Bookshop, were both theorising about the sort of poetic mind that would
produce such poems, without cliche ́, self-consciousness or convention, a
realism premised on removing the filters of custom. What this boils down
to is a common desire for a poetry whose agency would be utterly
singular: that is, it would have its own voice, rather than borrowed words,
thoughts or morals, and would thus be necessarily fresh and immediate –
literally, un-mediated. But like Wordsworth’s case for the real language of
men, many Georgians tried to find this singularity by imitating sensibil-
ities they imagined to be unified because they were unconventional –
reprobates such as John Masefield’s Saul Kane, Wilfrid Gibson’s working
people, or Lascelles Abercrombie’s peasants. Their shock tactics of hor-
rible subject-matter (corpse-washing, frog-crushing, sea-sickness) are
similarly a resistance to anything that would filter or dissipate the poem’s
impact. Imagism, however, took a more Coleridgean line by insisting
what mattered was not the authenticity of the poem’s extra-poetic sources
or the nature of the subject-matter, but its unity with itself. Most
obviously, it is organic form’s claim that metre be derived from within
the poetic content, or the poet’s interior intention, that sponsors the
Imagist introduction of free verse.^13 Drawing on Coleridge’s pervasive
plant imagery, Pound published an Imagist ‘Credo’ for the readers of
Harold Monro’sPoetry Reviewin 1912 :
I think there is a ‘fluid’ as well as a ‘solid’ content, that some poems may have
form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical
forms have certain uses. That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and
therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms.^14
The kerfuffle when Pound changes course mid-sentence from discuss-
ing ‘content’ to ‘form’, and then switches back again at the end to make
water both form and content is, in the end, only consonant with his point
that there should be no identifiable divergence between the two. Pound
was not, of course, arguing that free verse was the only permissible kind of
poetry, since unlike some of his fellow Imagists, he was no enemy of
traditional form for its own sake. ‘There is great freedom in pentameter’,
he insisted in 1915 , ‘and there are a great number of regular and beautifully
regular metres fit for a number of things, and quite capable of expressing a
wide range of energies and emotions’.^15 Nor, he was keen to point out to
the poetry-reading public, was Eliot a one-trick poet: ‘If the reader wishes
mastery of “regular form”, theConversation Galanteis sufficient to show
that symmetrical form is within Mr Eliot’s grasp. You will hardly find
such neatness save in France; such modern neatness, save in Laforgue’.^16
24 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism