emotions or divided loyalties; the poem is not wholly autonomous
because the situation it talks about is not. Its formal exteriority is thus
also ‘within’ the poem, as Coleridge put it, and this indeterminacy
between within and without renders exactly the moral difficulty of ‘Simon
Lee’, namely, how much of our action is self- determined and how much
determined by exterior structures which create the conditions of that self’s
possibility. And Wordsworth’s questioning of the borders of personal and
formal autonomy has implications for the more usual sense of the ‘auton-
omy’ of the aesthetic, its freedom from moral or philosophical subsump-
tion; for if, as Nigel Leask and others have suggested, Coleridge’s
aesthetics rework the anti-authoritarian implications of self-legislation
into a conservative isolation of the aesthetic from wider society, then
Wordsworth’s internal externality implicitly refuses such an absolute
separation.^12 Intransigently, Wordsworth’s poetic form raises the vexed
question ofagency.
This unresolved debate about what is within the poem and what from
outside it prefigures the relations between modernism and its contempor-
aries with uncanny foresight. For the question of poetic form that arises in
the twentieth century is, as with Coleridge, always at the same time a
debate about how to write poetry which is true to itself and to the self that
created it, and thus implicitly involves the question of where those selves
begin and end. The test that Pound and Eliot consistently applied to
justify their own distinctive forms – and to criticise the Georgians’ – was
that of total integrity; poetry meant the elimination of all external agency,
be it using other people’s forms, second-hand thinking or simply ‘rhet-
oric’, and this demand provides one of the hidden continuities between
Pound’s predominantly individualist aesthetic and Eliot’s anti-individual-
ist one. Wordsworth’s difficulties with agency, on the other hand, suggest
a reason why Hardy, Thomas and Owen should be interested in a degree
of aesthetic artificiality and awkwardness, a certain irresolvable formal
dissonance from their content.
Such dissonance, however, gains its particular acuteness from its place
in a literary period in which there was a wider movement against rhetoric,
custom and convention in poetry than just the modernists, a movement
in which Hardy, Thomas and Owen were a vital part. Like the disagree-
ments between Wordsworth and Coleridge, the story of the poetry wars
does not make sense without understanding how close the two sides
originally were. The sections that follow explore the way that between
1912 and 1914 , Georgians and Imagists alike were devoted to the ideal of
direct and immediate poetry and, under the auspices of the Poetry
Inside and outside modernism 23