anthology,Des Imagistes, followed by Aldington’sImages and Flint’s
Cadences,as well as a Futurist anthology, but two volumes ofGeorgian
Poetry, on whose successDes Imagisteshad been based. Pound had actually
given Monro’s own work a place in the next Poetry Bookshop publica-
tion, theCatholic Anthology(along with Eliot and Joyce), but after the war
took the opportunity to lambast him for his eclectic publishing policy:
‘OnlyHELL– you’ve never had a programme – you’ve always dragged in
Aberbubble and Siphon, and Wobblebery and wanted to exploit the
necropolis... One always suspects you of having (and knows you have
had) sympathy with a lot of second-rate slopp – and never knows when
the ancient sin will break out again.’^22
But Monro could honestly reply that hitherto he had not seen quite
what was so uniquely compelling about Pound’s own programme. In a
1915 article on the Imagists, he had remarked: ‘It has never become very
clear in what particular respects they may be considered innovators’, and
drawing their avant-garde sting, adduced Jonson, Dryden, Addison,
Burke, Coleridge and Arnold in support of the Imagist goals of ‘accuracy
of vision, precision of language, and concentration’. Nor, he declared, are
they particular innovators within their own time, being ‘one of the latest
groups in the forward movement of English poetry – not the only one’.^23
This criticism evidently hurt, because a swift reply in the next issue from
the Imagist May Sinclair argued that Monro had a problem with labels.
The poet H. D., she protested, doesn’t need Jonson, Shakespeare, Words-
worth or Arnold, for her verse ‘stands by itself in its own school’.^24
Unfortunately, this also meant that H. D. was not an Imagist either, and
the absurdity of justifying Imagism because none of its poets actually
belonged to it underlines the threat that Monro’s comment represented.
For Imagism’s foremost commandment had been ‘direct treatment of the
thing’, and if it could be shown that such ‘direct treatment’ had a tradition
behind it, it could not be as direct as all that.^25 Worse for Sinclair, it was
Monro himself who had done the most to make the general reader aware
that Imagism did not differ unequivocally from the company it kept,
because he was the editor of the first magazines in which Imagists and
non-Imagists had alike made their case for brevity, precision and accuracy.
In 1912 , for example, Monro’sPoetry Reviewprovided the British reader
with several key staging-posts in what was to become modernism. In
February, it printed Pound’s ‘Prolegomena’, a programme for what was to
be announced as Imagism, along with some new Imagist poems by
Pound. In July it sponsored T. E. Hulme’s lecture ‘The New Philosophy
of Art as Illustrated in Poetry’, which was republished as ‘Romanticism
and Classicism’, the essay whose call for classical dryness and hardness
Inside and outside modernism 27