in Coleridge’s binary opposition between poetry which iseitherorganic
ormechanical, from within or from without – a gesture whose anti-
industrial logic is also basic to Eliot’s complaint about the generalised
character ofGeorgian Poetrywhose middle-class readership ‘rejects with
contumely the independent man, the free man, all the individuals who do
not conform to a world of mass-production’.^148 Pound and Eliot were
fixing the greatest of gulfs between the pure exteriority of the mob and the
interiority of the free individual for polemical reasons, of course, but their
antipathy left no room to consider those complications of human agency
where the private self is always being acted upon by outside forces and yet
also alters and adapts them creatively – namely, the situation in which
most of us live. For in the last analysis, the possibility of ‘rhetoric’ is also
the possibility of any kind of interaction between collective and individ-
ual, outside and inside, a relation without which there would be neither
poetry nor politics.
For the Romantic, Symbolist and modernist tradition which bases its
legitimacy on organic autonomy, formal externality reveals a heteronomic
compulsion inimical to the freedom and self-direction of the aesthetic,
and alien to the unique and individual person or situation it describes. In
the chapters that follow, however, I aim to show that poems where this
perceptible exteriority of form becomes relevant but not wholly reconciled
to the interior content can register exactly the difficulties of compromise,
mediation, determination and contingency that are excluded by the ideal
of perfect freedom. Criticising the self-enclosure of this ideal freedom,
however, does not mean abandoning the possibilities of free verse. For
despite appearances, free verse is equally unthinkable without some ten-
sion between its structure and its material, since it has at the very
minimum line-endings, and with them, the possibility of enjambment,
‘the opposition of a metrical limit to a syntactical limit, of a prosodic
pause to a semantic pause’.^149 A line-break means that there is always a
possibility of the rhythmic sound of the line bisecting the sense of it, and
they allow the rhythm of a free-verse poem to make links across the
syntactic sense, or across the natural pattern of stresses and unstresses
inherent in every word and phrase. Once it is admitted that free verse is
not solely ‘a gapless and unforced unity of form and the formed’, in
Adorno’s words, though, there can also be no objection to more regularly
patterned verse as necessarily traducing its content.^150 All poems, in fact,
involve the possibility of a difference between semantics and semiotics,
formal structure and poetic content: even poems in prose maintain that
tension in their very title, because it still opposes theideaof poetic content
Inside and outside modernism 61