Modernist Poetry- T S Eliot, T E Hulme,Ezra Pound

THEORISTS OF
MODERNIST POETRY

‘No one can understand the revolution that was Modernism in Anglo-America
without some familiarity with the theoretical and critical writings of Eliot
and Pound – and before them, T.E. Hulme . . . Rebecca Beasley’s Theorists
of Modernist Poetry provides newcomers to this field with an excellent
introduction to the complex strains that inform the poetic theories in question
and argues convincingly that, however problematic the later politics of Eliot
and Pound, the legacy of their poetics remains crucial today.’

Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University

This volume examines T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme and Ezra Pound, three of
the most influential figures of the modernist movement, and argues that we
cannot dissociate their bold, inventive poetic forms from their profoundly
engaged theories of social and political reform.

Tracing the complex theoretical foundations of modernist poetics, Rebecca
Beasley examines:

• the aesthetic modes and theories that formed a context for modernism
• the influence of contemporary philosophical movements
• the modernist critique of democracy
• the importance of the First World War
• modernism’s programmes for social reform
Examining the critical thought and poetry of Eliot, Hulme and Pound, this
volume offers invaluable insight into the modernist movement, as well as
demonstrating the deep influence of the three poets on the shape and values
of the discipline of English Literature itself. In this way, Theorists of Modernist
Poetry is relevant not only to students of modernism, but to all those with an
interest in why we study, teach, read and evaluate literature the way we do.

Rebecca Beasley teaches in the School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck,
University of London, and is the author of Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture
of Modernism (2007).


ROUTLEDGE CRITICAL THINKERS

Series Editor: Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University
of London

Routledge Critical Thinkers is a series of accessible introductions to key figures
in contemporary critical thought.

With a unique focus on historical and intellectual contexts, the volumes
in this series examine important theorists’:

• significance
• motivation
• key ideas and their sources
• impact on other thinkers
Concluding with extensively annotated guides to further reading, Routledge
Critical Thinkers are the student’s passport to today’s most exciting critical

thought.

Already available:

Louis Althusser by Luke Ferretter
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William Large
Judith Butler by Sara Salih
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Edward Said by Bill Ashcroft and

Pal Ahluwalia
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Morton
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James, Lionel Trilling & Wayne C.
Booth by Peter Rawlings

Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James
Joyce, Dorothy Richardson & Virginia
Woolf by Deborah Parsons

Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T.S. Eliot,

T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound by
Rebecca Beasley
Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey,
Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis
and Barbara Creed by Shohini
Chaudhuri

Cyberculture Theorists: Manuel Castells
and Donna Haraway by David Bell

For further details on this series visit: www.routledge.com/literature/series.asp


THEORISTS OF
MODERNIST POETRY

T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound
Rebecca Beasley



First published 2007
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”


Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2007 Rebecca Beasley

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Beasley, Rebecca, 1971–
Theorists of modernist poetry: T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound/
Rebecca Beasley.

p. cm. – (Routledge critical thinkers)
1. American poetry – 20th century – History and criticism – Theory,
etc. 2. Modernism (Literature) – United States. 3. Eliot, T.S.
(Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965 – Criticism and interpretation.
4. Hulme, T.E. (Thomas Ernest), 1883–1917 – Criticism and
interpretation. 5. Pound, Ezra, 1885–1972 – Criticism and
interpretation. 6. Poetics – History – 20th century. I. Title.
PS310.M57.R43 2007
811 .509 – dc22 2007018157

ISBN 0-203-93421-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–28540–2 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–415–28541–0 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–93421–0 (ebk)

ISBN13: 978–0–415–28540–7 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–28541–4 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–93421–0 (ebk)


CONTENTS


Series editor’s preface vii
Acknowledgements xi


WHY ELIOT, HULME AND POUND? 1

KEY IDEAS 17

1 Origins of modernism 19
2 Philosophical details: the image and the objective correlative 33
3 Anti-democracy: the politics of early modernism 47
4 History and tradition 63
5 The First World War and the long poem 79
6 Modernism and the ideal society 95

AFTER ELIOT, HULME AND POUND 115

FURTHER READING 123

Works cited 133
Index 141


SERIES EDITOR’S
PREFACE

The books in this series offer introductions to major critical thinkers
who have influenced literary studies and the humanities. The Routledge
Critical Thinkers series provides the books you can turn to first when a
new name or concept appears in your studies.

Each book will equip you to approach a key thinker’s original texts
by explaining their key ideas, putting them into context and, perhaps
most importantly, showing you why this thinker is considered to be
significant. The emphasis is on concise, clearly written guides which do
not presuppose a specialist knowledge. Although the focus is on particular
figures, the series stresses that no critical thinker ever existed in a
vacuum but, instead, emerged from a broader intellectual, cultural and
social history. Finally, these books will act as a bridge between you and
the thinkers’ original texts: not replacing them but rather complementing
what they wrote. In some cases, volumes consider small
clusters of thinkers, working in the same area, developing similar ideas
or influencing each other.

These books are necessary for a number of reasons. In his 1997 autobiography,
Not Entitled, the literary critic Frank Kermode wrote of a
time in the 1960s:

On beautiful summer lawns, young people lay together all night, recovering

from their daytime exertions and listening to a troupe of Balinese musicians.


viii SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

Under their blankets or their sleeping bags, they would chat drowsily about the

gurus of the time. . . . What they repeated was largely hearsay; hence my

lunchtime suggestion, quite impromptu, for a series of short, very cheap books

offering authoritative but intelligible introductions to such figures.

There is still a need for ‘authoritative and intelligible introductions’.
But this series reflects a different world from the 1960s. New thinkers
have emerged and the reputations of others have risen and fallen, as
new research has developed. New methodologies and challenging ideas
have spread through the arts and humanities. The study of literature is
no longer – if it ever was – simply the study and evaluation of poems,
novels and plays. It is also the study of ideas, issues and difficulties which
arise in any literary text and in its interpretation. Other arts and humanities
subjects have changed in analogous ways.

With these changes, new problems have emerged. The ideas and
issues behind these radical changes in the humanities are often presented
without reference to wider contexts or as theories which you can simply
‘add on’ to the texts you read. Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with
picking out selected ideas or using what comes to hand – indeed, some
thinkers have argued that this is, in fact, all we can do. However, it is
sometimes forgotten that each new idea comes from the pattern and
development of somebody’s thought and it is important to study
the range and context of their ideas. Against theories ‘floating in space’,
the Routledge Critical Thinkers series places key thinkers and their ideas
firmly back in their contexts.

More than this, these books reflect the need to go back to the
thinkers’ own texts and ideas. Every interpretation of an idea, even
the most seemingly innocent one, offers its own ‘spin’, implicitly or
explicitly. To read only books on a thinker, rather than texts by that
thinker, is to deny yourself a chance of making up your own mind.
Sometimes what makes a significant figure’s work hard to approach is
not so much its style or content as the feeling of not knowing where
to start. The purpose of these books is to give you a ‘way in’ by offering
an accessible overview of these thinkers’ ideas and works and by guiding
your further reading, starting with each thinker’s own texts. To use
a metaphor from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951),
these books are ladders, to be thrown away after you have climbed to
the next level. Not only, then, do they equip you to approach new


ideas, but also they empower you, by leading you back to the theorist’s
own texts and encouraging you to develop your own informed opinions.

Finally, these books are necessary because, just as intellectual needs
have changed, the education systems around the world – the contexts
in which introductory books are usually read – have changed radically,
too. What was suitable for the minority higher education system of the
1960s is not suitable for the larger, wider, more diverse, high technology
education systems of the twenty-first century. These changes
call not just for new, up-to-date introductions but new methods of
presentation. The presentational aspects of Routledge Critical Thinkers
have been developed with today’s students in mind.

Each book in the series has a similar structure. They begin with a
section offering an overview of the life and ideas of the featured thinkers
and explain why they are important. The central section of each book
discusses the thinkers’ key ideas, their context, evolution and reception;
with the books that deal with more than one thinker, they also
explain and explore the influence of each on each. The volumes conclude
with a survey of the impact of the thinker or thinkers, outlining
how their ideas have been taken up and developed by others. In addition,
there is a detailed final section suggesting and describing books for
further reading. This is not a ‘tacked-on’ section but an integral part of
each volume. In the first part of this section you will find brief descriptions
of the thinkers’ key works, then, following this, information on
the most useful critical works and, in some cases, on relevant websites.
This section will guide you in your reading, enabling you to follow your
interests and develop your own projects. Throughout each book, references
are given in what is known as the Harvard system (the author and
the date of a work cited are given in the text and you can look up the
full details in the bibliography at the back). This offers a lot of information
in very little space. The books also explain technical terms and
use boxes to describe events or ideas in more detail, away from the
main emphasis of the discussion. Boxes are also used at times to highlight
definitions of terms frequently used or coined by a thinker. In this
way, the boxes serve as a kind of glossary, easily identified when flicking
through the book.

The thinkers in the series are ‘critical’ for three reasons. First, they
are examined in the light of subjects which involve criticism: principally
literary studies or English and cultural studies, but also other disciplines
which rely on the criticism of books, ideas, theories and unquestioned

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE ix


SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

assumptions. Second, they are critical because studying their work will
provide you with a ‘tool kit’ for your own informed critical reading and
thought, which will make you critical. Third, these thinkers are critical
because they are crucially important: they deal with ideas and questions
which can overturn conventional understandings of the world, of texts,
of everything we take for granted, leaving us with a deeper understanding
of what we already knew and with new ideas.

No introduction can tell you everything. However, by offering a way
into critical thinking, this series hopes to begin to engage you in an
activity which is productive, constructive and potentially life-changing.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


I am very grateful to the friends and colleagues who offered help and
advice during the writing of this book. I owe a particular debt of
gratitude to Peter White, whose comments on the manuscript were
invaluable, and I would also like to thank Robert Eaglestone, Jason
Harding and, at Routledge, Polly Dodson. My love and thanks to Sharon
Ellis, Elizabeth Crayford and the Ellis Wood family, who provided
such a congenial environment in which to finish the book, and to
Markman Ellis, for everything.



T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme and Ezra Pound are three of the most significant
figures in the early twentieth-century literary phenomenon we have
come to call modernism. They revolutionized Anglo-American poetry,
arguing that traditional poetic forms and themes could no longer
encapsulate the experience of the modern world. They were pioneers
in the use of free verse and in their expansion of the subject matter
of poetry. During his short career, T.E. Hulme provided the intellectual
impetus for Pound’s imagist movement, which Eliot called ‘the starting-
point of modern poetry’ (1978: 58). Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pound’s
The Cantos are renowned as two of the most innovative and influential
poems in the English language.
But it is not only their poetic experimentation that makes these
poets significant. The thinking of Eliot, Hulme and Pound is largely
responsible for shaping the modernism we have inherited. They were
the primary theorists of the major issues we traditionally associate
with modernism: disinterestedness vs political engagement, elitism vs
democracy, tradition vs novelty, abstraction vs realism. Until recently,
the canon of early twentieth-century literature was made up of writers
they praised. Their fascination with obscure literary traditions and
contemporary philosophy even reshaped the pre-twentieth-century
literary canon. They established an enormously influential system of
literary values, disseminated through their critical essays and their
editorial authority. This book will trace the formation of those values.


WHY ELIOT, HULME AND POUND?

However, some of the most important recent criticism of early
twentieth-century literature rightly argues that our understanding of
the period has been restricted by the influence of a small modernist
coterie and its associated literary values. It may be that we want to
reject the dominance of their literary theories and argue for a more
inclusive and various account of early twentieth-century literature, an
account that includes, for example, more writing by women, and writing
significant for reasons other than verbal experimentation. Nevertheless,
a precise understanding of the cultural field constructed by Eliot, Hulme
and Pound remains vital if we are to delineate the diversity of intellectual
discussion in the period. Far from being exclusively literary in their
interests, as they have been accused in the past, these writers were
vitally compelled by the pressing intellectual questions of their day, in
the fields of philosophy, fine art, economics, politics and education,
to name just a few of the subjects of their criticism.

Indeed, it is precisely the variety of their interests that makes them
both such important, but also such problematic figures. Their insistent
connecting of the literary and political fields, for example, makes us
ask fundamental questions about the role of literature in society, and
the role of the poet or artist, too. Should the poet comment on political
decisions, or even attempt to influence political decisions? All three of
these writers answered an emphatic ‘yes’ to this question: in their
view, their roles as specialists in the realm of culture required political
statement. This may not seem contentious, but when we find out that
Eliot’s, Hulme’s and Pound’s political statements were anti-Semitic,
anti-democratic and fascist respectively, our response to their creative
writing becomes more difficult to formulate. The cultural and political
works of these writers have forced readers to think hard about the
extent to which poetry involves politics: can one admire a writer’s
poetry while deploring their politics? How can one draw a line between
the poetic and the political? If we are to even begin to be able to
answer those questions, we must look closely at the intellectual
trajectories of these writers.

CAREERS

T.S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot was born in 1888 in St Louis, Missouri; he died in London
in 1965. During his lifetime, his literary status was unparalleled: his
critical works have been as influential as his poetry, taken up by a
generation of mid-century critics, including I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis
and the American New Critics, who placed Eliot centrally, not only
in the canon of twentieth-century poetry, but in the study of English
literature and culture more generally. His Complete Poems and Plays and
Selected Essays collect his major works, and the first volume of his
letters was published in 1988. Since his death his reputation has suffered
some vicissitudes: his political conservatism and Anglo-Catholicism have
proved unappealing, and charges of anti-Semitism have been vigorously
debated. Nevertheless, his influence on twentieth-century poetry and
aspects of his cultural diagnoses are enduringly pervasive.
Eliot entered Harvard University in 1906, graduating with a BA in
1909 and an MA in English literature in 1910. In 1908 he read Arthur
Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), his introduction
to the free verse poetry of the French symbolists. In the work of the
symbolist Jules Laforgue he found a parallel with the Elizabethan and
Jacobean verse to which he was also attracted, and it was these sources
that he credited with transforming his poetic style from the rather
conventional experiments in aestheticism that also characterized much


of Pound’s early verse, to the development of the typically Eliotian
ironic, self-conscious and urban personae of ‘Conversation Galante’,
‘Preludes’, ‘Portrait of a Lady’ and ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock’, all composed between 1909 and 1911 and included in his
first book of verse, published in 1917. Also in 1909, Eliot took Irving
Babbitt’s course ‘Literary Criticism in France’, in which Babbitt, drawing
like Hulme on the work of Pierre Lasserre, advanced the claims of
classicism over romanticism and deplored the relativism of modern
society.

After completing his MA, Eliot lived in Paris for a year, studying
French literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne, and attending
Bergson’s lectures at the College de France. Eliot also encountered a
more profound and long-lasting influence during this period in the
classicist, anti-democratic thinking of Charles Maurras and the Action
Française, which consolidated Babbitt’s teaching. In 1911, he returned
to Harvard to begin doctoral work in philosophy. He took classes in
Sanskrit, Eastern philosophy and comparative methodology, in which
he explored the anthropological interests that would be so important
to The Waste Land, and would later inform his belief in the cultural
importance of Christianity. He decided that his doctoral dissertation
would be an examination of the British philosopher, F.H. Bradley,
whose thinking would substantially shape his own. In 1914, he returned
to Europe to continue his studies in Oxford.

Eliot completed and submitted his dissertation in 1916, but since
he did not return to Harvard for the oral examination, the degree was
not conferred. By then, his career as a poet had begun: in 1914 he
had met Pound, who was impressed by ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock’ and had it published in Poetry magazine, the first of several
poems that would appear there. By 1916 Eliot was publishing literary
reviews and essays, alongside specialist philosophical articles drawing
on his doctoral work. In 1917 he joined the Colonial and Foreign
Department of Lloyds Bank, became assistant editor of The Egoist, and
published his first volume of verse, Prufrock and Other Observations. His
second volume, Poems, appeared only two years later, published by
Virginia and Leonard Woolf at their Hogarth Press, and his third,
Ara vos Prec (consisting mainly of poems included in the previous
two volumes), was published by the modernist writer John Rodker
in 1920. The same year, Eliot’s first American collection appeared, as
did his first volume of criticism, The Sacred Wood. Although Eliot appeared

on the literary scene slightly later than Hulme and Pound, then, his
impact was swiftly and deeply felt: by 1920 he had already built a
substantial international reputation. This is not to say that his work
was universally accepted: conservative critics found his poetry obscure
and somewhat trivial in its registering of minute impressions, as they
had found Hulme’s and Pound’s, too.

The poem that sealed Eliot’s reputation was The Waste Land, published
in 1922. It was far more allusive and more difficult than his previous
work, and indeed that difficulty was emphasized by Eliot’s notorious
notes to the poem. The Sacred Wood was of more use to readers and
reviewers: the famous essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in
particular, introduced Eliot’s belief (following Babbitt) that modern
poetry should eschew the emotional excesses of romantic poetry and
be ‘impersonal’, an expression of a collective literary tradition, rather
than of a poet’s individuality. The Sacred Wood also highlighted Eliot’s
interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, the influence of which was
immediately evident in The Waste Land. Finally, The Waste Land became
legible in the context of literary modernism itself: Joyce’s Ulysses was
also published in 1922 and Pound’s Cantos had been appearing in
periodicals over the past few years. The extensive literary allusions,
multiple narrative voices, and structural importance of myth in all
three works suggested the emergence of a post-war style, an approach
that was distinctively of its time, rather than the production of a single
idiosyncratic mind.

The 1920s and 1930s represented the consolidation of Eliot’s literary
status. He was by now far more integrated into the English literary
establishment than Hulme had been or Pound ever would be: he
reviewed for the Athenaeum and The Times Literary Supplement and in
1922 he began his own quarterly journal, The Criterion, whose classicist
perspective was advanced by the publication of writing by Sorel,
Maurras, Hulme and Babbitt. In 1925 Eliot left Lloyds Bank to join
the board of directors of Faber and Gwyer: his editorial presence there
would influence the course of twentieth-century poetry. Important
studies of Eliot’s work began to appear in the late 1920s, including
commentaries by the Cambridge-based academics I.A. Richards, F.R.
Leavis and William Empson, all powerful figures in the establishment
of new forms of literary criticism, and of English itself as a subject of
study. Eliot’s American reputation was also growing in this period:
in 1932 further collections of his poetry and essays were published,


he undertook a lecture tour in 1933 that generated The Use of Poetry
and the Use of Criticism (1933) and After Strange Gods (1934), and books
by influential critics such as F.O. Matthiessen and Cleanth Brooks placed
Eliot at the centre of modern developments in poetry.

But by this point, Eliot was no longer simply a poetic innovator or
literary critic. After writing The Waste Land, Eliot had begun to write
drama, and his first plays were published in this period: Sweeney Agonistes
(1932), the collaborative venture of The Rock (1934), Murder in the
Cathedral (1935) and The Family Reunion (1939) – to be followed in
later years by The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1953)
and The Elder Statesman (1958). More significantly for this book, though,
this was also the period in which Eliot, like Pound, was increasingly
turning his attention to larger issues of cultural crisis. Although this
concern is evident to an extent in his earliest essays, it moved into a
new phase after 1927, when Eliot was baptized and received into
the Church of England. ‘Literary criticism’, he now said, ‘should be
completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint’
(1980: 388), and in his Criterion essays, his lectures, his poetry, and
his plays, Eliot developed his long-standing classicist arguments for
order and authority into more explicit prescriptions for a moral society
founded on a strong church and monarchy. His most important
statements on this subject were made in The Idea of a Christian Society
(1939), and Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948), both of which
grew out of his service on a church discussion forum. But it has been
said that Eliot’s ‘true political testament’ was Four Quartets, his last
great work of poetry, consisting of ‘Burnt Norton’ (1936), ‘East Coker’
(1940), ‘The Dry Salvages’ (1941) and ‘Little Gidding’ (1942), in which
he re-examines the philosophical issues with which he began his career:
the workings of time, memory, ritual and the relation of experience
to verbal expression (Moody 1994: 71). In his final years, awards, prizes
and degrees were liberally conferred upon Eliot, including the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1948. He was the emblematic cultural figure of
his time: during the week of his death, the cover of the New Statesman
read: ‘The Age of Eliot’.

INTELLECTUAL TRANSITIONS

Eliot, Hulme and Pound were born and educated during a time of
intellectual upheaval. The scientific advances of the nineteenth century

WHY ELIOT, HULME AND POUND? 11


12 WHY ELIOT, HULME AND POUND?

had given the period a remarkable sense of confidence in its own ability
to explain the natural world in all its complexity. But towards the end
of the century it became clear that this confidence was misplaced. The
limitations of science began to be felt as previously secure scientific
formulations were questioned and interest began to turn to areas that
seemed to evade scientific analysis, areas better approached by the new
subject of psychology, or by philosophy, or even by studies of the occult.
Modernism might be understood as the product of this intellectual crisis,
occurring when the structures of enquiry were overwhelmingly scientific,
yet the limitations of those structures were palpably felt. The legacy
of the nineteenth century is felt in modernism’s urge to question,
analyse, and categorize – all three of these writers use noticeably scientific
vocabularies – but at the same time, they deliberately focus their attention
on that which cannot be scientifically proven. Although these three
writers come from quite different backgrounds, they begin their careers
by asking remarkably similar questions, and even come to some of the
same answers independently of each other.



In 1914, when Eliot showed Pound the poems later published as
Prufrock and Other Observations, Pound expressed amazement that Eliot
had ‘modernised himself on his own’ (1971: 40). But what did it mean
to look modern in 1914? Eliot also wrote in free verse and privileged
the closely observed detail. Evidently his work somehow expressed
the same values Hulme and Pound associated with modern verse. This
can be explained in part by a shared literary source, that of French
symbolism, but the use of that source itself was conditioned by a
common aim to express the relationship between experience and
understanding. Eliot, like Hulme, knew Bergson’s work in this area.
But by 1914, his thinking was far more deeply indebted to the philosophy
of F.H. Bradley. I will return to Bradley in Chapter 3, but it will be
helpful here to briefly indicate some general correspondences between
Eliot’s use of his philosophy and the contemporaneous concerns of
Hulme and Pound.

