_I entirely disagree with Mr. Carter’s point of view—as much of it
as I can fathom. But I hope his article will provoke discussion
that will lead to clearer understanding of the Imagist’s art in a
country where even poets are blind to it. Mr. Carter states his
position briefly as follows: “The Imagists claim that the
subjects with which they deal find a completer and more adequate
poetical expression in the Imagist form than in any other.
Granting that this is so, the question still remains whether this
form is essential to poetry or whether it tends to exclude
poetry. So one has to consider what poetry really is and what
it implies. My article is designed for this purpose.” How
horrible!—to treat miracles like this!—The Editor._
A few years ago I went to the Falkland Islands to sheep-farm for a bare
subsistence, and while living on a lonely station twenty miles from
everywhere, so to speak, tending my flock, what time the half-breeds
came and helped themselves to my humble belongings, I experienced a new
emotion. Perhaps it would be more correct to say I became aware of the
nature of an old emotion. I felt the currents of transcendent energy
which I felt in my childhood. But I now felt them more frequently, and I
saw that I was elevated by them beyond the normal course of every-day
life. At such moments I forgot the sheep, the pastures and the marauding
half-breeds. I even forgot the strong colour and form of nature. I saw
something ridding me of solid things and leaving nothing but a fluid
universe. I saw distinct forms melting to formative motions. I had been
caught in the midst of an intense current—a transforming current of
livingness. Moreover, I was free to the current, with the result that I
became a part of itself—fluid—unresistingly, and was actuated
accordingly. For the time being, I moved as the fluid element most moved
me. Later reflection showed me that I was moved by some ineffable thing
which I believe to be poetry. It may be that the soul is made of poetry,
and after the human soul has freed itself from the fetters of
materialism it becomes re-converted to poetry; that is, a part of its
own flow or motion. I do not think materialists will understand this.
But it will be clear to the spiritual minded.
I am sure that the hypothesis, that poetry is simply soul-stuff, is a
verifiable one. I am convinced that in my Falkland Island days, whenever
I was raised by intensity out of my material self at a higher level than
actuality, whenever such intensity annihilated time and space,
obliterated that personality which I call Huntly Carter, lifted me to
the infinite and eternal and left me dumb, I was experiencing poetry. I
know that the hypothesis involves two assumptions. First, that poetry
cannot be written. It can only be expressed in motion or action. And it
can only be expressed by the person who receives it direct from its
source or fount. Hence a significant poet is not one who writes verse,
but one who lives poetry, _is_ poetry. The second assumption is that
every human being who possesses the smallest soul vibration possesses a
poetry-sense, and is, in fact, a potential poet. Given absolute freedom,
he, too, would become poetry, such is the power of conversion residing
in the element waiting to operate upon him. Which is not absurd when we
come to think of it.
I find I am not alone in the attempt to rescue poetry from the lumber
heap of verbalism and verbalists, to say nothing of verbiage, and to
restore it to the infinite. I remember reading in an early number of the
London _Poetry Review_ that life has a rhythmic origin and poetry
resides first of all in the rhythms of motion and sound. Of course
“sound” is redundant, seeing that sound is the result of motion. I read
further that poetry ultimately finds its way into language as the vocal
expression of the fundamental motion or rhythm. Could anything be
clearer? We feel the motion or rhythm and act it. And we attempt to
express it in words in the last resort. Perhaps, some day nearer the
millennium, it will be discovered that language (verbal of course) is
the last resort of the poetically destitute.
The gist of what I read was this: First, poetry is the transmutation of
some natural element (motion, sound or what not) into simple emotion
(motion passing into e-motion). Then as the generic emotions pass beyond
the senses they are handled by the intellect. One knows what the
intellect does. Being peculiarly constituted to submit everything to
scrutiny and analysis, it seizes upon the vague and indefinable
characters of the human feelings and attempts the impossible task of
analyzing their composition and stating their quantity and quality with
precision. (Note what great emphasis the Imagists place upon the value
of precision.) In other words, the intellect sets to work to regulate
poetry by form and law. (Again, note how the Imagists emphasize the
importance of form and law.) I suppose only the poet who proceeds upon
instinct and despises methodical verse-making, recognizes the stupidity
of trying to express poetry in terms of intellectual states of mind. To
him, the vision of poetry in terms of cerebralism can only have one
effect, namely, to kill poetry.
After reading this explanation of poetry, I felt I ought to credit the
writer with a desire to exalt poetry to the Infinite. First, however, it
was necessary to determine what he meant by the process of
“transmutation.” If he meant the activity of the “thing” which I call
poetry, and not the “thing” itself; if he was thinking of the change
effected in the poet’s soul after it has received the rhythmic element
which effects the change; then poetry to him was clearly the operation
and not the operating agent. Further, there was the individualizing
meaning to be considered. Let us assume that the poet’s soul receives
rhythms or vibrations from the Infinite, which it instantly converts
into its own. Just as a magnetic needle receives its own currents and
points aright. Where is one to look for poetry? Is it the vibrations
themselves, or is it the act of conversion? I sought the answer in the
writer’s own words that “poetry resides first of all in the rhythms or
motion,” and I concluded that he was not making a precise use of the
word “transmutation.” So I was able to relate his explanation of poetry
to one I had published somewhere in _The New Freewoman_. This was my
explanation. There is a creative force underlying all phenomena. At an
early period of the world’s history when self-ownership was real—not a
dream—man was provoked by this force into poetic action. The force
operated by dissolving man into its own and thereby exalting him
mystically. But as man became more and more intellectual, so gradually
he lost the power of being dissolved, and provoked into mystical action.
With the result that he invented words to take the place of action. And
as this process of degeneration continued, so he evolved
substitutes—paid actors, poets, painters—to do for him what he had lost
the power to do for himself. Thus the verbal poet is simply a projection
of man’s lost capacity to poetize himself and for himself. That is, the
power to obliterate himself physically. I need not go into this point
further. If necessary, I could show that many human activities and most
human institutions are symptomatic of the long drawn-out diseases of
self-suppression and self-annihilation. Mind, I speak of the spiritual
self and not that usually confused with a corporeal nature.
This rather long but necessary preface brings me to another and more
recent attempt to recover the old emotion. I refer to my recent
experience with _The Egoist_ and the subject of Imagism in its relation
to poetry. I suppose most intelligent persons are inquiring what Imagism
and _The Egoist_ have to do with each other. _The Egoist_ is obviously,
as its name implies, a journal devoted to egoism. And its sub-title
informs us that it is an individualistic review. Of course, egoism is an
entirely individualistic affair. It consists in putting on the armour of
self-assertion and defending the special faith and interests of one’s
own. The power that one seeks to win is that of subjecting material
conditions and exacting the utmost spiritual toll from everything. One
pays no regard to the opinion of others, and refuses to play the part of
a cypher, and at the same time refuses to play any part with others. To
stand alone, and with a light heart to do the necessary bargaining with
external influences for the possession of one’s own soul—this, it seems
to me, is the true ground of egoism. Opposed to this is the process of
self-suppression, the process of making bundles of cyphers. When men
obliterate not their corporeal natures but the spiritual part of
themselves, by coming together and acting together, and so juggle the
play tricks in order that they may gain the applause and reward of their
fellows, they are cyphers, not egoists, and deserve to be treated as
cyphers. Persons who take this view of egoism have naturally been
watching for the appearance in the pages of _The Egoist_ of numerous
writers with aspirations beyond the group or societal level and not
seeing them appear have begun to ask what _The Egoist_ “stands for.” I
believe this question of “standing for” is one which is hurled at every
new and significant journal. One knows that it has been flung at THE
LITTLE REVIEW. There are two ways of answering it. A journal may show
that it does “stand for” something, or it may confound its critics by
claiming the high distinction of not “standing for” anything. Simply it
does not exist in time and space. It exists by the grace of God, so to
speak. As to what _The Egoist_ “stands for,” it is not my concern. The
thing for me to note is that for some issues it has been affected by a
very strong habit of Imagism. Now Imagism is not egoism. I do not think
the Imagists themselves are egoists. To me they appear to be socialists
by instinct and individualists by profession, just as Mr. Bernard Shaw
is an individualist by instinct and a socialist by profession. He is an
autocrat with a democratic lampblack rubbed over his face to
commercialize his appearance. The Imagists are the reverse with the
added difference that they use the polish to beautify rather than
commercialize their appearance. In saying this I do not wish to appear
to be attacking the Imagists. On the contrary, I am anxious to pay them
every possible compliment. The fact that they are sinning against
themselves must be its own punishment.
