Pound, Bergson, and the Vortex of Memory

Jonathan Pollock’s essay links Ezra Pound’s Vorticist thinking to the influential poetics of French philosopher Henri Bergson via Wyndham Lewis’s 1927 book, Time and Western Man. In that book, Lewis gives considerable attention to Bergson’s metaphysics but also devotes two chapters to Pound, whose reality is, like Bergson’s, of a temporal rather than a spatial nature. Drawing from Bergson, especially from Matière et Mémoire, Pollock makes a case for Pound’s Bergsonian poetics in The Cantos and speculates that from the start Pound’s notion of the vortex “almost certainly had in mind the famous cone of memory – a cone balancing on its tip on a flat plane. . .” In The Cantos, as in Bergson, “the vortex of the past is not to be understood as chronological”; rather, “the whole of the past is contained within each level, layer, or stratum of the cone.” Still, Pollock points out a significant divergence between them, when he discusses Bergson’s image in L’Évolution créatrice (1907) of a human arm plunged into iron filings. With Bergson the filings remain dead matter, whereas with Pound there is energy which creates patterns, like the Rose in the Steel Dust.