complete self-sacrifice from its maker. And its renowned masterpieces are
apt to leave the British Philistine a good deal perplexed, if not aghast.’^5
And in his reviews of Pound hitherto, de la Mare’s chief complaint had
been that his work was not sufficiently about self-sacrifice.The Spirit of
Romance, for example, demonstrated Pound’s tendency to dominate all
he wrote:
The Church was once scandalised by a creed that ran: ‘I believe in Lope de Vega
the mighty, poet of heaven and earth.. .’ Substitute the author’s name for the
dramatist’s, and critic for poet, and, in spite of the scholarly modesty of his
subtitle, we have a not entirely exorbitant misrepresentation of Mr. Pound’s
point of view.^6
This excess of self-promotion spoilt Pound’s pre-Imagist poetry as well,
for unexpectedly, it actually resulted in his poems being less individual. ‘It
is obvious that Mr. Pound, when he forgets to pose and frees himself from
a kind of superciliousness, is a poet as well as a curious experimenter...
[but] there is too much parade... too egotistic and not individual
enough’.^7 Richard Aldington’s Imagist work was, he felt, ‘silk flowers
under the glass of self-consciousness’.^8 De la Mare’s creed, on the other
hand, was that ‘a poem indeed is a giving and surrender of life, of life in
essence, and the man who claims to have “made” it resembles the fig tree
that boasts of its figs’.^9 But although this anti-authorial approach seems to
gesture towards the further reaches of ‘Tradition and the Individual
Talent’, the tradition that de la Mare was interested in was rather less
exotic than Eliot’s, for his review of Japanese poetry then suggests an
unexpected native equivalent for thehaiku: ‘Our nursery rhymes are
uncommonly like the Japanese, and such a form as thehokkuor the
tankamight become acclimatized in England, if only the poet were sure
that his tiny sign-post would conduct the wayfarer into the appointed
paradise.’ Japanese poetry (not to mention Imagism) may be unfamiliar,
but it turns out that its self-erasing poetics have been part of everyone’s
upbringing – and still can be, for reading even modern children’s poetry is
a way to encounter the anonymous:
They spirit us back, not into an irrevocable past, but into the ever-present, ever
new, and lovely realm of childhood, where dwells that best of all the Messrs.
Anon – the poet who squandered a rare imagination and romance on that
supreme doggerel, the Nursery Rhymes – a poet so artless that he never even
breathed a word how artful he truly was, and so selfless as to leave himself utterly
out of his work.^10
Nursery rhymes and their anonymous author were de la Mare’s poetic
ideal. ‘I wish I were Mr. Anon’, he confessed to his erstwhile lover,
110 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism