‘Everything that I call grammar on primary notions of Art can be summed up in one word: Irregularity.’¹ Salvaged from a notebook after his death, the aphorism is perhaps the closest Pierre-Auguste Renoir came to expressing a total vision of art. Yet it expresses a paradox, in which the only reliable or regular thing is irregularity itself. ‘Despite the apparent simplicity of the laws which preside over their formation’, there is a certainty, as Renoir argued in an essay of 1884 (also unpublished), that ‘the works of nature from the most important to the most insignificant are infinitely varied, no matter what type or species they belong to’, and that ‘every type of beauty derives its charm from its diversity’.²

A sense of what it would mean to see the world in this way struck forcefully upon the young George Moore, whose thinly fictionalised recollection of his first encounter with paintings by Renoir and Claude Monet at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877 pays special attention to questions of grammar.³ ‘[A]rmed with all the jargon of the school’, Moore remembered, he and his art school companions ‘could but utter coarse gibes and exclaim’:

Moore’s recollection indicates some of the forms of irregularity that characterised much impressionist painting: the unmixed pigment, the oddities of posture, the sketchiness, the slanting perspectives, the hazy outlines. It indicates, too, something of the sense of bewilderment felt by those persons schooled on ‘the grammar of art’ who first encountered impressionist art, for whom Monet’s Turkeys (1876) and Renoir’s Torso, Sunlight Effect (c. 1875–6) were seemingly illegible.⁵

I will have more to say about what the grammar of art looked like to contemporaries of Moore and Renoir shortly, but I have chosen to start with these remarks because they introduce the subject of this book and suggest something about the manner in which that subject will be addressed. Moore was one of the first English-speaking writers to register the importance of impressionist art; what he recounts here is not only his unfavourable first impression of the new visual form, but also a portrait of the approximate moment at which impressionist painting began to strike upon English literary culture.⁶ This book is a study of such moments: of the impressions made by impressionist painting and aesthetics on individual anglophone writers – particularly on anglophone poets – and of the more general marks left by impressionism on pre-war poetry in English. As such, it joins a vast body of scholarship on connections between literature and art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Specifically, it is an offshoot of (which is to say, related to but divergent from) a rapidly growing branch of criticism which is interested in the idea of impressionist writing.⁷ While Moore’s own poems do not feature here, it has seemed useful to begin by placing his remark after Renoir’s, both to stage the chronology and pattern of exchange implied by my title and because together they illuminate some distinctive aspects of the argument I will be making in this book. The rationale for this argument and its contribution to existing scholarship are dealt with fully in the following introductory chapter, but for purposes of clarity, and to indicate some of the subjects with which the present study is centrally concerned, its salient features are outlined here.

Firstly, Moore’s markedly secular confession describes the encounter with impressionist art as a moment of revelation or crisis: as a passage out of false belief into understanding, after which established notions about art no longer seemed tenable, and one rigidly defined grammar of art, to which certain kinds of rule and regularity were supposed to be central, came to be supplanted by another, more pliable set of values. In fact, there are continuities between much impressionist art (Renoir’s in particular) and European painting of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but in this study I have been less interested in correcting how poets apprehended impressionism than in exploring how their responses to impressionism – which at times appeared as a model to be followed, at others as a crisis to be avoided or a mistake to be reversed – shaped their poetry. Accordingly, I have not been concerned with putting forward a theory of what has been called ‘literary impressionism’. Rather, I have been interested in understanding how a closely connected and influential group of English-speaking poets – namely, Arthur Symons, W. B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Edward Storer, T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint and Ezra Pound – reacted to (and often against) various forms of impressionism, and with taking these responses seriously as contexts for their poetry. Not only were these poets personally acquainted and moving in the same circles in London; they were also responsive to impressionist art and aesthetics in ways that were productively divergent and poetically formative. My title is meant to indicate the nature of my approach to this subject: in what follows, I consider poetry ‘after’ impressionism in the triple sense of being written ‘later in time’, ‘in imitation of’ and, more broadly, ‘in response to’, often as a corrective or revisionary form.⁸

This points to a second important issue suggested by Moore’s references to grammar, which not only draw attention to the discrepancy between impressionist visual forms and their contemporary language of pictorial representation, but also exemplify the manner in which writers were disposed to understand impressionism in terms of its potential ramifications for literature. As we will see, literary scholars are increasingly wary of suggesting correspondences between literature and other art forms, but it remains true that many writers discussed in this book were concerned to pursue exactly such analogies. Elsewhere, Moore will speak of impressionist art being ‘like a newly-discovered Greek text, without punctuation or capital letters’, and there is a quite literal sense in which, for him as for many of the poets I shall be discussing, its forms and subjects represented a new language that was available to writers as well as painters.⁹ While the practicability of this idea is open to doubt, I have preferred not to disregard or patronise such notions, but rather to understand how they guided the literary endeavours of the poets upon whom they were impressed. One argument I will be making here is that these poets’ pursuit of analogy – like their attempt to escape analogy, or to be analogous to opposed or variant visual forms – cannot, however ill-founded, be divorced from their writings, and that such analogies deserve our attention. So while its focus is not confined to literary responses to visual art, this book often pays close attention to what poets thought about impressionist painting. Beyond that, it is concerned with how their writings relate to an older philosophical language of impressions, which was formative of, and eventually formed by, impressionist art. In considering both issues, it suggests that impressionism was one crucial term – at times, the crucial term – through and against which late Victorian and early modernist poetry was defined.

What emerges from my discussion is the first extended account of the transformative impact of impressionist aesthetics upon English poetry.¹⁰ As such, this book aims to contribute to our understanding of the relationship between impressionism and literature, and of the relationship between art and literature during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries more generally. More broadly, I hope that it will refine our comprehension of that interstitial phase of English verse which joins the poetic culture of Tennyson and Arnold to the full-blown modernism of Eliot and Pound. One of the implications of this study is that certain forms of modernist poetry were forged, in part, out of arguments over impressionism; and that certain important poetic engagements with impressionism took place in, and were formed by, the context of late Victorian debates about art, culture and society. To the extent that it impinges on both, this book will, I hope, illuminate one part of the complex and uninterrupted process by which the poetry of the early twentieth century evolved from precepts and practices that became prominent in the late nineteenth century. No study of this subject can be exhaustive: a number of poets – Oscar Wilde, say, or Amy Lowell – whose work might fruitfully be considered in relation to impressionism have been omitted from my discussion for reasons of space and chronology. For those whose interest in the relationship between impressionism and poetry extends in these (or other) directions, I hope that my study indicates the richness to be discovered in the subject.

Finally, Moore’s description foregrounds its own divided structure, in which the impulse to ridicule of a former self is found to be ridiculous. Its combination of initial repulsion and belated reverence exemplifies one aspect of the variety of responses that impressionism could elicit – responses which, like the impressionist painters, were diverse in character and changed over time. Another argument I will be making here is that any serious discussion of impressionism’s literary reception needs to account for the diversity of impressionist art and its potential range of connotations during the period. And it must attend also to the ways in which writers were attracted to and repelled by impressionist art – often both, either simultaneously or at different times. Something I have therefore felt it important to emphasise in this study is the deep irregularity, to use Renoir’s word, of the art forms typically called impressionist and the poetic responses they provoked, each of which were remarkably varied and variable.