Metre gives to the poet’s words aformwhich is itself a direct expression of the
emotion which the words enclose. Not only does the underlying consistent beat
keep our answering emotions in the necessary state of excitation, but the sudden
varieties and modulations of metre, the momentary deviations from consistency,
are most powerful suggesters of shifting changes and unexpected upward rushes
of emotion.^39
The difference in technique only makes the criteria of complete unity
of form and feeling more obvious. ‘What the Imagists are “out for” is
direct naked contact with reality,’ explained May Sinclair in response to
Monro’s summary of Imagism’s faults inThe Egoist.^40 In the article that
follows Abercrombie’s, Gibson summarises neatly: ‘Poetry is not the
decorating or disguising, but the unveiling of truth... the most direct,
trenchant, terse and intimate of the arts.’^41
These similarities suggest that, rather than veering in several directions,
Monro saw himself editing a publication whose overall slogan was direct
transmission of the poetic impulse. Unsurprisingly, there are strong
similarities in the terms of approval and disapproval on both sides. Rupert
Brooke wrote that Gibson, ‘with an almost terrifying severity’ abstained
from ‘“romantic” devices’ with a ‘careful pruning of every unnecessary
part... every superfluous ounce removed’.^42 This stripped-down verse
reflects Gibson’s accuracy, for ‘perfect technique in poetry consists in
keeping carefully before the mind the precise shade of feeling of the idea
you want to evoke’: compare Pound’s continual insistence on rendering
subjects ‘precisely... whether of external nature or of emotion’.^43
Edward Thomas praised the Georgian Ralph Hodgson’sEve and Other
Poemsbecause their lack of Victorian decoration meant there was ‘nothing
between their beauty and the reader’, allowing Thomas to ‘recall what
poetry was before Keats and Tennyson had so adorned it that it could run
and ring too seldom’.^44 Walter de la Mare thought Hodgson’s work ‘bare,
vivid, wasteless – as near action as words can be’. His speech is ‘clean and
incisive as a blow’, because ‘it does not argue, it does not dissect or explore
or teach or attempt to criticise life’, a criticism which sounds remarkably
like Pound’s explanation that the image is ‘constatation of fact. It pre-
sents. It does not comment...Itisnotacriticism of life.’^45 Such
similarities of argument only underscore the difference in the actual
poetry, of course. But when Monro does make a comparison ofDes
Imagisteswith Abercrombie’s latest publication in the Imagist number
ofPoetry and Drama, the expected terms are reversed. Far from being
direct and immediate, the Imagists are ‘Faint, shadowy, cool, almost,
it must be said, mellifluous, their few words enmesh images, hint,
Inside and outside modernism 31