imply, suggest; seek, while never too hotly pursuing; find, but never
definitely articulate; hold you out their meaning, but withhold it before
your grasp.’^46
This flowing, indefinite netting of images deliberately ironises
Aldington’s demands for poetry with ‘a hardness of cut stone’, or
Pound’s hatred of ‘slush’ and ‘mushy technique’.^47 For Monro, their
gentle vagueness contrasts violently with Abercrombie’s ‘End of the
World’, which sounds like a generic description of a modernist poem:
‘It is the precise opposite of impressionism. Detail brims over from its
lines. It is difficult, hard, tough. Oneimaginestheaveragereaderbaffled
by it.’^48 While on the Imagists’ side, Flint praised Frost for his ‘direct
observation of the object and immediate correlation with the emo-
tion’.^49 Pound too admired Frost’s ability to ‘paint the thing, the thing
as he sees it’, although Frost stubbornly resisted the latter’s attempts to
get him to write free verse.^50
Familiar with such a mixture, the reader of Monro’s publications
would perhaps have not have thought it remarkable to find that thePoetry
Reviewwas sponsoring a lecture by T. E. Hulme in 1912 – a lecture which
became ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ with its famous call for poetry to
be a ‘compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over
sensations bodily’, a language only one remove from neurotransmission.^51
This language Hulme defined as ‘Classical’, against ‘Romantic’ indirec-
tion and imprecision, and in doing so, presaged the movement against
‘personality’ in modernist criticism which culminates in Eliot’s ‘Tradition
and the Individual Talent’. But it is the anti-Romanticism of this very
essay that has helped disguise the most obvious common factor between
the Georgian and Imagist programmes: their mutual reliance on Roman-
tic thought, and especially Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads.
Pound’s insistence that ‘the “image” is the furthest possible remove from
rhetoric’ echoes Wordsworth’s famous calls for ‘simple and unelaborated
expressions’, a style of ‘nakedness and simplicity’ with ‘little of what is
usually called poetic diction’.^52 As Eliot himself said in 1942 , without
drawing out the implications: ‘Every revolution in poetry is apt to be, and
sometimes to announce itself as, a return to common speech. That is the
revolution that Wordsworth announced in his prefaces and he was right
... and the same revolution was due again something over a century
later’.^53
The image as incarnation of all directness finds its ancestor in
Wordsworth’s assertion that ‘there is no object standing between
the Poet and the image of things’: indeed, Wordsworth summarises
32 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism