately in ongoing duration. But what is the nature of the time of reading and how do we apprehend it? The chapter goes on to examine and criticize Bergson’s cinematographic account of language perceived as movement. Bergsonian duration and the dynamic of translation are compared with Impressionist painting. The chapter then moves on to consider the part played by voice and rhythm in the realization of duration and of intuitional relationships with text. It finally sets itself the task of identifying a rhythm pecular to translational activity itself. The chapter includes, as illustrations, translations from Eluard, Laforgue and Leconte de Lisle.

Conrad eloquently wrote about his inability to write; he stuttered his way through his texts with nonlexical grunts, snarls, howls, murmurs, gurgles, snorts and hems; and he sought to stay true to “the stammerings of his conscience” (xliii), a working method alluded to in the Preface of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). In this chapter, I argue that distraction – usually a writer’s enemy – is another one of these unexpected features that Conrad used to propel his writing; his seemingly rambling digressions are part of a quest for verbal precision. Although he is frequently conceived of as a methodical and philosophical writer, distraction was a fundamental and serious part of his literary enterprise. By allowing distraction, inattentiveness and absent-mindedness to become part of his fiction, he was able to stay productive, steal the reader’s attention and add a level of everyday realism to his texts. Conrad, I maintain, writes in medias distractionis and consistently pays attention to those who do not pay attention.

In 1906, under the guiding editorial hand of William Roughead, a new series of books appeared under the title Notable Trials. These tremendously popular volumes capitalised on a burgeoning fascination with the criminal trial and a focus upon the courtroom, in place of the scaffold, as the ultimate symbol of the justice system. While many of the early volumes dealt with historically significant trials, by 1920 attention was very much directed towards what would dominate the series as it developed in the ensuing decades until its demise in the 1950s: namely, the contemporary trial marked by some element of personal interest. The Notable Trials are an early example of what would now be called ‘true crime’: a form which trades on reality as cachet. Yet the series also tended to publish accounts of trials in which the verdict was in some way doubtful. This chapter argues that the conceptualisation of realist narrative as potentially faulty, which underpinned the success of Notable Trials, also shaped the development of literature in the period, and in particular the various forms of doubt and uncertainty which characterise the fiction of literary impressionism.

This chapter examines the relationship between literature and visual cultures between 1900 and 1920 through the different forms of art writing practised by a range of literary and cultural figures. Museums and art galleries witnessed a surge in popularity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as collections expanded and opened up to a wider viewing public, while exhibitions such as the post-impressionist exhibition of 1910 have come to be seen as cultural landmarks in narratives of the period. This essay explores writers’ encounters with artworks and artefacts in the contested yet stimulating spaces of museums and galleries, and examines the ways in which such encounters helped to frame questions about aesthetics and cultural identity, history and the contemporaneous. It takes in the role of periodical cultures – focusing on Rhythm (1911–13), Blast (1914–15), and Colour Magazine (1914–32) – in mediating responses to visual art and as sites in which the demarcations between word and image could be redefined.

One of Ford’s heart patients in The Good Soldier (1915), a Mr Hurlbird, has a habit of handing out ‘cool California oranges’ to everyone he meets. Ford offers little explanation for this behaviour beyond the clue that Hurlbird is a ‘violent Democrat’ – a phrase that would perhaps have conjured in the minds of contemporary readers the endeavours of William Jennings Bryan and other economic pragmatists to introduce a version of what we would now call ‘quantitative easing’: namely, an agreement from the US central bank to print money according to demand. This chapter proposes that British attitudes towards monetary value in the first two decades of the twentieth century were beginning to give way to the influence of American pragmatists like Bryan. Keynes writes in an essay of 1923: ‘The fluctuations in the value of money since 1914 have been on a scale so great as to constitute … one of the most significant events in the economic history of the world.’ Monetary value was beginning to change its character from a non-negotiable essence to an instrument of policy. This chapter traces the imprint of this incipient British economic pragmatism in the work of Keynes, Conrad, and Ford.

This chapter reassesses the relationship between the Gothic and the cinematic experience within the silent cinema era. At its birth in 1895, the very medium of cinema itself was perceived as inherently Gothic. Maxim Gorky’s famous allusion to a ‘kingdom of shadows’ full of grey, silent figures that filled him with ‘breathless horror’ evoked the spectre of the uncanny that underpins the Gothic experience. Yet, this chapter demonstrates that if one examines the history of the Gothic in the silent era, the Gothic changes from being an intrinsic part of the cinema experience to becoming a series of narrative and stylistic elements that ultimately form part of a kind of proto-horror, a mise-en-scène in search of a genre. By focusing not upon story elements but rather upon the ongoing association between the Gothic and the cinematographic through the use of cinematic techniques to convey subjective states of being, this chapter examines how the Gothic potential of the cinematic experience that was fundamental to the era of cinema’s birth did not disappear but rather remained, and continues to remain, embedded within cinema itself.

It is no surprise that Fauré has never been associated with orientalism or exotic musics. Aside from a few paragraphs by Sylvain Caron, no one has ventured to write a study of Fauré and orientalism.1 Indeed, it almost seems as if the composer himself ordained this dissociation for his own legacy. His final two song cycles, Mirages, Op. 113, and L’horizon chimérique, Op. 118, bring the point home. The titles of both works evoke faraway geographies. But the first song of Mirages, “Cygne sur l’eau,” works in the opposite direction: the itinerary reaches inward.