Tradition – but all share the Romantic desire for poetry at one with itself,
free from exterior determination, ‘acting creatively under laws of its own
origination’, as Coleridge put it.^145 Although modernist critics often
denied this Romantic heritage because it linked them to the dominant
poetic tradition of their enemies, it is Romanticism’s desire to eliminate
the extraneous which provides the common ground between the excisions
of Imagism, defending a free inner subjectivity from exterior determin-
ations of formal pattern or generic words, and the poetics of plurality and
fragmentation in Eliot, separating off the poem from the contingencies of
personality and history, dissolving the possibility of externality in Trad-
ition’s perpetual irony, as Yeats would analogously recuperate private loss
into the cosmic syntheses ofA Vision. And it is unfinished business within
Romanticism about the possibility of this autonomy – of the aesthetic and
of the poetic subject – that relates the modernists to their non-modernist
contemporaries. For by writing poetry with a detectable exteriority of
form to content, non-modernist poetry witnesses to a lack of perfect
unity, and the presence of forces alienating the speaker from him- or
herself. In formulating the aesthetics designed to eliminate the possibility
of that exteriority, de Gourmont had argued that ‘substance engenders
form as the tortoise and oyster engender their shells’.^146 Picking up de
Gourmont’s metaphor, Pound’s point was more political: ‘The shell-fish
grows its own shell, the genius creates its own milieu... there is no
misanthropy in a thorough contempt for the mob. There is no respect for
mankind save in respect for detached individuals.’^147 It is exactly because
Hardy, Thomas, de la Mare and Owen did not find themselves solely
creators of their own milieu, but also determined by it, that their form is
not just an outgrowth of their substance, but is actively and sometimes
awkwardly directing it. For Hardy, such exterior determination reflects
the implacable indifference of events to human desires; for de la Mare, the
echoes of verse-form are part of the self-displacement of the uncanny. It is
the subtle, almost-invisibility of his poetic patterns that allows Thomas to
explore the relations of chance and choice in enlisting; for Owen, the ex-
traordinary discrepancy between his ultra-patterned formal structure and
the shattered content testifies to the unbearable strains of trench life itself.
As with Wordsworth, though, the presence of a form which is palpably
out of kilter with its material does not mean that the poem is purely
derivative, a poetry-by-numbers whose meaning would already be sup-
plied in advance (although Hardy grimly gestures in this direction, he
does so in protest). Such a reversal would simply maintain the absolute
antithesis of inside and outside, an antithesis whose origins are visible
60 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism