preoccupation with “treatment”’.^102 ‘Treatment’ has one eye on the
audience and one on the subject, and so cannot be wholly ‘direct’. And
such ‘treatment’ is evident in the second part of the sentence, ‘whether
subjective or objective’. By accepting both halves of the opposition,
Pound renders the distinction meaningless; if it doesn’t matter whether
the thing is subjective or objective, why bother to make the distinction?
The clause is there to amplify the first clause as if the reader could not be
trusted to understand, and in that sense is also ‘treatment’. The second
tenet’s determination to use ‘absolutely no word that does not contribute’
simply violates itself. ‘Absolutely’ is an intensifier that contributes noth-
ing further to the prescription except Pound’s concern that the reader
should take this clause very seriously; again, it is treatment, not subject.
The same is true of the anaphora in the third tenet, whose second ‘in
sequence of ’ could be removed without changing the meaning of the
command.
Pound’s offhand indifference to ‘whether subjective or objective’ is true
of each phrase in its combination of a statement of objective principle
amplified by a personal worry about being misunderstood. The three
tenets are rhetorical in the modern sense because they use useless words,
according to a strict criterion of directness. What makes them not at all
useless, of course, is that they are indicative of rhetoric in the old pre-
Romantic sense, of Pound’s need to persuade his audience. The same
issue is evident in this classic statement of Imagistic impact:
Constatation of fact. It presents. It does not comment. It is irrefutable because it
doesn’t present a personal predilection for any particular fraction of the truth. It
is as communicative as Nature. It is as uncommunicative as Nature. It is not a
criticism of life. I mean it does not deal in opinion. It washes its hands of
theories.^103
We are to know that the Image has been ‘presented’ by the absence of
comment, personal predilection and opinion; we have to feel the white
space round the tiny Imagist poem, the intense neutrality of every line.
Such criticism displays a personal predilection of its own, since Pound has
to explain, amplify, clarify and refine his definition by telling us just what
the Image isn’t, with a certain mistrust of his audience. Here, the telling
adjective ‘irrefutable’ suggests a mental audience of philosophers reading
poetry in order to argue with it, or perhaps an Imagist poet whittling away
until he or she gets to the poem’s core, discarding far more than is kept –
as the paragraph of negatives itself proceeds by elimination. That suspi-
cion of the audience manifests itself in a self-consciousness that inevitably
46 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism