manifest in May Sinclair’s reply to Monro’s assertion that Imagism was
not the only direct mode of poetry around:
The Image is not a substitute; it does not stand for anything but itself.
Presentation not Representation is the watchword of the school. The Image, I
take it, is Form. But it is not pure form. It is form and substance.
It may be either the form of a thing – you will get Imagist poems which are as
near as possible to the naked presentation of the thing, with nothing, not so
much as a temperament or a mood, between you and it... or the Image may be
in the form of a passion or emotion or mood... The point is that the passion,
emotion or mood is never given as an abstraction. And in no case is the Image a
symbol of reality (the object); it is reality (the object) itself. You cannot
distinguish between a thing and its image.^106
In which case, one is entitled to wonder, how does one know one is
looking at an image at all? Or to put it the other way round, if it is the
‘form of a thing’ directly presented, why do we need to know this if we
could never tell the difference between a thing and its image anyway? For
if the thing and the image were indistinguishable, any criterion of direct-
ness and immediacy is presupposed, since we couldn’t know the thing any
other way. ‘What the Imagists are “out for” is direct naked contact with
reality’, continued Sinclair, which is either trivial (all poems are real) or
pointless: if the real is only knowable through the image, then the image
cannot but be direct, and if itisknowable outside the image, why bother
with the image? By claiming to be a more direct transmission of ‘the
object’ than any other sort of poetry, Imagist verse was trapped in a
contradiction, that the more successfully it demonstrated the directness
of its language, the more it had to point to the mental experience of this
directness rather than the object it was transmitting, in order to have
anything to say.
But as the Poetry Bookshop publications demonstrate, directness was
equally the goal of the Georgian poets, and this contradictory demand for
the poem to be visibly transparent, the sentimental constructing the naı ̈ve,
means they are prone to exactly the same difficulty with a directness that
self-consciously presents itself, rather than its material. Lawrence made a
typically acute complaint to the Georgian editor Edward Marsh in 1915 ,
when he noted that despite promising emotional directness, Ralph Hodg-
son’s work had a subtext: ‘“oh I do want to give you this emotion”, cries
Hodgson, “I do”’, and hence the poem is full of Hodgson, not the
emotion.^107 Masefield made his reputation with a rough-and-ready verse
whose frequent manglings of grammar and syntax for the rhyme were
48 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism