The apparently innocuous issue of capitalisation has proved an unusually tricky one in the writing of this book. The Oxford Guide to Style distinguishes between the capitalised ‘Impressionist’, which is used to describe ‘the actual historical movement’ in visual art, and the more general sense of the uncapitalised ‘impressionist’, which refers to the ‘influences of art upon e.g. literature or design’.¹ However, I have found this distinction to be handled inconsistently in scholarship on the subject, and I think that the distinction itself is fragile. It is difficult to speak of the artists who exhibited together in Paris between 1874 and 1886 as a ‘movement’, because the cast of contributors changed considerably across the eight exhibitions and were frequently moving in divergent directions. The difficulty is amplified by the vast range of visual forms commonly described as impressionist, but which were not explicitly aligned with the original impressionist groupings. For these reasons, I employ the lower case when referring to impressionist artworks throughout the book. Moreover, where the words ‘impressionism’ and ‘impressionist’ are applied to literature, the minor case is used to avoid the false implication that the writers now described in such terms were a coherent grouping. I have followed the same logic when employing other intermittently capitalised terms, such as cubism, futurism, imagism, symbolism, vorticism, modernism, decadence, romanticism (and so on), all of which present similar challenges to precise definition. There are two noteworthy exceptions to this rule. First, where quoting from other writers, I have retained the author’s use of upper or lower case. Second, in my discussion of Pound’s imagism, the term ‘Image’ often appears capitalised in recognition of his various definitions of the Image as a special unit of poetic expression which is related to but distinct from verbal imagery in general.

All translations are my own unless I indicate otherwise. Where I have quoted important or lengthy passages in translation, I have provided the original text in the endnotes.