But although Pound’s political individualism remained as forthright as
ever in hisNew Ageseries ‘Studies in Contemporary Mentality’ and
‘Provincialism the Enemy’, he insisted with Eliot on discipline in poetry.
‘Remedy prescribed “Emaux et Came ́es” (or the Bay State Hymn Book).
Rhyme and regular strophes’.^124 Or, as Eliot had put it to a lecture class in
1916 : ‘The beginning of the twentieth century has witnessed a return to
the ideals of classicism. These may roughly be characterised asformand
restraintin art, discipline and authority in religion, centralization in
government (either as socialism or monarchy).’^125 For such a famous
monarchist to admit that socialism might also be a form of classicism
only underlines the vehemence of his anti-individualism.
The results of this form-as-restraint, according to Pound, were his own
‘Mauberley’ and Eliot’s ultra-regular quatrains of 1920 , designed to elim-
inate any possibility of Romantic self-indulgence, since in Eliot’s recollec-
tion, ‘the form gave the impetus to the content’.^126 As he insisted at the
time: ‘To create a form is not merely to invent a shape, a rhyme or
rhythm. It is also the realization of the whole appropriate content of this
rhyme or rhythm. The sonnet of Shakespeare is not merely such and such
a pattern, but a precise way of thinking and feeling.’^127
Nevertheless this classicism of form is not the authority it seems, for it
tacitly maintains de Gourmont’s programme (a few years later, Eliot was
to anoint him one of his two perfect critics). In his earlier essay, ‘On Style
or Writing’, de Gourmont had anticipated Eliot by arguing that if form
really is inseparable from content, then it is not only the case that content
should match form exactly: it also follows that ‘to change the form is to
change the idea’.^128 Three pages later, in a discussion of the style of
Prosper Merime ́e, de Gourmont worked out the implication; if changing
the form alters the meaning, then ‘Merime ́e’s surplusage expresses the
very subtle observations made by a man who.. .’ and so forth.^129 Yet
surplusage was the very thing modernism was supposed to be expelling;
the word itself occurs in Walter Pater’s essay on ‘Style’, a foundational
text for Imagism, where ‘in truth all art does but consist in the removal of
surplusage’.^130 But according to de Gourmont’s logic, there can be no
such thing as surplusage. If form creates content, and vice versa, then all
form is coterminous with content, and there is no possibility for any
excess or rhetoric to exist. Merime ́e’s work says what it says, and that
surplusage is as expressive as anything else. If form always realises content,
then no poem, or person, can be rhetorical, sentimental or generalised at
all. Although asserting the priority of form seems to attack Romantic
freedoms, Eliot’s formulation actually maintains the perfect unity of
54 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism