triumphantly, ‘Poetry is the image of man and nature’ ( 752 ). No wonder
that Monro’s article on Imagism remarked that ‘Wordsworth (if Christ was
a Socialist) might almost be called an Imagist in theory’– a sly thrust at
Imagist separatism, since Wordsworth was patently the tutelary genius of
the Georgians. Abercrombie’s peasants, Gibson’s working poor, Brooke’s
sunny youth, Masefield’s ne’er-do-wells, Thomas’s tramps and de la Mare’s
children all manifest theLyrical Ballads’ fascination for a subject who
would speak without compromise or convention: since W. H. Davies
actually was a beggar and a tramp, he simply wrote as himself, an irony
whose implications I will pursue in chapter four.^54 Yet this little stab also
carried the justification for Monro’s inclusive editorial policy, because it
links the Wordsworthian subjects favoured by Georgian poets with the
Wordsworthian aims of Imagist technique; in 1917 Pound himself was to
call Wordsworth ‘a silly old sheep with a genius, an unquestionable genius,
for imagisme’.^55 Like Wordsworth, both group’s strictures against rhetoric
are made the cause of a poetry whose expression would be true to the
‘primary laws of our nature’ and ‘the essential passions of the heart’ ( 743 ),
as exemplified by the humble and rustic who live without the influence
of ‘social vanity’ ( 744 ). However implausible its sociology, the Preface to
Lyrical Balladsopens with a model of personal sincerity uncompromised by
social falsehood, and Coleridge criticised Wordsworth’s ideas about tech-
nique because he felt they failed to live up to Wordsworth’s own principles
about such sincerity; most obviously, the latter’s disastrous idea that metre
was an ‘intertexture of ordinary feeling... not strictly and necessarily
connected with the passion’ ( 755 ), which would make Wordsworth’s form
foreign to his expression of the ‘essential passions of the heart’. Or, as
Pound declared to thePoetry Reviewreadership, ‘I believe in technique as a
test of a man’s sincerity’.^56 Free verse is the opposite of rhetoric, for
Aldington, because nothing would impede ‘some real observation, some
accurate expression of emotion’.^57 Pound’s direct, cut-down poetics are
about unimpeded emotional accuracy:
Poetry is the statement of overwhelming emotional values[,] all the rest is an
affair of cuisine, of art. On n’e ́meut que par la clarte ́. [One writes movingly only
by clarity.] Stendhal is right in that clause. He was right in his argument for
prose, but Poetry also aims at giving a feeling precisely evaluated.^58
When this rhythm, or when the vowel and consonantal melody or sequence
seems truly to bear the trace of emotion which the poem (for we have come at
last to the poem) is intended to communicate, we say that this part of the work is
good... from the other side, ideas, or fragments of ideas, the emotion and
concomitant emotions of this ‘Intellectual and Emotional Complex’ (for we have
Inside and outside modernism 33