Collected Prose

to pass off translations of French poets as their own work. Outside the realm of poetry, the impact of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essays on Shakespeare has been well documented, and a good case could be made for establishing the link between Rabelais and Thomas Nashe, whose 1594 prose narrative, The Unfortunate Traveler , is generally considered to be the first novel written in the English language.
    On the more familiar terrain of modern literature, French has continued to exert a powerful influence on English. In spite of the wonderfully ludicrous remark by Southey that poetry is as impossible in French as it is in Chinese, English and American poetry of the past hundred years would be inconceivable without the French. Beginning with Swinburne’s 1862 article in The Spectator on Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and the first translations of Baudelaire’s poetry into English in 1869 and 1870, modern British and American poets have continued to look to France for new ideas. Saintsbury’s article in an 1875 issue of The Fortnightly Review is exemplary. “It was not merely admiration of Baudelaire which was to be persuaded to English readers,” he wrote, “but also imitation of him which, at least with equal earnestness, was to be urged on English writers.”
    Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, largely inspired by Théodore de Banville, many English poets began experimenting with French verse forms (ballades, lays, virelays and rondeaux), and the “art for art’s sake” ideas propounded by Gautier were an important source for the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England. By the 1890s, with the advent of The Yellow Book and the Decadents, the influence of the French Symbolists became widespread. In 1893, for example, Mallarmé was invited to lecture at Oxford, a sign of the esteem he commanded in English eyes.
    It is also true that little of substance was produced in English as a result of French influences during this period, but the way was prepared for the discoveries of two young American poets, Pound and Eliot, in the first decade of the new century. Each came upon the French independently, and each was inspired to write a kind of poetry that had not been seen before in English. Eliot would later write that “… the kind of poetry I needed, to teach me the use of my own voice, did not exist in England at all, and was only to be found in France.” As for Pound, he stated flatly that “practically the whole development of the English verse-art has been achieved by steals from the French.”
    The English and American poets who formed the Imagist group in the years just prior to World War I were the first to engage in a critical reading of French poetry, with the aim not so much of imitating the French as of rejuvenating poetry in English. More or less neglected poets in France, such as Corbière and Laforgue, were accorded major status. F. S. Flint’s 1912 article in The Poetry Review (London) and Ezra Pound’s 1913 article in Poetry (Chicago) did much to promote this new reading of the French. Independent of the Imagists, Wilfred Owen spent several years in France before the war and was in close contact with Laurent Tailhade, a poet admired by Pound and his circle. Eliot’s reading of the French poets began as early as 1908, while he was still a student at Harvard. Just two years later he was in Paris, reading Claudel and Gide and attending Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France.
    By the time of the Armory show in 1913, the most radical tendencies in French art and writing had made their way to New York, finding a home with Alfred Stieglitz and his gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. Many of the names associated with American and European modernism became part of this Paris-New York connection: Joseph Stella, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, William Carlos Williams, Man Ray, Alfred Kreymborg, Marius de Zayas, Walter C. Arensberg, Mina Loy, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. Under the influence of Cubism and Dada, of Apollinaire and the Futurism of Marinetti, numerous magazines carried the message of modernism to American readers: 291, The Blind Man, Rongwrong, Broom, New York Dada, and The Little Review , which was born in Chicago in 1914, lived in New York from 1917 to 1927, and died in Paris in 1929. To read the list of The Little Review’ s contributors is to understand the degree to which French poetry had permeated the American scene. In addition to work by Pound, Eliot, Yeats