of editorial policy. Shortly afterwards, Rupert Brooke informed Gwen
Raverat that he, de la Mare, Gibson, Abercrombie and Davies were ‘the
staff poets’ of the magazine, and their work featured in almost every
subsequent issue alongside painting’s international avant-garde.^75 The
OEDgives the first instance of the adjective ‘modernist’ applying to a
movement in the arts as 1927 ;in 1912 , however,Rhythmwas advertising
itself inPoetry Reviewas ‘the Unique Magazine of Modernist Art’. It is a
historical irony, but perhaps an understandable one, that the Georgians
appeared under the banner of ‘modernism’ – in the sense we would use it
today – long before the Imagists ever did.
3
Shortly after writing ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, Hulme changed his
mind about Bergson. His initial attraction had been based on the way
Bergson promised a way out of the late nineteenth-century deterministic
and mechanistic view of the world: if it were composed entirely of atoms
acted upon by physical forces, there had seemed no phenomenon that was
not ultimately determined by those forces, including human beings.
Bergson’s argument for a uniquely incommensurable object of knowledge
provided philosophical underpinnings for a reassertion of individuality –
and ironically, it was this that provoked Hulme’s subsequent rejection of
him. As he explained it to readers of theNew Age, ‘I had no sooner sat
down in this hall and felt the almost physical sensation produced by the
presence all around me of several hundred people filled with exactly
the same kind of attitude to Bergson as my own, than I experienced a
complete reversal of feeling... I was immediately repulsed by what before
had attracted me’.^76 Hulme’s biographer calls this a ‘trivial and subjective
reason’, but it is also truly Bergsonian in its assertion that the absolute
truth of things cannot be accessible to common standards.^77 And al-
though Pound damned Bergson as ‘frog diarhoea’, his own rejection of
the common was equally heartfelt, for since ‘poetry is the expression of
overwhelming emotional values, no rattle of formulae, Christian, pagan
or socialistic will compass this force of expression’.^78 Just asBlastdedi-
cated art to the individual, so Pound declared in 1917 that ‘there is no
respect for mankind save in respect for detached individuals’, and quoted
John B. Yeats’s dictum that ‘poetry is the last refuge and asylum of the
individual of whom oratory is the enemy’ approvingly.^79 Poetry is the
opposite of rhetoric because poetry is truly individual, and obviously must
therefore be entirely true to itself. Hence his strictures on rhetoric, on
Inside and outside modernism 39