as the Romanticism it despised, for the very terms of the opposition are
taken from two of Coleridge’s most influential sources, Schiller and
Schlegel. Schiller’s influence is evident in the way T. E. Hulme first uses
the terms, where ‘classicism’ turns out not to mean submission to higher
authority, but organic poetry based on Schiller’s concept of the classically
‘naı ̈ve’ poet. Similarly, ‘Tradition’, in Eliot’s formulation, does not mean
common custom, but something much closer to Schlegel’s idea of the
Romantic fragment poem – a polyphonic space where all possible tension
between what belongs to an individual poem or poet and what is exterior
to it would dissolve in irony, and where it forms, in Eliot’s subsequent
discussion, an ‘organic whole’.^20 By tracing Hulme and Eliot’s sources to
these arch-Romantic German idealists, it becomes possible to see the
continuity between what look like wildly differing concepts of poetry,
modernism’s simultaneous attraction to minimalism (the elimination of
the superfluous) and maximalism (the incorporation of hugely various
cultures and influences). ‘Romanticism’, Eliot admonished his students in
1916 , ‘stands forexcessin any direction’; but it was excess, in the sense of
any kind of externality of form or influence, that both Romantic and
modernist poetics were designed to make impossible.^21 The rest of the
book is about why non-modernist poets might have found it useful.
Tracing these early stages of the poetry wars, however, is made more
difficult by the way that there was no great showdown between Thomas,
Hardy and Owen and their modernist counterparts, and their individual
responses to modernism have to be reconstructed from hints and guesses;
by the time Eliot published ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, two of
them were dead and the others were sufficiently established to have little
interest in justifying their work in a theoretical way. But like Wordsworth,
that did not mean that in conspicuously retaining a sense of exteriority,
their poetry might not ask awkward questions about the self-enclosure of
organic, autonomous poetics. For Hardy, Thomas or Owen’s poems are
about situations that are not self-determined, where the exterior or alien is
very much at work. Yet they are not the less Romantic for doing so;
rather, they suggest a reason for seeing tension between what belongs and
what is extraneous to the poem not as a failure, but as a truth which is also
visible in the freest verse, and the most truly organic.
2
The Poetry Bookshop was always an awkward institution for those
wishing to dissociate modernist poetry from its contemporaries. By 1915 ,
not only had its proprietor, Harold Monro, published the first Imagist
26 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism