Words are public things with meanings beyond the power of the private
individual. But Pater distrusted anything beyond himself:
The most and greatest of man’s powers are as yet little known to him, and are
scarcely more under his control than the weather: he cannot keep a shop without
trusting somewhat to his unknown powers, nor can he write books except such as
are no books. It appears to have been Pater’s chief fault, or the cause of his faults,
that he trusted these powers too little.( 213 )
And it was for just this Pateresque excess of self-awareness that Thomas
criticised the Imagists – not, as subsequent battle-lines in twentieth-
century poetry would suggest, because he held a general contempt for
modernist innovation. In fact, his review ofDes Imagistesdeclares that
Flint’s poems ‘will interest readers as theorists, and touch them as men’,
and the same piece notes that ‘Mr Pound has seldom done better than
here under the restraint imposed by Chinese originals or models’: since
Pound’s best earlier work had, according to Thomas, a ‘directness and
simplicity’, a lack of rhetoric and a ‘beauty of passion, sincerity and
intensity’ that did not depend on verbal pyrotechnics, then it is real praise
being offered here.^32 But Thomas had also always been uncomfortable
with the intensity of Pound’s self-awareness. He is ‘so possessed by his
own strong conceptions, that he not only cannot think of wrapping them
up in a conventional form, but he must ever show his disdain for it a
little’, remarked a generally positive review ofPersonae. This was also the
fault ofExultations(his ‘verses show us only such things as the writer’s
effort to imagine’), and turns into the substance of his review of the
Imagists. Their writing is ‘in the manner of translations’ but the foreign-
ness of influence and effect they seek is overridden by such self-conscious-
ness adoption of otherness: ‘There are in this book sixty-three pages,
many of them only half-filled; yet it sticks out of the crowd like a tall
marble monument. Whether it is real marble is unimportant except to
posterity; the point is that it is conspicuous’.^33
Such self-conscious conquest was equally what he disliked inGeorgian
Poetry, though. Always ‘fervently and loudly pursuing some form of
magic, rapture or beauty’, the contributors always ended up trying too
hard:
All in some way adore Aphrodite, Mr Sturge Moore’s ‘Goddess of Ruin’ or one
of her priestesses, ‘gay, invulnerable setters-at-naught of will and virtue’. Nearly
all would give anything to be beyond good and evil. Messrs Davies and de la
Mare alone have penetrated far into the desired kingdom, and that without
having been certain of their goal or of their way.^34
Edward Thomas in ecstasy 77