of utter individuals would be as homogeneous as a world of identical
people, because there would be no common criteria to distinguish them
from one another, and the poetics of individualism has the same problem,
for the more that the poetry is unique, the less possibility there is that we
could ever know it. As Frank Kermode first pointed out inRomantic
Image, for the unique poem to be recognisable as such, it must use a
common, discursive language.^85 Hulme’s idea that ‘poetry is compromise
for a language of intuition’ admitted what Pound would not when he
declared that ‘the Image is the word beyond formulated language’.^86
Language is not language unless it is to some degree formulated, and
the concepts of accuracy, sincerity and organicity are meaningless without
the threat of some kind of formula. If the absolute or individual is ever to
be appreciated as such, it depends to some degree on the common.
This is not, of course, a problem unique to Hulme, Pound or Bergson.
It can be plausibly traced to the contrary demands placed upon the very
idea of the aesthetic itself in Kant’sCritique of Judgement, where aesthetic
must be judged as itself, without reference to concepts or categories (or it
would be reducible to an example of something else) and simultaneously
stand as an example of such indeterminate freedom in order to be the
education in the ‘sensus communis’, the reconciliation of freedom and
universality that Kant’s project aims for.^87 But not the least of the many
ironies in Hulme’s essay is that its entire programme for the undivided
Classical psychic unity is itself based on a Romantic essay which addresses
exactly this paradox of uniqueness and dependency, Schiller’sOn the
Naı ̈ve and Sentimental in Literature. There is no direct record of Hulme
reading Schiller (though Pound tells us he read Kant and Hegel in the
original), but the distinction between Classical and Romantic common in
Victorian poetics – Arnold is the most obvious example – was first
formulated as an opposition between a unified ‘naı ̈ve’ aesthetic and an
infinitely divided, ‘sentimental’ one by Schiller’s essay.^88 It was Coler-
idge’s lectures on Shakespeare that introduced that essay’s terms to the
English-speaking public, just as they introduced the concept of organic
form to which Hulme draws his reader’s attention, and although Coler-
idge adapted both from his reading of A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures in
Dramatic Art and Literature(it was Schlegel’s brother Friedrich who first
called modern art ‘Romantic’), he had, like Schlegel himself, derived the
substance of his opposition from reading Schiller.^89
Nevertheless, the essay’s importance for twentieth-century poetics has
hitherto been mostly overlooked in favour of Schiller’s more prominent
reworking of Kant in theAesthetic Education, whose English editors make
Inside and outside modernism 41