to the prosaic absence of sound-pattern, since there would be no point in
prose poetry if the audience didn’t know they were poems. To think
about the moments when the sounds and rhythms of a poem’s structure
run, if ever so gently, counter to its ostensible content is to think through
the formal inside-outside dynamic of poetry itself – and with it, the
problems of freedom and determination manifest in the situations the
poem creates, and its paradoxical status as an aesthetic object, contingent
upon social and historical forces, its vaunted autonomy a social relation in
denial, but an object whose meanings are not finally reducible to those
forces and relations either.
If this sounds like having one’s cake and eating it, the possibility of
such a formal structure was recognised in a backhanded manner by Eliot
himself in his preface to Pound’sSelected Poemsof 1928 :
People may think they like the form because they like the content, or think they
like the content because they like the form. In a perfect poet they fit and are the
same thing; and in another sense theyalwaysare the same thing. So it is always
true to say that form and content are the same thing, and always true to say they
are different things.^151
The fact that they ‘fit and are the same thing’ indicates that they are
not the same thing, of course, and Eliot’s ineffable last sentence smudges
the fact that form and content are the same thing in a way that is
necessarily true (all poems would mean something different with a
different form) and is therefore useless for critical purposes, but form
and content are different things in a way that alters – that there are
degrees of fit, in other words. It is the presence of this difference between
form and content, no matter how small, that makes Eliot’s desire for
their unification meaningful; the perfect poet actually relies on the
possibility of the difference he or she has overcome, as it were. And
the presence of this difference in themost ‘perfect’ verse is important,
because by countenancing a non-identical relation between form and
content, it allows for a dynamic between them which is somewhere
between autonomous and compulsory, and hence suggests a more
nuanced account of social agency than the Romantic binaries of either
organic or mechanical, interior or exterior, would allow. In a sense, it is
these complications and negotiations between self-presence and the
force of the other that also stand for Thomas, Hardy or Owen’s rela-
tionship with modernism as a whole,as poets neither inside its bound-
aries nor wholly alien to its aims, and as such, tacit indicators of
modernism’s difficulties with itsown autonomous literary status.
62 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism