began a second phase of modernist poetics, associated with abstract geo-
metric art and Eliot’s impersonal poetry.^26 In October it provided the first
English appearance of William Carlos Williams’s poetry, with commen-
tary by Pound. But thePoetry Reviewwas not a modernist house organ, it
was an outgrowth of the Poetry Bookshop, and the Georgian poets are
equally in evidence. ‘Prolegomena’, for example, is followed by reviews
of Lascelles Abercrombie; in the August issue Richard Aldington re-
views on the same page as Rupert Brooke, and most of the magazine is
taken up with Flint’s exhaustive survey of ‘Contemporary French Poetry’,
whose appearance should be contrasted with Eliot’s accusation that Geor-
gian verse ‘takes not the faintest notice of the development of French verse
from Baudelaire to the present day’.^27 This mixture carried on when the
Poetry Reviewseceded to Stephen Phillips in 1913 and Monro beganPoetry
and Drama, which provided regular exposure for works by the Georgian
anthologists (awarding a prize to Rupert Brooke’s ‘Grantchester’), and at
the same time, to Pound’s circle and other avant-garde movements, so
that Futurism and Imagism were each given a whole issue to promote
their poetry and manifestos. In fact, Hulme was one of the Brooke prize
judges. A reader ofPoetry and Dramain December 1914 could see poems
by Frost, Davies, Pound, Aldington and Lawrence and prose by Edward
Thomas and Re ́my de Gourmont, the Symbolist critic whom Pound
admired and Eliot named one of his two perfect critics. The Imagist
special issue puts Flint’s ‘French Chronicle’ and Pound’s new poems
alongside Edward Thomas on the art of bad reviewing, and Monro in
praise of W. H. Davies. The June 1914 issue contains Thomas on reprints,
Hulme’s ‘German Chronicle’ with its important recantation of his previ-
ous Imagism, and almost in summary of the mix, a reprinting of work
from bothDes ImagistesandNew Numbers, the self-publicising magazine
set up by Brooke, Gibson, Abercrombie and Drinkwater. What with its
Imagist issue, Futurist issue, Flint’s up-to-the-minute ‘French Chronicle’
and Hulme’s introductions to German Expressionism, the subscribers to
Poetry and Drama(who included Thomas Hardy) would probably have
been better informed about new movements in European modernism
than anyone else in the country, as well as thoroughly familiar with the
Georgian poets. Such catholicism may simply reflect Monro’s uneven
taste, as Pound thought, but actually looking at the articles themselves
reveals that Monro’s editorial policy was rather more consistent than was
convenient for Pound’s retrospective self-fashioning.
In January, the first number of his editorship of thePoetry Review,
Monro set forward his programme, declaring boldly that ‘it is now at last
28 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism