absolutely necessary for the fetters of stereotyped poetic language to be
shaken off’.^28 In order for modern poetry to be modern, ‘the modern
poet’s equipment must include, apart from the natural adoration of
beauty, a clear and sound grasp upon facts, and a stupendous aptitude
for assimilation’:
The goal is nothing less than the final re-welding of metre to meaning, and it
cannot, in the nature of things, be achieved until man has attained a second
innocence, a self-obliviousness beyond self-consciousness, a super-consciousness;
that condition, in fact, produced only by a complete knowledge of his own
meaning... a fastidious selection of topic, language and form... it must be
packed and tense with meaning; no line may be thin, no link may rattle.
( 11 – 13 )
When the magazine published Pound’s ‘Prolegomena’ in the February
issue, therefore, a subscriber to thePoetry Reviewwould not have noticed
any sudden swerve in editorial policy. Pound’s demand for ‘the trampling
down of every convention that impedes or obscures’ ( 73 ) corresponds to
Monro’s unfettering of stereotyped poetic language, or his declaration in
‘Freedom’ that ‘a new diction is demanded... the Modern poet will be
free, at all hazards, from the conventions of his predecessors’.^29 Pound’s
belief in ‘an “absolute rhythm”, a rhythm, that is, in poetry which
corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed’
( 73 ) accords with Monro’s ‘re-welding of metre to meaning’ above.
Monro’s ‘fastidious selection’ and dislike of thin lines resembles Pound’s
whittling down of ‘In a Station of the Metro’ from thirty lines to two in
the cause of ‘maximum efficiency of expression’.^30 Both Monro and
Pound are announcing a programme of poetry based on expelling any-
thing extraneous, for just as Pound’s ‘absolute’ rhythm is an ‘uncounter-
feiting, uncounterfeitable’ record of the poet’s sensibilities, so Monro’s
‘complete knowledge of his own meaning’ implies there is nothing about
the poet’s materials which is beyond his ken – as Pound put it a few
months later, ‘“good writing” is perfect control’.^31 Pound printed ‘D!Ria’
to show what he meant by ‘austere, direct’ poetry ( 76 ), but he had been
forestalled: in the January issue, the Georgian W. W. Gibson was praised
for his diction of ‘direct and unadorned austerity’ and then censured
for taking it too far, from ‘an austere simplicity to baldness’.^32 A
few pages later, ironically, Pound was criticised by his fellow Imagist
Flint for his second-hand work; despite Pound’s praise of Daniel and
Cavalcanti’s ‘testimony of the eyewitness’ and their ‘first hand’ symptoms,
thought Flint, ‘so much of his inspiration seems bookish, so much of
Inside and outside modernism 29