“A Vague, Invarious Delight”: Ezra Pound’s “Middle-Aging Care” and Bernard Hart’s Psychology of the Complex

Abstract

This article compares Ezra Pound’s use of the word “complex,” a term he employs to define imagism, with British integral psychologist Bernard Hart’s use of the term. Pound cites Hart in “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” as the source of the term. This study first surveys the prominent role of emotion in Pound’s literary theory before it investigates how George Mead’s Quest Society introduced Pound to British integral psychologists like Hart. Finally, it considers the influence of British integral psychology on two of Pound’s poems. While living in London among the burgeoning school of what Arthur McDougall calls British “integral psychology,” Pound borrowed terms from this school to compose two poems that express contrasting understandings of the term “complex,” namely, “Middle-Aged: A Study in an Emotion” (1912) and “Villanelle: The Psychological Hour” (1915). As this study demonstrates, in “Middle-Aged” the emotional content of the imagist complex revitalizes the speaker’s creativity, whereas in “Villanelle” the speaker deteriorates into hysteria via the Hartian complex. A careful analysis reveals that, while “Villanelle” adheres more closely to Hart’s sense of the term “complex” as a pathogenic, destructive concept, “Middle-Aged” expresses a different, more constructive understanding of the term in accord with Pound’s usage in “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.”