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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
Kandinsky mash-up
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)
Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
The Romantic view holds that man is
intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance.
Remove all the bad laws and customs that had
suppressed him . . . and the infinite
possibilities of man would have a chance. It is
spilt religion. The Classical view holds
that man is an extraordinarily fixed and
limited animal whose nature is absolutely
constant. It is only by tradition and
organization that anything decent can be got
out of him. It is absolutely identical with
normal religious attitudes.
T. E. Hulme 1883-1917
Wyndham Lewis Abstract Composition (1915)
It is essential to prove that beauty may be in
small, dry things. Hulme, Romanticism and
Classicism, 1999-2000
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
Imagisme. An Image is that which presents an
intellectual and emotional complex in an instant
of time. . . . It is the presentation of such a
complex instantaneously which gives that sense
of sudden liberation that sense of freedom from
time limits and space limits . . . . Use no
superfluous word, no adjective, which does not
reveal something. . . . Be influenced by as many
great artists as you can, but have the decency
either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to
try to conceal it. . . . Use either no ornament
or good ornament. . . . Consider the way of the
scientists rather than the way of an advertising
agent for a new soap. Pound, A Few
Donts by an Imagiste 2005-6
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
Blast will be popular, essentially. It will not
appeal to any particular class, but to the
fundamental and popular instincts in every class
and description of people, TO THE INDIVIDUAL. The
moment a man feels or realizes himself as an
artist, he ceases to belong to any milieu or
time. Blast is created for this timeless,
fundamental Artist that exists in everybody. The
Man in the Street and the Gentleman are equally
ignored. A VORTICIST KING! WHY NOT? Lewis,
Long Live the Vortex! 2011 Vorticism a
literary and artistic movement associated with
Cubist-Futurist abstraction and theories of
history in which the past and present intersect
or overlay each other, ply-on-ply. Wyndham
Lewis edited Blast,
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
Wyndham Lewis, Workshop (1914-15)
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
Mina Loy, La Miason en Papier (1906)
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
To obtain results you must make sacrifices the
first greatest sacrifice you have to make is of
your virtue The fictitious value of woman as
identified with her physical purity is too easy a
stand-by------rendering her lethargic in the
acquistition of intrinsic merits of character by
which she could obtain a concrete value
therefore the first self-enforced law for the
female sex . . . would be the unconditional
surgical destruction of virginity through-out the
female population at puberty---. Mina Loy,
Feminist Manifesto
Mina Loy
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
Wyndham Lewis, A Canadian Gunpit (1918)
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska L'Oiseau de feu (1912)
Brzeska, Red Stone Dancer (1913)
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
Thomas Sternes Eliot 1888-1965
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
Tradition cannot be inherited, and if you want
it you must obtain it by great labour. It
involves, in the first place, the historical
sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to
any one who would continue to be a poet beyond
his twenty-fifth year and the historical sense
involves a perception, not only of the pastness
of the past, but of its presence. . . . This
historical sense, which is a sense of the
timeless as well as of the temporal and of the
timeless and the temporal together, is what makes
a writer traditional. Eliot,
Tradition and Individual Talent, 2320
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What happens to the poet is a continual
surrender of himself as he is at the moment to
something which is more valuable. The progress of
an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a
continual extinction of personality. The mind of
the poet . . . may partly or exclusively operate
upon the experience of the man himself but, the
more perfect the artist, the more completely
separate in him will be the man who suffers and
the mind which creates the more perfectly will
the mind digest and transmute the passions which
are its material. Eliot,
Tradition and Individual Talent, 2322
The poet is never the bundle of accident and
incoherence that sits down to breakfast he has
been re-born as an idea, something intended,
complete. W. B. Yeats, General
Introduction to My Work
Jaun Gris, The Washstand (1912)
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Manuscript Pages from The Waste Land
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
Bran of the Blessed, one of the possible origins
of the Fisher King myth. Bran was based on the
Irish sea-god Manannan mac Lir.
The Fisher King
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The Quest of the Grail by Elizabeth Siddal
(wife of D.G. Rossetti). Also known as "Sir
Galahad at the Shrine of the Holy Grail"
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
What are the roots that clutch, what branches
grow  Out of this stony rubbish? Son of
man,   You cannot say, or guess, for you know
only  A heap of broken images, where the sun
beats,  And the dead tree gives no shelter, the
cricket no relief,  And the dry stone no sound of
water. Only  There is shadow under this red
rock,   (Come in under the shadow of this red
rock),  And I will show you something different
from either  Your shadow at morning striding
behind you  Or your shadow at evening rising to
meet you I will show you fear in a handful of
dust. Eliot, The Waste Land, ll. 18-30
Ezekiel, by Raphael
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
Frisch weht der Wind  
Der Heimat zu.                 Mein
Irisch Kind,  Wo weilest
du?  You gave me hyacinths first a year
ago   They called me the hyacinth girl.  Yet
when we came back, late, from the
Hyacinth garden,  Your arms full, and your hair
wet, I could not  Speak, and my eyes failed, I
was neither  Living nor dead, and I knew
nothing,   Looking into the heart of light, the
silence.  Od' und leer das Meer. Eliot, The
Waste Land, ll. 30-42
John William Waterhouse Tristram and Isolde
Sharing the Potion (1916)
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,  Had a bad
cold, nevertheless  Is known to be the wisest
woman in Europe,   With a wicked pack of cards.
Here, said she,  Is your card, the drowned
Phoenician Sailor,  (Those are pearls that were
his eyes. Look!)  Here is Belladonna, the Lady of
the Rocks,  The lady of situations. Here is the
man with three staves, and here the Wheel,  And
here is the one-eyed merchant, and this
card,  Which is blank, is something he carries on
his back,  Which I am forbidden to see. I do not
find  The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.   see
crowds of people, walking round in a ring.  Thank
you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,  Tell her I
bring the horoscope myself  One must be so
careful these days. Eliot, The Waste Land, ll.
43-59
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
Unreal City,   Under the brown fog of a winter
dawn,  A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so
many,  I had not thought death had undone so
many.  Sighs, short and infrequent, were
exhaled,  And each man fixed his eyes before his
feet.   Flowed up the hill and down King William
Street,  To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the
hours  With a dead sound on the final stroke of
nine.  There I saw one I knew, and stopped him,
crying Stetson!  You who were with me in the
ships at Mylae!   'That corpse you planted last
year in your garden,  'Has it begun to sprout?
Will it bloom this year?  'Or has the sudden
frost disturbed its bed?  'Oh keep the Dog far
hence, that's friend to men,  'Or with his nails
he'll dig it up again!   'You! hypocrite
lecteur!mon semblable,mon frère! Eliot, The
Waste Land, ll. 60-76
From the Anglican Prayer Book
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished
throne,  Glowed on the marble, where the
glass  Held up by standards wrought with fruited
vines  From which a golden Cupidon peeped
out  (Another hid his eyes behind his
wing)  Doubled the flames of sevenbranched
candelabra  Reflecting light upon the table
as  The glitter of her jewels rose to meet
it,  From satin cases poured in rich
profusion   In vials of ivory and coloured
glass  Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic
perfumes,  Unguent, powdered, or liquidtroubled,
confused  And drowned the sense in
odours. Eliot, The Waste Land, ll. 77-89
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
Tereus violates Philomela (17th century)
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with
me. Speak to me. Why do you never speak?
Speak.  What are you thinking of? What thinking?
What? I never know what you are thinking.
Think.   I think we are in rats alley  Where
the dead men lost their bones.   What is that
noise?                        The wind under the
door.  What is that noise now? What is the wind
doing?                     Nothing again
nothing. Do You know nothing? Do you see
nothing? Do you remember Nothing?  I
remember  Those are pearls that were his
eyes. Eliot, The Waste Land, ll. 111-25
Wyndham Lewis, Lovers (1912)
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When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said  I
didn't mince my words, I said to her myself, 
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME  Now Albert's coming
back, make yourself a bit smart.  He'll want to
know what you done with that money he gave
you  To get yourself some teeth.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so
antique.  (And her only thirty-one.)  I can't
help it, she said, pulling a long face,  It's
them pills I took, to bring it off, she
said.  (She's had five already, and nearly died
of young George.)  The chemist said it would be
alright, but I've never been the same. Eliot,
The Waste Land, ll. 139-44, 156-61
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Mermaids Singing, Each to Each
Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot fighting in the
captains tower While calypso singers laugh at
them and fisherman, they hold flowers
Portrait of Eliot by Wydham Lewis