Like Hulme, Pound and Bergson, Bradley was interested in the
problem of registering immediate experience, and like them, he believed
it could only be understood through the practical compromise of abstract
concepts, what he called ‘appearances’. But Bradley was troubled by
the implication that we are all locked into our individual consciousnesses,
experiencing absolutely individuated sensations that cannot be accurately
expressed to each other. Bradley’s solution was that our individual
consciousnesses only appear to be divided off from each other and in
fact they are all part of a single, all-encompassing consciousness, which
he called ‘the Absolute’. While one can immediately see a certain
correlation with Hulme’s ‘cinder theory’, Bradley’s Absolute indicates


a difference in emphasis: where Hulme emphasizes the plurality of the
cinders, or the world, Bradley emphasizes its singularity and continuity.
Like Hulme and Pound, Eliot is critically aware of the implications of
this theory for the poet, who wants to express not appearances,
but the immediacy of experience itself. Where Hulme’s and Pound’s
response was to develop a concept of the verbal ‘Image’, which mediates
between the real world of experience and the conscious world of
appearances, Eliot developed a concept of the ‘objective correlative’,
which he described as ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events’
which can be ‘the formula’ of the emotion the poet wants to express
(1980: 145). Although Eliot’s objective correlative is not the same as
the Hulmean or Poundian Image, it does suggest that these three poets
agree on some important points. They agree that poetry aims to express
experience, rather than the appearances or concepts by which we
make experience intelligible to ourselves. They see that this creates a
problem for language, since language tends to falsify experience, even
as it enables us to express some approximation of it. Therefore, they
think the poet needs to find some means of making language have a
more direct impact on the reader, and the answer for all three of them
is to create poetry around concrete details, which might act as a trigger
or catalyst for experiencing the poem’s subject directly.

The major point to emphasize is that, according to these poets,
language cannot be understood as a transparent window through
which one sees reality; it is a medium that is more likely to obscure
reality. Their poetry will attempt to get behind language, as it were,
by highlighting the mismatch between what we feel and what we can
say. And, as we might expect, that decision will give rise to considerable
difficulties not only for the poet, but for the reader too. As Eliot wrote
in 1921:

It appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be

difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this

variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various

and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive,

more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language

into his meaning.

(1980: 289)

The aim of this book is to explore Eliot, Hulme and Pound as
critical thinkers, as well as poets, though of course those two identities



frequently converge. The chapters proceed roughly chronologically,
tracing the development of the poets’ thought and poetic practice from
the beginning of their careers. The first chapter outlines the turn-ofthe-
century literary context in which these poets first began to write
and to think about what it meant to be a ‘modern’ poet, and the
second chapter provides the philosophical background for their early
work. The third chapter addresses the poets’ pre-war and wartime
political thought and its relation to their poetry. The fourth and fifth
chapters discuss the major theoretical issues Eliot and Pound confronted
in composing their masterpieces, The Waste Land and The Cantos: Chapter
4 focuses on the poems’ concepts of history and tradition and Chapter
5 is concerned with the modernist renovation of the long poem against
the backdrop of the First World War. The sixth chapter discusses the
later poetry of Eliot and Pound in the context of their social criticism.

NOTE ON DATES OF TEXTS

Dates of texts are given throughout as the date of first publication,
rather than composition, unless otherwise stated.


KEY IDEAS



1

ORIGINS OF
MODERNISM

Eliot, Hulme and Pound are emphatically twentieth-century writers
and thinkers. They saw themselves as representative of the beginning
of a new century, a century that was itself fascinated by its own
modernity. The invention and popularization of the telephone, the
cinema, the automobile and the aeroplane, together with what we might
think of as intellectual inventions, such as Freud’s psychoanalysis and
Einstein’s theory of relativity, transformed the cultural landscape and
created what seemed to these writers to be a distinctively modern
consciousness (Kern 1983: 1–2). They emphasized their own modernity
repeatedly in their writings: Pound’s maxim ‘make it new’ is probably
the most frequent quotation from the period (1994: 265). But, at the
same time, the very importance Eliot, Hulme and Pound attached to
their contemporaneity suggests a reaction against something else,
something they thought of as the ‘not modern’, as it were. An
understanding of that ‘not modern’ will help to clarify what is at stake
in these writers’ claims to modernity, and in turn illuminate their poetic
project. Therefore, this chapter will describe the late nineteenth-century
literary culture against which Eliot, Hulme and Pound consciously
reacted. But it will also explore the influence of that culture on their
thinking and their poetry, and of particular significance here is the
impact of a group of French poets known as the symbolists, whose
work had a profound effect on all three writers. The chapter will


20 KEY IDEAS

conclude by looking closely at an early and important prescription for
modernist poetry, T.E. Hulme’s ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’,
delivered in 1908.

THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE

Even a cursory glance through the most well-known works of literary
criticism by Eliot, Hulme and Pound will yield a series of statements
that implicitly and explicitly oppose modernist poetry to its recent
predecessors. In his ‘Prolegomena’ (1912), for example, Pound contrasts
the achievements of the nineteenth century, ‘a rather blurry, messy
sort of a period, a rather sentimentalistic, mannerish sort of a period’,
with his hopes for twentieth-century poetry, which will, he predicts,
‘move against poppy-cock, it will be harder and saner, [. . .] austere,
direct, free from emotional slither’ (1960: 11, 12). In ‘Romanticism
and Classicism’ (written c. 1911/12), Hulme uses a very similar set of
terms, comparing the ‘dry and hard’ poetry of the modern classicist
with the over-emotional ‘damp’ poetry of the outmoded romantic (1994:
66), and that comparison underlies one of Eliot’s most famous pronouncements,
from ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919): ‘Poetry
is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not
the expression of personality, but an escape from personality’ (1980:
21). This method of strong opposition is a powerful polemical tool that
sharpens our understanding of the writers’ claims for the poetry they
are advocating. But it also simplifies the relationship between the opposing
poles. These too-stark oppositions are the writers’ strategies for managing
and controlling a discussion that is always complicated, always intellectually
and emotionally fraught: their own literary ancestry.

The American critic Harold Bloom coined the phrase ‘the anxiety
of influence’ to describe modern poetry’s engagement with its parentage.
For Bloom, the history of Western poetry since the Renaissance is a
history of ‘anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse,
wilful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not
exist’ (1973: 30). Eliot, Hulme and Pound were highly conscious of
their poetry’s relationship with literary tradition, and while their essays
insist on their own originality, they also emphasize that originality in
literature is compatible with learning from literary predecessors, and
indeed displaying that learning. The most well-known articulation of
this argument is Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, which


appeared in his first collection of essays, The Sacred Wood (1920). There
he writes that:

we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [the

poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their

immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of

adolescence, but the period of full maturity.

(1980: 14)

Pound instructed new poets to ‘be influenced by as many great artists
as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright,
or to try to conceal it’ (1960: 5), and Hulme attested to the inevitability
of poetic influence when he remarked that ‘your opinion is almost
entirely of the literary history that came just before you, and you are
governed by that whatever you may think’ (1994: 64).

That last statement of Hulme’s is worth dwelling on for a moment,
because it highlights the fact that, although these poets were prepared
to acknowledge a remarkably wide range of influences on their poetry,
they were not necessarily in control of the way their literary ancestry
made itself felt in their work. In particular, during the early stages of
their careers both Eliot and Pound wrote extensively about their interest
in much earlier periods of literary history, seventeenth-century English
drama in Eliot’s case, thirteenth-century French and Italian poetry in
Pound’s, but they were far less forthcoming about the most immediate,
the most inescapable, influence on their work, that of ‘literary history
that came just before’: the literature of the late nineteenth-century
‘aestheticist’ movement. Although the negative characterizations of
over-emotional poetry quoted above were general enough to be applied
to all kinds of literature the writer disliked, the most immediate target
was aestheticist poetry. Those over-stated oppositions are excellent
examples of how Eliot’s, Hulme’s and Pound’s anxiety about their
recent literary heritage was expressed, in Bloom’s words, as a ‘selfsaving
caricature’ of their literary parentage.

AESTHETICISM

The emergence of aestheticism in the second half of the nineteenth
century can be read as a response to, and a rejection of, nineteenth-
century industrialism and its accompanying philosophy, utilitarianism.

ORIGINS OF MODERNISM 21


22 KEY IDEAS

Aestheticism. Less a coherent movement than a way of thinking about art
and culture that appeared first in France in the mid-nineteenth century,
and subsequently in Britain from the 1860s, and America from the 1880s.
Its doctrine is described by the slogan ‘art for art’s sake’, a translation of
a phrase that became current in France in the first half of the nineteenth
century, ‘l’art pour l’art’. Aesthetes believed that art had no social
responsibility, that it was an end in itself. The object of art and indeed of
life for the aesthete was the appreciation and cultivation of beauty. Preeminent
English aesthetes include the critic Walter Pater (1839–1894), the

poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), and the playwright and
essayist Oscar Wilde (1854–1900).

The Marxist cultural theorist Fredric Jameson has described aestheticism
as a ‘compensation for everything lost in the process of the development
of capitalism’, a way of insisting on the importance of quality in a
world that seemed more interested in quantity, and of preserving ‘the
place of sheer color and intensity within the grayness of measurable
extension and geometrical abstraction’ (2002: 225). The aesthetes’
commitment to the individual’s perception of beauty therefore offered
an alternative to the utilitarian aim of achieving ‘the greatest happiness
of the greatest number’ (Bentham 1988: 3). Art, for the utilitarians,
had a moral responsibility to assist social reform; in direct contradiction
of this view, the aesthetes placed art outside all moral and even social
considerations: art was the product of subjective experience and made
for the artist’s delight alone. As Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘whenever a
community or a powerful section of a community, or a government
of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art
either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into
a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique result of
a unique temperament’ (2001: 141).

Modernism inherited much from aestheticism, and it is no wonder:
aestheticism was the background against which Eliot, Hulme and Pound
became artists. Though we know little of Hulme’s literary interests as
a teenager and student, Eliot’s and Pound’s early poems, letters and
essays show their keen interest in writers of the aestheticist movement
(Eliot 1996; Pound 1976). The importance of the poet Algernon Charles
Swinburne was particularly deeply felt: in 1946, looking back on the


Utilitarianism. The theory of ethics first formulated by Jeremy Bentham
(1748–1832) and subsequently promoted by John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
and Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), which judges all actions in terms of the
amount they contribute to the sum of human happiness. It aimed (and
aims) to provide a rational foundation for social and legal policy. In
Bentham’s formulation of the theory, an action’s contribution to happiness
is calculated by adding up the amount of pleasure it brings, minus the
amount of pain it entails, erasing distinctions between different types of
pleasure (a point Mill would later contest). This led Bentham to argue that
‘the utility of all these arts and sciences, [. . .] the value which they possess,
is exactly in proportion to the pleasure they yield’, and that therefore, the
child’s game of ‘push-pin’ is ‘of equal value with the arts and sciences of
music and poetry’. Indeed, ‘if the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure,

it is more valuable than either’ (Bentham 1825: 206).

challenges facing young poets at the beginning of the century, Eliot
summed up, ‘the question was still: where do we go from Swinburne?
and the answer appeared to be nowhere’ (1996: 388). Swinburne was
the major inspiration, but it was not clear how one’s own poetry could
build on his achievements. Pound articulated the problem remarkably
similarly in two early poems on Swinburne, ‘Salve O Pontifex’ and
‘Swinburne: A Critique’, in which he described Swinburne’s style as
‘Wondrous pattern leading nowhere’ (1976: 40, 261).

Although Swinburne pervades the early verse of Eliot and Pound,
both deliberately distanced themselves from his influence as they began
to establish their careers. In Pound’s case, the distancing was ambivalent:
throughout his career he admired Swinburne as a translator and for
the musical qualities of his verse. But he also thought that Swinburne
produced ‘inaccurate writing’, that ‘he neglected the value of words
as words, and was intent on their value as sound’ (1960: 293, 292),
points made much more forcibly by Eliot in his two essays on Swinburne
in The Sacred Wood. In the second of these, ‘Swinburne as Poet’, Eliot
writes that in Swinburne’s poetry, ‘meaning is merely the hallucination
of meaning, because language, uprooted, has adapted itself to an independent
life of atmospheric nourishment’ (1976: 149). The objection
of both Pound and Eliot is that Swinburne’s poetry is so intoxicated
with the musicality of words that it neglects to pay proper attention

ORIGINS OF MODERNISM 23


24 KEY IDEAS

to their sense. Recent critics have argued vigorously and effectively
against this judgement, but the modernist rejection of Swinburne was
extremely damaging to his reputation during the twentieth century.

Swinburne died in London in 1909, the year after Pound moved to
London, and five years before Eliot arrived there. The early deaths of
a number of other leading members of the English aestheticist movement
appeared to place that poetic era firmly in the past. However, one
major poet who had identified himself with aestheticism was still in
London, and still to produce his best work: the Irish poet and playwright,

W.B. Yeats. Pound had studied the poetry of Yeats and his circle (‘The
Rhymers’ Club’) as a postgraduate student, and later claimed that he
had come to London to ‘sit at Yeats’s feet, and learn what he knew’
(Carpenter 1988: 93). Yeats, like Swinburne, had made experiments
with poetic rhythm central to his verse, and he wrote and lectured
extensively on the art of speaking poetry and the relationship between
music and speech. This was particularly compelling to Pound, given
his graduate research on the Provençal troubadours (poet-musicians)
of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But, despite sharing Swinburne’s
typically aestheticist interest in the music of poetry, Yeats was less
vulnerable to the charge of ‘inaccurate writing’, because he was also
well known as a theorist of ‘symbolism’ in poetry. In ‘The Symbolism
of Poetry’ (1900), Yeats set out his understanding of how symbols
work:
All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their preordained energies

or because of long association, evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions,

or, as I prefer to think, call down among us certain disembodied powers,

whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions; and when sound, and colour,

and form are in a musical relation, a beautiful relation to one another, they

become, as it were, one sound, one colour, one form, and evoke an emotion

that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion.

(1961a: 156–57)

Yeats uses the term ‘symbol’ in a deliberately wide-ranging fashion,
to denote anything that can evoke an emotion; he acknowledges that
outside the fields of mysticism (a great interest of his) and modern
poetry, few people would give the same definition, preferring to reserve
the term for what he calls ‘intellectual symbols’, that is, ‘symbols that
evoke ideas’ rather than emotions (1961a: 160).


FRENCH SYMBOLISM

Despite the evident influence of English and Irish aestheticism on
modernist poetry, Eliot, Hulme and Pound would all make much of
their belief that, in Eliot’s words, ‘the kind of poetry that I needed to
teach me the use of my own voice did not exist in English at all’.
Though the three were, to varying degrees, acquainted with the literature
of several other languages and cultures, the kind of poetry they needed,
Eliot said, ‘was only to be found in French’ (1969b: 252). The French
poetry he meant was that of the group known as the symbolists.

It was at Harvard in 1908 that Eliot came across one of the most
influential books for modernist poetry, a book he credited with affecting
‘the whole course of my life’: The Symbolist Movement in Literature
(1899) by the English aesthete poet and critic, Arthur Symons (1865–
1945) (1996: 402). Symons’s book consisted of eight essays on the
French writers Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855), Villiers de L’Isle-
Adam (1838–1889), Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), Paul Verlaine
(1844–1896), Jules Laforgue (1860–1887), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–
1898), Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) and (the Belgian) Maurice
Maeterlinck (1862–1949), together with his own introduction and
conclusion. According to Symons, symbolism in literature is ‘a form
of expression, at the best but approximate, essentially but arbitrary
[. . .], for an unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness’. Like
Yeats, Symons defines symbolism very broadly, and the correspondence
between their definitions is no accident. Symons dedicated The Symbolist
Movement in Literature to Yeats (his erstwhile flatmate) as ‘the chief representative’
of symbolism in England, and Yeats’s essay on ‘The Symbolism
of Poetry’ begins with a very positive review of the book (Symons
1958: 1, xix).

The title of Symons’s book and its definitions of symbolism attribute
a coherence to the movement that is somewhat misleading. The
manifesto that named the symbolist movement was published by a minor
French poet, Jean Moréas (1856–1910), in 1886, but several of the
most important symbolist writers had already produced their major
works by 1880, and most critics would cite symbolism’s origin as far
back as Charles Baudelaire’s volume of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal (1857).
Similarly, though Moréas announced symbolism’s death in 1891, it is
usually understood to stretch into the twentieth century, in the poetry
of Paul Claudel and Paul Valéry (Porter 1990: 14–16; Balakian 1982:

ORIGINS OF MODERNISM 25


26 KEY IDEAS

67). We should therefore think of symbolism as consisting of several
overlapping groupings of poets (including Belgian, Swiss, Polish and
American poets writing in French, as well as French poets), and different
stages from the middle of the nineteenth century to the second decade
of the twentieth century.

Given the span of time covered by symbolism and the number of
poets who have been described as symbolists, it is not surprising that
critics have found it difficult to agree on the movement’s characteristics.
Typically, however, symbolist poetry has been associated with
musicality, obscurity, mystery, the use of free verse, and of course the
use of symbols. Perhaps it is more useful, though, to adopt the definition
provided by a recent critic, who has argued that the one unifying
symbolist characteristic is a sense of a crisis in the effectiveness of
language (Porter 1990: 20). This is where the particular importance
of the symbol to this group of poets becomes clear: if language cannot
adequately describe a thing or feeling or thought, a symbol may be able
to evoke it obliquely. If you look back at the quotation from Yeats in
the previous section, you’ll see that ‘evocation’ is the key word in his
definition of symbolism.

The symbolist sense of crisis was influentially explored by Stéphane
Mallarmé in his essay ‘Crisis in Poetry’ (1886), which argues that
language’s inability to capture what Mallarmé variously refers to as ‘the
soul’, ‘the essence’ of things, or ‘Truth’, has produced ‘a fundamental
and fascinating crisis in literature’ (1956: 34, 37–38, 40). He explains
that it is in order to resolve this crisis that symbolists have rejected

Free verse (also often referred to using the French term, vers libre). Term
used to describe verse that departs from regular patterns of rhythm and
rhyme. Although the French symbolist poet Gustave Kahn claimed to have
invented free verse, it is not a modern invention: varieties exist in Latin,
Greek and medieval verse. The beginning of its contemporary popularity
is usually traced to the poetry of Walt Whitman (1819–1892) (in the United
States), the symbolists (in France) and Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
(in England). Modernist poets, who wanted to abandon the artificial and
ornamental in verse, argued that free verse enabled them to write poetry
whose rhythms were closer to the patterns of speech.


traditional patterns of rhyme and metre in favour of free verse, and
that their poems refuse description, in favour of evocation, allusion
and suggestion. For Mallarmé, the very diversity of human languages
indicates the shortcomings of all of them: the ‘supreme language’, the
language that could fully represent Truth ‘is missing’ (1956: 38). But
this pessimistic view of language is accompanied by a much more
optimistic sense of the opportunity this presents to poetry. It is precisely
because language is imperfect that poetry is important, Mallarmé argues,
because poetry ‘atones for the sins of languages, comes nobly to their
aid’ by supplying a representation of that which language itself cannot
describe (1956: 38). It is in this sense that Mallarmé’s symbolist
precursor, Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), remarking that ‘everything
is hieroglyphic’, called the poet ‘a translator, a decipherer’ (1964: 239).
The poet deciphers the hieroglyphics of ‘Truth’, to use Mallarmé’s
(somewhat problematic) word, and translates them into poetry.

LANGUAGE GAMES

Baudelaire’s use of the word ‘hieroglyphic’ here and Mallarmé’s
comments about the imperfections of all languages are representative
of changes in thinking about language during the nineteenth century.
Both poets are drawing attention to the gap between language and
experience (what we think or sense), a gap that was generating great
interest among linguists and philosophers as knowledge of the relationships
between different languages, especially ancient languages such as
Sanskrit and Egyptian hieroglyphics, increased. Detailed comparisons
of languages highlighted what we might call the materiality of language,
its existence as a system, a set of rules and patterns, rather than a transparent
or natural means of expression. This will sound familiar to
readers of structuralist theory, and indeed structuralism grew out of
this shift in nineteenth-century linguistic research: Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857–1913) delivered the lectures that now make up the founding
text of structuralist theory (Course in General Linguistics) from 1907–1911,
the early years of modernism. Eliot and Pound had direct experience
of the new emphasis in linguistic thought from their university studies:
Eliot studied Sanskrit, Pound studied Romance languages. Hulme’s
study of mathematics is relevant here too: mathematics, after all, is
also expressed in a language whose signs and symbols are as arbitrarily
assigned as letters and words.

ORIGINS OF MODERNISM 27


28 KEY IDEAS

The early poetry of Eliot, Hulme and Pound is preoccupied by this
gap between language and experience. Like the symbolists, they draw
attention to the limitations of language, at the same time as attempting
to overcome those limitations. For example, Eliot’s best-known early
poem, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (written 1910–1911,
published 1915), takes the failure of communication as its subject matter.
In the first stanza, Prufrock walks through a cityscape at dusk (a typical
symbolist scenario), where the details of the scene are represented in
terms of language: streets are ‘muttering retreats / of restless nights
in cheap hotels’, that ‘follow like a tedious argument’. But what are
the streets ‘saying’? Something important: they ‘lead you to an
overwhelming question’, but Prufrock and Eliot stop short of framing
the question itself. The stanza ends: ‘Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” /
Let us go and make our visit’. The comic effect of these lines, created
by their relative shortness in relation to the previous lines, the neatness
of their rhyme, and their unstressed endings (ís it / vísit), dismisses
language and replaces it with action: Prufrock leaves the street and
enters the social world of the drawing room. The drawing room, too,
is defined by language (‘in the room the women come and go / Talking
of Michelangelo’), but this repeated couplet seems to describe the
‘wrong’ kind of talk: the social, superficial chat of an unflatteringly
generalized group of women (contrasted with the particularized Prufrock
and Michelangelo). Language has become separated from experience:
the overwhelming question cannot be asked here (1969a: 13).

While Eliot had found the distinctive voice he displays in ‘Prufrock’
by 1910, Pound’s poetry experiments with a range of styles and voices
for much longer. Two styles predominate: the first was modelled on
the poetry of aesthetes such as William Morris (1834–1896), Dante
Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) and Swinburne, and focussed on the
portrayal of beauty. The second, rougher, more vigorous, style was
modelled on the poetry of the medieval troubadours and Robert
Browning (1812–1889), and often takes the form of a dramatic
monologue. For most of his career, Pound allowed only the poems in
the second category to be republished, calling the others ‘stale cream-
puffs’ (1965: [7]). From 1911, however, Pound’s own voice begins to
become more distinct and ‘The Return’ (1912), for example, contains
elements of both youthful styles. Yeats described this poem as ‘the
most beautiful poem that has been written in the free form’ (Carpenter
1988: 174), though Pound stated that it was actually a version of a


classical metre known as Sapphics, after the ancient Greek poet Sappho,
also used in English by Swinburne. Though usually interpreted as
concerning the relationship of ancient gods with the modern age, the
poem begins by drawing an extended analogy between the return of
the gods and the poem’s own metrical experiments: ‘see the tentative
/ Movements, and the slow feet’, Pound writes, ‘The trouble in the
pace and the uncertain / Wavering!’ (1990: 74). What Pound is doing
here is using rhythm to describe the scenario itself. He uses a combination
of long vowels and punctuation to keep the pace of the stanza
slow, but he also interrupts it with that three-syllable staccato ‘tentative’
at the end of the first line, which holds us just a little too long there,
so that we’re made to enact the word itself. Rather than simply describing
the hesitant return of the gods, then, Pound reproduces their
movement: he manipulates the poem’s rhythm to close the gap between
language and experience.

Pound appears to have only begun to read the symbolists seriously
in 1912, though his close study of Browning provided some of the
lessons Eliot had learned from Laforgue. Hulme, however, had encountered
the work of the symbolists as early 1905 or 1906, and from 1908
he published short free verse poems in imitation (1994: 57). ‘Autumn’
(1909) evokes the mood of an autumn night through two sharp images:
the moon is ‘like a red-faced farmer’, the stars have ‘white faces like
town children’. Though not as accomplished as either Eliot’s or Pound’s
poems, it shares the precision of their writing and distrust of language:
Hulme’s speaker tells us that he ‘did not stop to speak, but nodded’
to the moon – he is as taciturn as Prufrock (1994: 3).

We can see the aestheticist and symbolist heritage of these poems
in the way they evoke meaning without recourse to description. None

Dramatic monologue. A poem presented as a speech by a fictional figure
to an (unspeaking) listener, often at a moment of crisis. As in a theatrical
monologue, the speaker’s character is revealed not only directly (through
what the speaker says), but also indirectly (through how it is said, and
what is not said). Much rests, therefore, on the reader’s interpretation.
The form is associated particularly with the Victorian poet, Robert
Browning.

ORIGINS OF MODERNISM 29


30 KEY IDEAS

of the poems lends itself to simple summary of content, there is
no ‘story’ to tell; yet they all convey a mood, a tone, through the
combination of experiments in rhythm and striking images. We may
not know what Prufrock looks like (apart from that he is slightly bald),
but the images he presents of himself, ‘formulated, sprawling on a
pin’, or transformed into ‘a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the
floors of silent seas’, evoke his social alienation more vividly than
straightforward description could (1969a: 14, 15).

HULME’S ‘A LECTURE ON MODERN POETRY’

T.E. Hulme’s ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ (1908) records this
transitional moment, where a recognizably modernist poetry emerges
from nineteenth-century aestheticism. It was composed and delivered
at an early stage of modernism’s development and is a very clear example
of how modernist poets tussled with their recent poetic past to establish
what they saw as a distinctively modern poetry. If we want to
know what kind of poetry Eliot, Hulme and Pound thought of as modern
when they embarked on their careers, this lecture is an excellent
starting point.
Hulme writes that he began to compose poetry because ‘there were
certain impressions which I wanted to fix’. However, no existing form
seemed to him to be suitable until he encountered symbolist free verse
(1994: 50). Drawing on an essay by the French symbolist Gustave Kahn,
he argues that periods of intense poetic activity are brought about not
by social or political changes, but by the invention of new verse forms
that can express the age. Free verse, Hulme writes, is particularly suited
to the expression of modern life and the modern sensibility – and his
definitions of these are highly instructive. He distinguishes between
‘the old poetry’, written in the metrically regular epic or ballad forms
and concerned with heroic action, and modern poetry that ‘has become
definitely and finally introspective and deals with expression and
communication of momentary phases in the poet’s mind’ (1994: 52,
53). Clearly, this is a polemical distinction and Hulme’s description
of ‘old poetry’ is deliberately unspecific, but his connecting of the
modern with the expression of individual consciousness immediately
alerts us to the aestheticist and symbolist heritage of this passage.

But what would Hulme’s ‘modern poetry’ actually look like? He
has established that it would be composed in free verse, but he also,


towards the end of the lecture, emphasizes the importance that the
poetic image will play. Hulme’s modern poetry will apparently be made
up entirely of images, piled up, he says, in different lines. This method
is designed to convey the intensity of the poet’s experience to the
reader with the greatest immediacy possible. In this way, he argues,
poetry is the ‘direct language’ because it ‘arrests your mind all the
time with a picture’. Prose, on the other hand, is an ‘indirect language’
made up of images once fresh, but now decayed into conventions and
clichés. ‘One might say that images are born in poetry’, Hulme writes,
‘They are used in prose, and finally die a long lingering death
in journalists’ English’ (1994: 55). In this statement, Hulme not only
elevates poetry over prose, he also hints at one of the reasons he does
so. For many literary figures of the period, journalism was the enemy, a
utilitarian way of writing that transmitted information (or disinformation)
with little interest in intellectual subtleties or style. Hulme’s comparison
between journalism and poetry alerts us to the fact that his whole
lecture might be understood as an ambitious attempt to carve out a
new place for poetry (rather than the novel or the newspaper) as the
privileged expression of the modern mind. Hulme hopes that modernist
poetry, like aestheticism before it, will preserve ‘the place of sheer
color and intensity’ from the utilitarian drive of the journalist (Jameson
2002: 225).

SUMMARY

In this chapter we have seen how modernism, despite its insistence on
its own modernity and originality, was deeply indebted to nineteenth-
century aestheticism and, in particular, French symbolism. Aesthetes and
symbolists reacted against the utilitarian belief that art should be moral
by developing the doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’ and their poetry focussed
on the evocation of emotions rather than the description of ideas or moral
narratives. The modernists inherited the desire to create poetry that would
exceed the limitations of language, and their early writing aims to achieve
this through the use of vivid images and experiments in rhythm enabled
by the use of free verse.

ORIGINS OF MODERNISM 31


2

PHILOSOPHICAL
DETAILS

THE IMAGE AND THE
OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE

One of the most influential aspects of Eliot’s, Hulme’s and Pound’s
poetry was their reinterpretation of the symbolists’ use of the poetic
symbol to form new building blocks for modernist poetry. Hulme and
Pound referred to their versions of the symbol as the ‘image’ or ‘Image’,
and in 1912 Pound founded ‘imagism’, a movement Eliot later called
‘the starting-point of modern poetry’ (1978: 58). Although Eliot was
not in London during the development of imagism, his education in
the United States and France introduced him to some of the philosophical
ideas that informed it. So it is not entirely surprising that his own
version of the symbolists’ symbol, which he named ‘the objective
correlative’, has much in common with the Hulmean and Poundian
Image. This chapter examines the philosophical ideas behind the Image
and the objective correlative, focussing in particular on the influence
of the philosophers Henri Bergson and F.H. Bradley.

HULME AND BERGSON

On 11 February 1909 the poet F.S. Flint reviewed Hulme’s poetry in
a journal called The New Age. Hulme had published two poems in a
collection of verse by the Poets’ Club, a group of well-respected
members of London’s literary establishment. Flint compared this
collection with some recent work by the French symbolists, but it was


34 KEY IDEAS

not a favourable comparison. While Flint praised the symbolists as
‘pioneers’ and ‘craftsmen’, he poured scorn on the members of the
Poets’ Club as a band of ‘rhymesters’ more interested in dining than
writing poetry. Flint did, however, pick out a small number of
contributions as noteworthy, including Hulme’s ‘Autumn’ (1909: 327).
Hulme promptly left the Poets’ Club to found a new poetry group
with Flint where, according to Flint, the focus of discussion and poetic
experimentation was French free verse, Japanese poetry (then very
much in vogue) and ‘what we called the “Image”’ (1915: 71). Pound
joined this group on 22 April 1909.