The tendency of _The Egoist_ towards Imagism flowered in the May issue.
This issue was in fact “organized” (if I may use a trade term) from
cover to cover to provide an honest and profitable discussion of the
so-called “new” thing in poetry. As if poetry can be new. I had an idea
that God made poetry when the world was very young indeed. Well, I
turned to the May _Egoist_ in order to rediscover my emotion. I found
the journal comprised an admirable treatise on the theory and practice
of Imagism with some uncritical praise and a strong note of criticism
thrown in. I read the prose with a good deal of interest, particularly
Mr. Harold Munro’s history, origin and criticism of Imagism. It seems
Mr. Munro objects to Imagism on the general ground that it is not
inspired by the High Muses. It is rather the work of poets on the way to
Parnassus who have stopped half-way to chase hares. The fact of the
matter is that if an Imagist has a passionate instantaneous impression
to start with he does not end with it. He simply destroys it before he
has got very far with intellectual or technical theories. In Mr. Munro’s
very words, “poets of the Imagist and other kindred modern schools are
no longer visited by the Muses: they are not at home to them.”
How far this is true one may learn from the Imagists themselves. Here
are some extracts from their contributions to the said “Special Imagist
Number:”
“Somewhere in the gleam of the year 1908, Mr. T. E. Hulme,
excited by the propinquity, at a half-a-crown dance of the other
sex ... proposed to a companion that they should found a Poets’
Club. The thing was done, there and then. The Club began to
dine.... In November of the same year, Edward Storer, ...
published the first book of “Imagist poems.” This statement that
the Imagist movement was started by Edward Storer and T. E.
Hulme, was subsequently refuted by Mr. Allen Upward who it seems
received the Imagist message in 1900 from “a poet named Cranmer
Byng,” who had received it from Professor Giles, who had brought
a tablet of China from the East with all sorts of wonderful
little poems painted thereon. Later, Mr. Ezra Pound made for Mr.
Allen Upward the Imagist garland to deck his forehead in the
Court of Eternity. To continue the extracts, “Mr. Storer ... was
in favor then of a poetry ... described ... ‘as a form of
expression, like the Japanese, in which an image is the resonant
heart of an exquisite moment.’” “I (the writer) had been
advocating ... a poetry in _vers libre_, akin in spirit to the
Japanese.” ... “A dissatisfaction with English poetry as it was
then being written” led to a desire “to replace it by the
Japanese _tanka_ and _haika_.” “He (Hulme) insisted on absolutely
accurate presentation and no verbiage” ... “used to spend hours
each day in the search for the right phrase.” ... “We (the
Imagist group) were very much influenced by modern French
symbolist poetry.” “The group died a lingering death at the end
of its second winter.” “He (Pound) had made Imagism to mean
pictures as Wyndham Lewis understands them; writing later for _T.
P.’s Weekly_, “he made it pictures as William Morris understood
them.” So much for the history of Imagism and the expansion of
Mr. Ezra Pound according to Mr. F. S, Flint. One next learns with
regard to Mr. Pound that “he will sincerely work over a few lines
of _vers libre_.” He “tried to cultivate a sense of style, a
feeling for words” ... “he began to try to make poetry out of the
realities of existence.” ... “he is a ‘bookish’ poet.” ... “It is
inevitable that the ‘improved’ and selected world which the
Romantic poet creates should be composed, at least in part, of
ideas, of declaration, of emotions derived from _extensive
reading_.” If the prizes of this world ... were given to merit
... that poem deserves the prize usually reserved for some not
too revolutionary “honest craftsman.” Thus Mr. Richard Aldington
or Mr. Ezra Pound. Next as to “H. D.” “The poetry of H. D. has
been described as a kind of “accurate mystery” ... “it has the
precision of Goldsmith’s work.” “The things she (H. D.) has seen
and the emotions she has felt have been transmuted in her mind
into an unreality that reveals itself in images of an unsuspected
virtue and in phrases that seem to owe nothing to common speech.”
... “A poet who will accept nothing that has not come to her
direct.” ... “Her ceaseless scrutiny of the word and phrase.” “A
tendency to pare and cut too far.” It is Mr. F. S. Flint who
writes. From the next article one gathers that “every poet must
seek anew for himself, out of the _language_ medium at his
disposal, rhythms which are adequate and forms which are
expressive of his own unique personality.” And again, “what will
teach us most is our _language_ and life.” “He (Mr. Fletcher) is
seen at his best where fancy, imagination, musical ingenuity,
verbal magic, and a curious feeling for the landscape of Chinese
painting are fused in an intriguing and quite beautiful lyric
sequence.” Mr. Ferris Greenslet is writing on the poetry of John
Gould Fletcher.
I have quoted sufficient to indicate the history, aim, scope and methods
of Imagism as set forth by the Imagists. Perhaps I should add an extract
or two (also in inverted commas) from Mr. Harold Munro’s contribution.
“Their (the Imagists’) insistence on the necessity of an
absolutely fresh start in poetry.” They claim to have discovered
“poetry as an Art.” They devoted their energies solely to the
cultivation of new form and the adoption of a renovated language
oblivious of the fact that Idea must primarily dictate both.”
“The forms they still felt they might use, the vocabulary that
remained at their disposal, were extremely limited.” They had
thrown so much good material away “that they remained now almost
unprovided with a language or a style.” It looks as though they
threw away the baby with the bath water. So they divided. “Some
decided to tolerate the old subjects, but to discover a new
manner of presenting or representing, them; others, not so
satisfied, probed nervously the psychological recesses of the New
World and dragged out all the strangest rags of fancy they could
find, exhibiting them solely on account of their whimsical colour
and shapes. Further, “they do not profess to sing.” (Neither does
modern commerce). They swear by “the best of intellect.” “Their
minds are obsessed by the Town.” They acclaim the “passing
event.” They suspect the “beauties of poetry.” “The method of the
Imagists is to model little detached patterns of words.” One of
their principles seems to suggest “that if one first design a
poem, then the idea will be present by reason of the design.”
This recalls the principle of certain theatre reformers that if
one builds a new theatre a new form of drama will enter crowned
with daisies. It is equal to saying that given a donkey’s tail
the donkey will be present because of the tail.
After reading the Imagists’ theories I read their verse. Without,
however, recovering my emotion. It left me cold. I asked myself if
poetry had ceased to run through me. Was I no longer its agent? Had
intellect interposed to censor it—with form? In other words, was my
conception of poetry wrong? Was the Imagists’ conception wrong? Then I
remembered that when I first experienced poetry and became aware of what
I experienced, and when I began to express what I experienced, I
proceeded on the principle of not mixing with my expressed experience
any intellectual elements of thought, idea, reason or what not. I simply
allowed some element to flow through me, and myself to be actuated by
the flow. To me poetical expression was really an abstraction of the
individualizing features of a spiritual experience received and
transmitted in an instant of time. It expressed a creative movement
abstracted from a creative movement, just as a subconscious drawing
externalizes certain vibrations received through a magnetic medium. This
creative movement appointed me its receiver that I might impart a
momentary outwardness and sensational reality to its external content.
Actually I was saturated with this precious element as a sponge can be
saturated with rich perfume, and like the sponge was prepared to
saturate in turn. In my belief, poetry is this spiritually saturating
element. I would say it is a unifying element, bringing a like element
in each of us into a unity of Soul or Spirit-consciousness. That is, the
consciousness of Soul states which transcend this sordid material life
in which we are so deeply immersed. I can imagine a true poet saturated
by this element having glimpses of a supreme and superb Being, and thus
entering consciously into that state of Being. But I cannot possibly
imagine such a poet finding poetic expression in pots and pans and
tup’ny tubes, and the confused and meaningless odds and ends of material
life. I know there are certain poets who claim they have poetry in them,
and because of this, they can poetize any object. Just, as I suppose,
the bee can pour forth honey on any object, or wine can be used to
adulterate water. But, of course, the honey does not change the object
into honey, nor the wine turn the water into wine, any more than the
poetry element poured forth lavishly can transmute a motor-car or any
dead thing into living poetry. Indeed, all that poets, obsessed by the
theory of poetizing town and kitchen stuff, really do, is to waste their
precious possession. Actually they precipitate their sweet scent on a
concrete floor. If such poets ever hope to take the Golden Road they
must leave shrieking machinery alone and cease pouring the perfumes of
Araby over cancrous civilization. They must leave perishable things to
perishable minds and fit out an expedition to the Inner Self. Thereby
they may hope to return wet with the poetic spirit. In other words, they
will return with rich experiences lit by the flame of poetry. It seems
then that the reason I could not feel the Imagist verse was because I
was trying it by a law or principle which told me that poetry makes
itself felt through the senses, not through the intellect. Furthermore,
it makes itself felt not only by passionately initiating us into some
mystery or other of reality, but by making us an active part of that
mystery. The poet is a signature of poetic reality.
I do not say this is the ultimate test of poetry. It may be that poetry
is so indefinable as to elude all tests. Again it may be that this very
indefinableness is the test of poetry. The secret in its motion cannot
be analyzed. One cannot explain it any more than one can explain the
odor of a flower. One is aware of it—that is all. Yet, I may ask, how
does the Imagist poetry stand my test? The first thing one notices in
the poetry is its air of cerebrality verging on cerebralitis.
Accordingly one discovers an inordinate love of the intellectual
qualities of style, and consequently, a feverish quest for figures. So
there are figures of every kind. Condensing and visualizing figures,
figures of similarity, contiguity and contrast, figures describing and
analyzing perishable things. There is in fact a profusion of figures
having one characteristic in common, namely, a straining after novelty,
originality and freshness. If for the sake of argument one admits that
poetry can be expressed in words, of course one admits that poetry can
be expressed in images or figures of speech. But this is not to say that
figures of speech are consequently poetry. Otherwise every bit of
foolish verse that has ever been written could lay claim to the
imperishable Garland. Every tup’ny box would be entitled to arrest each
passer-by with a cry of “Behold the poetry in me.”
Turn where we may in the wide-flung Garden of Verse and fruitful figures
face us. Here are some gathered at random:
“He came like night.” (Homer describes Apollo’s descent from
Olympus.)
“Soft as the fleeces of descending snows.” (Ulysses’
eloquence.)
“With lockes crull, as they were laid in press.” (So Chaucer
pictures his Squire.)
“Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-top with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green.” (Shakespeare.)
“Her voice is but the shadow of a sound.” (Young.)
“The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head.” (Pope.)
“Some true, some light, but every one of them
Stamped with the image of the king.” (Tennyson compares Arthur’s
Knights with coins.)
“Hair in heaps lay heavily
Over a pale brow spirit-pure—
Carved like the heart of the coal-black tree,
Crisped like a war-steed’s enclosure.” (Browning describes a lady’s
hair.)
“What says the body when they spring
Some monstrous torture-engine’s whole
Strength on it? No more says the soul.” (Browning describes the
paralyzing effect of a wrong accusation on a highly
sensitive mind.)
“Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours.” (Shelley seeks to raise a resemblance between the
closing night of an eventful year, and the dome of a
sepulchre.)
“Stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like Cliffs which had been rent asunder;
A dreary sea now flows between,
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween
The marks of that which once hath been.” (Coleridge describes a
break in friendship.)
“There was silence deep as death.” (Campbell.)
“There was silence as of death.” (Macaulay.)
“Earth turned in her sleep with pain
Sultrily suspired for proof.” (Describes a summer night’s thunder.)
“Long shall Comala look before she can behold Fingal in the
midst of his host; bright as the coming forth of the
morning, in the cloud of an early shower.” (Ossian.)
“In short the soul in its body sunk like a blade sent home to
its scabbard.” (Browning describes suddenly suspended
animation.)
I could quote thousands of similar figures. I do not, however, accept
them as poetry, simply because they do not give me poetry. I dare say
the Imagists would refuse to accept them as poetry, but on a different
ground. No doubt they would say that many of these figures have been
manufactured in the wrong place. They have been made in the cerebrum
instead of in the Imagist quarter, the cerebellum. They are in fact
suffering from cerebritis whereas nowadays the proper complaint is
cerebralitis. So the Imagists would complain that such figures do not
conform to their conception of poetry as _an Art_. The ideas in them are
not expressed as they would express them. There is an absence of
clarity, precision, novelty, freshness, originality and so on. Change
the form from cerebriform to cerebraform, clip the words, remove the
clichés, stop the singing, bring the image up to the quick-lunch
standard and most of the figures would pass the Imagist test. All this
is very pretty. But when all is said I do not see why some of the
figures may not pass the test as they stand. When Mr. Hulme wants to
describe a nature experience he does it in this lengthy fashion:
A touch of cold in the autumn night
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge,
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to talk, but nodded;
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.
The similitude of a “red-faced farmer” does not raise the subject to
heights. It is entirely lacking in dignity, is commonplace, and suggests
ludicrous associations. For instance, much beer and a hot game of
skittles.
When Browning does it he gets to work in a businesslike manner:
The sun looked over the water’s brim
And straight there was a path of gold for him
And a world of souls for me.
I quote from memory, but I believe I quote correctly. The image is
expressed with brevity, clearness, and dignity. Keats’s way of
expressing the experience is:
I who still saw the universal sun
Heave his broad shoulder o’er the edge of the world
The similitude of “heaving the shoulder” is open to the same objection
as that of a “red-faced farmer.” It is undignified. It calls up a vision
of the sun shooting coals down the front cellar.
Again, when John Gould Fletcher wants to describe umbrellas in a new way
he refers to them as:
Bending, recurved blossoms of the storm.
And a special movement of rain is exactly described as:
Uneven tinkling, the lazy rain
Dripping from the eaves.
The ingenuity of these comparisons takes away Miss Amy Lowell’s breath.
Writing in _The New Republic_ she uses the term “absolutely original.”
And she tells us how well the first figure “makes us see those round,
shining umbrella-tops,” while the second is “a marvel of exact
description.” I dare say Miss Lowell is right. And yet the description,
“The news was a dagger to his heart,” was just as original when it was
written long, long ago, and is certainly as vivid and intense in its way
as anything by Mr. Fletcher praised by Miss Amy Lowell.
Comparing the new with the old in this way, one may well inquire whether
the new-fashioned Imagists differ so very much from the old-fashioned
ones whom they seek to destroy. For my part, I have no hesitation in
asserting that the subject of the old order of verse does not differ
from that of the new order. If present-day Imagists are bringing a
number of contemporary facts and incidents into figurative employment;
if they cut their particular capers _In a Tube_, or in _My Backgarden_,
or in a _Bath_, or at _The Breakfast Table_, or amid _Slaps_, or in
_Chicago_, or in the _Pine Trees’ Tops_, or _After the Retreat_, they
are doing precisely what the every-day Imagist has done with
contemporary facts ever since the world began. So the truth is that
subject for subject they are no nearer the Parnassian height than the
mereset babbler of driveling verse. And if they are really mounting the
peaks, if as they claim they are making an absolutely fresh start at
poetry, they are being pushed there by expression or technique, not
poetry. In their view the mere curling and combing of words is
sufficient to elevate them above such common poets as Shakespeare and
the rest, and to entitle them to a seal among the really elect in the
poetry business. But, of course, the bare fact that the Imagists are out
for a revolution in form does not prove that they are out to give us a
taste of real poetry. It only proves they are out for a revolution in
form. And if one examines their form carefully, I believe it will be
found to prove that there are poets among us suffering rather severely
from the modern cant disease of culture. They “know” so much rather than
feel anything, and because they know so much one meets them in every
nook and corner, talking incessantly about the necessity of other poets
knowing what they know, and doing as they do. Indeed they regard the
production and advertisement of their particular kind of goods, which
have become a sort of cult among a large number of persons who believe
in hard study and discipline, rather than in spontaneity and livingness,
as the beginning and end of earthly existence. But if one come to the
bottom of the whole business it really amounts to no more than this.
Tennyson and Kipling turned their attention to verse-making. They did
not write poetry. They wrote doggerel, because what they wrote was in
doggerel form. The Imagists have turned their attention to verse-making.
Perhaps it should be versicle-making. They do write poetry. They write
poetry because what they write has a poetry form. In short, the
difference between Tennyson, Kipling and the Imagists is one of form. If
the former had used present-day Imagist form they would be supreme
poets. There is nothing to prove that Tennyson and Kipling could not
have cultivated Imagist form. Therefore Tennyson and Kipling could have
written Imagist verse. They were potentially supreme poets. How anyone
can reasonably pretend that mere form transforms a subject into poetry
passes my understanding. How anyone, moreover, can suggest in cold print
that such form is helping to make an absolutely new start in poetry is a
point best left to the decision of mental experts. Still, on reflection,
one finds it is all part of the modern “game” of confusing content with
form. One must be grateful to the Imagists for one thing. For some time
there has been a movement among poets of a certain school to shift the
interest from poetry to themselves considered as deputies. The errors of
the Imagists, who, apparently, are mistaken in their conception of
poetry and the business of poetry, enables one to shift the interest
from these poets to poetry itself. One can say to them, “We are not
interested in you, but in poetry. To tell us that you are deputy
receivers and recorders, to describe your aims and methods, to take us
to museums and to invite us to study the fossilized remains of ancient
literatures, is not to help us to enjoy your verse.” Poets do not get
any nearer to poetry by setting up new rulers and standards. Poetry does
not take us farther afield into speculating on form and technique, but
farther from them. Poetry tends to shift the interest from the poet to
itself, from the solid instrument of transmission to the world in
solution. Indeed it tends to obliterate the poet in the physical sense.
As I said it converts him into poetry. Now the reason why Imagism fails
as poetry is precisely because it shifts the interest from the world in
solution to a group of too, too solid poets. My conclusion is obvious.
Before the Imagists can claim that they are making an absolutely new
start in poetry, they must learn to obliterate their corporeal natures.
The moment they do so obliterate themselves, that moment one can safely
say “Now we are coming to poetry.”
I intended to show that one cannot write free-verse unless one is a free
poet. I must return to the subject.