Rather than eradicating traditional verse forms, modernist poetry
changed the justification for them. In order to argue for free verse’s
rightful place, the criteria for verse-form had to become the entire
appropriateness of the form to the meaning, and here Pound was simply
putting Coleridge’s poetics into practice. ‘Since Dryden’, declared Coler-
idge, ‘the Metre of our Poets leads to the Sense: in our elder and more
genuine Poets, the Sense, including the Passion, leads to the metre’.^17 Or
as Pound put it: ‘Poetry is a composition or an “organisation” of words set
to music. By “music” here we can scarcely mean much more than rhythm
and timbre. The rhythm form is false unless it belong to the particular
creative emotion or energy which it purports to represent.’^18 And in free
verse, the idea was that the exterior form wouldnecessarilybe in perfect
correspondence with the interior content: there could be no manipulation
of the latter to fit any prearranged pattern, and hence the poem itself
would be true to what it talked about, and embody a sensibility utterly at
one with itself. Hence when Pound accused his neo-Wordsworthian
contemporaries of rhetoric and inaccuracy, his argument essentially
repeated Coleridge’s strictures against Wordsworth, only with a neater
pun; Eliot’s work, he sighed thankfully, is ‘a great and blessed relief after
the official dulness and Wordsworthian lignification of the “Georgian”
Anthologies’, where ‘lignification’ combines turning to wood and making
a line. Wooden form typifies poetry whose perspective is borrowed
(‘official dulness’) and in consequence, untrue to itself.^19
Nevertheless, because Georgian and Imagist poets shared basically
similar goals, they ran into the same difficulty, for by trying so hard to
make the poem the expression of a singular or unified consciousness, both
groups actually ended up promoting the poet’s self rather more than the
poem. As Eliot noted, the effort to avoid rhetoric itself became a conven-
tion, and his way out of convention was not to ignore other poets but to
find oneself through them, a process he later called ‘Tradition’. The great
shift in modernist poetics from a model of poetry as unfettered self-
expression (subsequently labelled ‘Romantic’) to one that is explicitly
anti-Romantic and anti-individualist (or ‘Classical’) stems from a reaction
to this problem of writing a truly free poetry. In distrusting the individual-
ism of Amy Lowell’s brand of free verse, Classicism formed a theoretical
anchor for the return to strict quatrains in Pound and Eliot’s poems after
1916 , and in its formulation as ‘Tradition’, almost simultaneously the
fragmented polyphony of what were becoming theCantosandThe Waste
Land. But what is concealed by this shift of terms is the way that modernist
classicism is in fact based on the same Coleridgean ideas about autonomy
Inside and outside modernism 25