his attraction lies in the vivid picturesqueness of his romance-besprinkled
page’.^33 It was not only Monro’s articles that resembled Pound’s
Imagism. In the March 1912 issue, Pound’s Georgian foe Lascelles
Abercrombie wrote a long article on ‘The Function of Poetry in the
Drama’, arguing that poetry requires a different attitude to character,
for poetry allows its speakers ‘a certain powerful simplification and exag-
geration, so that the primary impulses of being are infinitely more
evident’ and their speech has an ‘intense unobstructed significance’. In
poetry alone, he continues, ‘the primary emotional urge of our being is
conveyed directly, immediately into our apprehension’.^34 Less significant
than the truth of his ideas is the key Imagist vocabulary of intensity,
directness and immediacy to describe the essence of poetic communi-
cation; compare Pound’s ‘direct treatment’ and instant presentation of the
Image, or his clarification that ‘an image, in our sense, is real, because we
know it directly’.^35 Just as Abercrombie believed that this direct poetry
would allow the ‘primary emotional urge’ to be transmitted, so Pound’s
‘D!% ia’ is also, in Flint’s words, ‘a perfect translation of pure emotion’,
H. D.’s work that of a poet who ‘will accept nothing that has not come to
her direct, that has not sprung immediately out of her own contem-
plation’.^36 Consequently, the Imagist justifications for free verse based on
direct transmission of the impulse sound remarkably similar to Georgian
justifications for metre. Imagism was for free verse because it allowed
‘the precise rendering of the impulse’, in Pound’s terms.^37 Or, as Richard
Aldington expanded:
The old accented verse forced the poet to abandon some of his individuality,
most of his accuracy and all his style in order to wedge his emotions into some
preconceived and sometimes childish formality; free verse permits the poet all his
individuality because he creates his cadence instead of copying other people’s, all
his accuracy because with his cadence flowing naturally he tends to write
naturally and therefore with precision, and all his style because style consists in
concentration, and exactness which could only be obtained rarely in the old
forms.^38
Needless to say, Aldington does not heed his own advice about style
being concentration and not wedging your style into a preconceived
formality, as his sentence’s inordinate length is entirely determined by
its ternary parallelism. But his overall focus is clear: free verse allows the
poet to be natural, at one with himself, his individuality never comprom-
ised by convention. Such absence of convention also allows him to write
accurately and precisely. Ironically, this was exactly the same argument
that Abercrombie used for regular metre:
30 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism