are part of his aim to rewrite the history of modern poetry, so that
modernism becomes not a triumph over Georgian sentimental nostalgia,
but ‘an aberration’, whose foreign ‘culture-mongering’ has lost poetry its
audience.^23 By implication, the non-modernists are the native tradition
which runs from Wordsworth and Clare through Hardy, Thomas and
Owen to himself, a line whose English form had to have a more natural,
popular relation to the public than an imported, subsidised one. Bolstered
by the rise of Seamus Heaney, Philip Hobsbaum went further to insist
that the ‘English tradition’ is alien to the montage, discontinuity and free
verse more natural to ‘the American language’, a prospect which, if true,
was bad news for Blake and Frost alike, not to mention Heaney’s own
loyalties.^24 But Eliot was perhaps more present in this process than Larkin
would have liked, for if the arrival of Larkin’s verse prompted the discov-
ery of an English tradition to back it up, it was doing exactly what Eliot
insisted all ‘really new’ poetry did: alter our perception of the ‘relations,
proportions, values of each work of art towards the whole’, so that the past
can be seen to have always already contained the genesis of the present.^25
And if Eliot can be seen to be structuring the method, Pound’s isolation
of modernism from the corruptions of the Poetry Bookshop is all too
easily maintained in Larkin’s separation of a normal, native English
tradition from alien influence. Despite its tweed-jacket image, the idea
of an English tradition is really a post-modernist assertion of the values of
locality and limitation against modernist polyglot internationalism, a
modernism cast more in Eliot’s mould than that of Yeats or MacDiarmid,
say.^26 But by discounting the shared context of modernist and non-
modernist poetry and the history of Romantic poetics behind them,
characterising Hardy and the Georgians by their native Englishness dis-
places the period’s actual arguments about rhetoric onto a problem of
national identity, while preserving all the problems with the principle of
pure self-determination behind that argument. When Thomas criticised
Pound’s verses as ‘so extraordinary, dappled with French, Provenc ̧al,
Spanish, Italian, Latin and old English’, it was because he thought Pound
was trying too hard to establish his own extraordinariness; when Eliot
criticised Georgian insularity in return, it was because he thought a
European sensibility essential to avoid being victim to one’s own poetic
cliche ́s.^27 Of course, England was under threat in this period – but as far
as Thomas and Owen were concerned, from German soldiers rather than
foreign cultural prestige and a surfeit of free verse. Owen’s aesthetics were
strongly influenced by French symbolism, and the last chapter will
explore the dilemma he found reconciling their aesthetic with writing
Introduction: the poetry wars 11