simultaneously totally personal and wholly impersonal, a paradox which
reappears undiminished in Pound’s discussion of the Imagist-Vorticist
poet in 1915 :
By bad verse, whether ‘regular’ or ‘free’, I mean verse which pretends to some
emotion which did not assist at its parturition. I mean also verse made by those
who have not sufficient skill to make the words move in rhythm of the creative
emotion. Where the voltage is so high that it fuses the machinery, one has merely
the ‘emotional man’, not the artist. The best artist is the man whose machinery
can stand the highest voltage. The better the machinery, the more precise, the
stronger; the more exact will be the record of the voltage and of the various
currents which have passed through it.^98
In order to make the poem nothing but the purest record of the
pulsations of creative emotion, the artist himself is reduced to a machine
for recording them. Even Hulme’s call for a ‘dry, hard’ classical verse
based on limitation and finitude has a distinct resonance of the naı ̈ve
poet’s ‘dry, matter-of-fact way’ of treating things.^99 In short, Hulme’s
classicism is Schiller’s naı ̈ve rewritten, and the naı ̈ve provides an ideal for
some of the cardinal doctrines of Imagist poetics.
As the title indicates, however, Schiller’s essay is written not simply in
praise of the naı ̈ve, but in contrast to its opposite, the sentimental. Within
the sentimental poet, ‘the agreement between his feeling and his thinking
...isnolonger in him but rather outside him’, in an ‘ideal yet-to-be-
realised state’ ( 201 ). He no longer operates as an ‘undivided sensuous
unity’, but constantly oscillates between immediate feeling and reflection,
yearning for their reconciliation but never able to achieve it on his own.
The naı ̈ve poetisnature, the sentimental poet just seeks it, and as a
consequence remains permanently divided, writing always not of his
object but of the felt distance between self and object. Nevertheless,
Schiller intimates that this division indicates that the sentimental poet
has one thing which the naı ̈ve poet does not, namely freedom to choose.
The naı ̈ve poet’s unity means he has ‘a single relation to his object’,
whereas the sentimental ‘always has to do with two conflicting images
and feelings’ ( 204 ). Yet this conflict arises because of the disparity between
‘the actual world as a limit and his idea as something infinite’, in other
words, inherently free. As the essay progresses, Schiller claims that the
future of poetry lies not in a return to the naı ̈ve, but in enabling the
sentimental poet to join his freedom with the undivided unity of the naı ̈ve
and soar onwards to greater poetry than has yet been written. Contradict-
ing his earlier assertion that ‘naı ̈vete ́alone makes someone a genius’ ( 189 ),
he describes the ‘sentimental genius’ ( 235 ) who would draw his power
44 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism