from his infinite inward capacities and join them to the sensuous, natural
but unfree powers of the naı ̈ve.
Yet this triumphant future reconciliation of the naı ̈ve with the senti-
mental is proclaimed in terms that keep collapsing, as if such a thing were
by definition necessary, desirable but also impossible.^100 ‘Knowing how to
restore nature in its original simplicity within himself is precisely what
constitutes the poet’ ( 224 ), but if a poet ‘knows’ how to restore simplicity,
by definition he can’t be simple, nor will he be able to restore it. The naı ̈ve
person can never know they’re naı ̈ve, since if they did, they wouldn’t be
naı ̈ve any more. The person without divisions cannot know that they are
without divisions, because to know this would mean to know the differ-
ence between thinking and feeling, and for that to happen, one would
have to understand what it would be to split them, and so on. In other
words, the naı ̈ve and sentimental is an essay whose very terms of analysis
are predicated on the impossibility of the naı ̈ve person ever writing such a
thing. As Schiller admits, this means that only the sentimental can
recognise the naı ̈ve, but the logical consequence of his argument is less
often pursued, that the naı ̈vecannot actually existas a concept without its
sentimental opposite. That which is characterised by its own internality,
structured on its own terms, ‘being at each moment a self-sufficient and
complete whole’ ( 233 ), cannot actually be recognised without the external-
ity it was supposed to exclude. And this has important implications for
the subsequent history of all verse that is premised on its naı ̈ve capacities –
that somewhere, somehow, the presence of the admiringly sentimental
will be detectable in the vicinity, and the self-division that the naı ̈ve was to
eliminate will reappear with it.
Just such a division is powerfully evident in one of the creeds that was
designed to prevent it, Pound’s famous announcement of the rules for
Imagist poetry:
- Direct treatment of the ‘thing’, whether subjective or objective.
- To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the
presentation. - As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical
phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.^101
The first two words are mutually contradictory. If poetry is a ‘treat-
ment’ of a thing, then it is by definition not direct, unless ‘direct
treatment’ is one sort of treatment among others, which would reduce
it to a stylistic device. Pound later commented that he had learnt a great
deal from Hardy’s ‘absorption insubjectas contrasted with [sic] aesthetes’
Inside and outside modernism 45