the same, because the struggle to sound direct had overwhelmed any
personal expression. To ensure it does not abstract from the thing, for
example, American free verse focuses on the accidental object to the
exclusion of all emotion, and is therefore prone to blankness. Georgian
poetry, on the other hand, follows Wordsworth by focusing on the trivial
(animals, flowers), and therefore denies itself the opportunity to express
serious emotions. In Wordsworth, apparently, ‘the emotion is of the
object’ not of specifically human associations, and ‘such emotions must
be vague (as in Wordsworth), or if more definite, pleasing’.^116 Lacking
even Wordsworth’s limited grasp on philosophy because he fears rhetoric,
abstraction and morals, the Georgian poet thus either apes Wordsworth’s
sensibility or, if he departs from Wordsworthian topics, ‘is subject to
lapses of rhetoric from which Wordsworth, with his complete innocence
of other emotions than those in which he specialized, is comparatively
free’ ( 119 ). Georgian poetry is rhetorical, in other words, because it has no
emotions except those unconsciously borrowed from Wordsworth, and
because its blind patriotism ‘has borrowed little from foreign sources’, it
lacks any possibility of stepping outside this tradition and expressing
something truly personal ( 118 ). As Eliot put it a little later, ‘because we
have never learned to criticize Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth (poets of
assured though modest merit), Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth punish us
from their graves with the annual scourge of the Georgian Anthology’.^117
Eliot’s attack continued in the third of the ‘Reflections’, where he again
noted that the editors of an anthology calledThe New Poetry(which
included Georgians, Imagists and Eliot himself) had bracketed their
contributors under a common goal. Opposed to ‘all the rhetorical ex-
cesses’ of the previous generation, the new poetry would be ‘a concrete
and immediate realisation of life; it would discard the theory, the abstrac-
tion, the remoteness, found in all classics not of the first order... it has
set before itself an idea of absolute simplicity and sincerity – an ideal
which implies an individual, unstereotyped diction, and an individual
unstereotyped rhythm’.^118
Eliot recognised the aim ‘to wring the neck of rhetoric’, as Verlaine had
demanded, but he doubted whether many had pressed hard enough:
But as for the escape from rhetoric – there is a great push at the door, and some
cases of suffocation. But what is rhetoric? The test seems unsatisfactory. There is
rhetoric even among the new poets. Furthermore, I am inclined to believe that
Tennyson’s verse is a ‘cry from the heart’ – only it is the heart of Tennyson,
Latitudinarian, Whig, Laureate... The writers inThe New Poetrywho have
avoided rhetoric... have done so chiefly by the exercise, in greater or less degree,
52 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism