Correspondence

Sir,

With some interest I noted in your last issue Michael Fordham's query about a possible connection between Jung and T. S. Eliot with Herbert Read acting as intermediary, bringing from Jung certain ideas on undirected thinking that might have developed in Eliot as formulations of ‘Imagist’ principles in poetry.

It was not until late 1917 that Herbert Read, on brief leave in London to collect the M.C., first met Eliot in a Piccadilly restaurant to discuss contributions that Eliot might make to a periodical Read was launching. By that date the Imagist movement was pretty well a spent force. Ezra Pound, by his own claim, had founded the movement in 1912. Two years later he withdrew from it and thereafter Imagism began its decline. As a friend of Pound from 1914 onwards, Eliot was familiar with Imagist ideas for quite a while before he met Read.

The concern with images and the logic of the imagination did not, of course, belong exclusively to or die out with Imagism. In 1910 and 1911 Eliot had composed an example of non-linear poetry, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Traditionally a poem had a single action and a number of distinct characters, but in ‘Prufrock’ Eliot presented a single character and a number of distinct actions. Pound, convinced that a picture was worth a thousand words, even when the picture was composed of words, also went on to turn the ‘stills’ of Imagism into a full-length motion picture epic in the Cantos. However, when readers had been habituated to press directly forwards to a terminus, they found it exasperatingly difficult to circle around a core, as these two works required them to do.

Though Read flirted with ideas of Gurdjieff shortly after the war, it is not clear when he first encountered depth psychology as we generally know it. Apart from a glancing reference to Freud, the first material demonstrating an interest in the subject was published in 1925. In Eliot's quarterly the Criterion he quoted Jung's Psychological types (1923 Engl