come to the intellectual and emotional complex) must be in harmony, they must
form an organism, they must be an oak sprung from one acorn’.^59
Behind this slightly breathless claim that the emotional value of poetry
is both overwhelming and precisely evaluated, we might also hear the
more familiar Wordsworthian formulation that poetry is both the ‘spon-
taneous overflow of powerful feelings’ and ‘emotion recollected in tran-
quillity’.^60 Ultimately, it was for emotional insincerity that Pound and
Eliot criticised Georgian poetry, for the words didn’t have any basis in real
feeling: the Georgians were looking for ‘des sentiments pour les accom-
moder a`leur vocabulaire’ [feelings to suit their vocabulary].^61 And nowhere
was this Romantic emphasis on sincerity more clearly shown than in
Hulme’s essay, which is premised on the fact that a truly Classical poem
means not adherence to a set of principles, but a truly sincere poem and
poet. Far from being an accident of publishing history, it is entirely
appropriate that Hulme’s anti-Romantic document should have been
sponsored by a magazine committed to a new Wordsworthian revolution
in poetry.
Hulme always seemed to be a forerunner of the various strands of
modernism. It was he who in 1908 first called for a version of Imagism
in free verse, although Pound disputed his claim to be the sole source of
the Imagist school of 1912. He translated Bergson, whose philosophy
of direct intuition of the unique rather than a comparative analytic
method of science provided philosophical underpinning for Imagism’s
hatred of conventions. Yet just as the burgeoning English free-verse
movement was putting his 1908 demand for ‘the maximum of individual
and personal expression’ into practice, with his rejection of regular metre
as ‘rhetorical’, ‘cramping, jangling, meaningless, and out of place’,
‘Romanticism and Classicism’ called for order, discipline and restraint.^62
It presaged a new geometrical, anti-humanist art exemplified in Hulme’s
advocacy of Wyndham Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein, and its
argument for the ‘original sin’ of mankind and the necessity of restraint
and limitation in art as well as politics led T. S. Eliot to call him ‘the
forerunner of a new attitude of mind, which should be the twentieth-
century mind’.^63 M. H. Levenson has placed this essay as a fulcrum
between early modernism based on impressionism and the personal,
and the later modernism based on order and impersonality, and Richard
Shusterman has seen it as the beginnings of modernism’s decisive turn to
scientific objectivism.^64 But ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ is not such a
volte-faceas critics have thought, for on closer reading the same impulse
that drove Hulme’s earlier call for personal individual expression is still
34 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism