Inscriptional Modernism

Abstract

Abstract The Old Round Reading Room of the British Library, then housed in the British Museum in Bloomsbury, was a major site of literary modernism in London in the 1910s and a crucial working space for Pound, H. D., and later Richard Aldington. At the time, the entrance to the library was reached through ‘The Hall of Greek and Roman Inscriptions’, and it was the treasures in this room (many of them damaged or fragmentary) which formed the backdrop to some of the most crucial experiments in modernism, from Pound’s advice to all new poets to write like ‘weather-bit granite’ to H. D.’s first experiments in Imagism. From inscriptions on stone, the chapter then turns to inscriptions on paper and to the intense modernist interest in the collection of epigrams – a genre that originated in inscription – found in the Greek Anthology. H. D.’s unpublished essays show that she saw the Anthology as a collection of ‘fragments and references to lost fragments’, whose gaps and omissions she exploited in her poetry, while for Ezra Pound, the collection was reinvented as an inscriptional prototype, itself anthologized and mediated over centuries, for the kinds of fragmented poetics he would develop in the Cantos.