To understand what Hulme and Flint’s ‘Secession Club’, as it has
come to be known, understood by the Image and its relation to poetry,
we need to look more broadly at Hulme’s activities in 1909. In July,
Hulme followed Flint into The New Age’s pages, but rather than writing
on poetry, he became the journal’s commentator on contemporary
philosophy. In particular, his articles promoted the theories of Henri
Bergson (1859–1941), who, like Hulme, had had a mathematical background,
but had come to believe that, while mathematics and its
related sciences could make useful statements about the external world,
its procedures were unable to reveal anything about the essential nature
of reality, especially the reality of human consciousness. His philosophy
addressed that topic.

In his first two books, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience
(translated as Time and Free Will) (1889) and Matiere et mémoire (Matter
and Memory) (1896), Bergson argued that positivist science was not
only limited in its ability to describe human consciousness, its influence
had actually hindered our understanding of it. He claimed that the
method of perceiving and understanding the physical world by breaking
it down into analysable units could not be applied to consciousness
without falsifying its real character. One of the analogies he used to
explain this complex idea was the analogy of a bell striking. We can
listen to the bell’s strokes in two distinct ways, explained Bergson: we
can either count the chimes as distinct, comparable elements in a series,
or we can attend to the series as a whole, as if it were a musical piece.
The first approach involves separating out the sounds and classifying
them as sound elements of the same kind, repressing any difference
between the sounds or our impression of them. This approach only
records the quantity of the chimes. The second approach registers the
way in which the sound of each chime is carried over to combine and


modify the sound of the successive ones, creating a unified overall effect.
This approach records the quality of the chimes. Bergson argues that,
while we tend to think of our consciousness in the first way, as a series
of discrete moments, it would be more accurate to describe it in the
second way, as a succession of moments that interpenetrate each other
and form an indivisible whole. Our memory of each moment, our
experience of each state of our consciousness, is carried forward and
colours future experiences. In this sense, we can never see even an
everyday physical object – a chair, a table, a vase – in the same way
twice, because our memory of our first impression of it modifies the
second impression. Bergson calls this continuity that characterizes our
consciousness ‘real duration’ (Bergson 2002: 53–54; Schwartz 1992:
282–83).

In his next work, an essay entitled ‘Introduction a la métaphysique’
(‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’) (1903), which Hulme translated,
Bergson extended his concept of ‘real duration’ from consciousness to
the external world. The key opposition in this work is no longer between
the external world of stable objects and the internal flux of consciousness,
but rather between the faculties by which we perceive reality. The
intellect, argues Bergson, is a practical tool that enables us to understand
reality by dividing it up and ordering it. The intuition, however, enables
us to grasp reality in its actual state of flux. But how can we register
our intuitions without imposing the structure of the intellect upon
them? In Time and Free Will, Bergson had noted the inability of language
to apprehend consciousness: ‘the rough and ready word, which stores
up the stable, common, and consequently impersonal element in the
impressions of mankind, overwhelms or at least covers over the delicate

Positivism. Strictly, the philosophical school deriving from the work of the
French philosopher, Auguste Comte (1798–1857). More generally used to
describe the philosophical belief that knowledge is confined to the ‘positive’
data of sensory experience, and that all speculations about reality not
based on such evidence must be rejected. It therefore privileges the
knowledge produced by science and mathematics. In its emphasis on
human, rather than religious, experience positivism is closely related to
utilitarianism.

PHILOSOPHICAL DETAILS 35


36 KEY IDEAS

and fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness’ (2002: 74).
In ‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’ he introduces the idea that language
can more effectively express duration if abstract concepts are replaced
with ‘images’: ‘no image can replace the intuition of duration’, Bergson
writes, ‘but many diverse images, borrowed from very different orders
of things, may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness
to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized’
(1913: 14). For Bergson, poets are especially adept at conveying this
process (1910: 15).

In this last quotation from Bergson we might notice a correspondence
with the way the symbolists used the symbol to evoke a reality they
believed language could not represent directly. Certainly, this
correspondence struck Bergson’s French critics, who frequently related
his philosophy to symbolist poetry, and Hulme himself remarked that
‘the spirit which finds expression in the Symboliste movement in
poetry is the same as that represented by Bergson in philosophy’ (1994:
58). For Hulme, Bergson’s philosophy justified his own belief that
poetry could access reality more precisely and powerfully than other
forms of writing, and in his third essay for The New Age he described
the difference between poetry and prose in very Bergsonian terms.
‘Poetry’, he wrote:

is not a counter language, but a visual concrete one. It is a compromise for a

language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily. It always

endeavours to arrest you and to make you continuously see a physical thing,

to prevent you gliding through an abstract process. It chooses fresh epithets

and fresh metaphors, not so much because they are new and we are tired of

the old, but because the old cease to convey a physical thing and become

abstract counters. Nowadays, when one sees the hill is ‘clothed’ with trees,

the word suggests no physical comparison. To get the original visual effect

one would have to say ‘ruffed’, or use some new metaphor [. . .]. Images in

verse are not mere decoration, but the very essence of an intuitive language.

(1994: 95)

We can see Hulme’s Bergsonian ideas about poetry in practice if
we turn to his poem ‘Above the Dock’ (1912):

Above the quiet dock in mid night,

Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height,


Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away

Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.

(1994: 3)

Like ‘Autumn’, the poem has a very traditional subject: the moon in
the night sky. But Hulme departs from traditional treatments of the
subject, such as those that muse on female beauty or love. Hulme’s
interest here is not in the associations the moon has for us, the moon
as ‘an abstract counter’ that means beauty or love. Instead, Hulme
wants us to see the moon itself as if for the first time, to get the
‘original visual effect’. To achieve this he finds a ‘fresh metaphor’, that
of the child’s balloon. This everyday reference has the effect of
undercutting the romantic, poetic associations of the moon: it helps
us to focus on the moon as a ‘physical thing’. Hulme’s use of the poetic
image is a specifically Bergsonian attempt to convey intuitions of reality.

Hulme published only six poems in his lifetime; a handful more
were published after his death. Though Eliot considered him ‘a really
great poet’ (1988: 311), his significance as a writer rests less on his
poetic achievement than on his reputation as the inspiration behind the
imagist movement.

POUND AND IMAGISM

Although Pound later claimed Hulme’s importance for imagism had
been overstated, his first public announcement of the new movement
nevertheless accorded Hulme a paternal role. Pound’s sixth collection
of poetry, Ripostes (1912), contained an appendix of five poems entitled
‘The Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme’, which Pound introduced
with a jocular note. Though not entirely complimentary, it
described the imagists as ‘the descendents’ of Hulme’s ‘Secession Club’
(1990: 251). In his ‘History of Imagism’ (1915), F.S. Flint reiterated
the connection to Hulme (1915: 71).

‘Imagism’ was coined by Pound as a marketing ploy for poetry by
himself and his friends H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886–1961) and Richard
Aldington (1892–1962). Early announcements used French forms,
‘Les Imagistes’ and ‘Imagisme’, to underline a comparison with contemporary
French post-symbolist movements, such as unanimisme and
impulsionnisme. The ploy was successful: the imagists were published
to considerable controversy in the United States by Poetry and in England

PHILOSOPHICAL DETAILS 37


38 KEY IDEAS

by The New Freewoman (later The Egoist), and four anthologies of their
poetry appeared between 1914 and 1917. Pound, however, only
appeared in the first anthology, Des Imagistes, arguing that the
movement’s original ideas were being diluted by some of its new
associates. The subsequent anthologies were edited by the American
poet, Amy Lowell (1874–1925), and a fifth and final anthology appeared
in 1930, edited by Aldington.

The original imagist ideas upon which Pound insisted were
summarized in three ‘principles’ published in Poetry in March 1913:

1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase,
not in sequence of a metronome.

(1960: 3)

The correspondence with Hulme’s earlier prescriptions for modern
poetry is striking. For Pound, as for Hulme in ‘A Lecture on Modern
Poetry’, good poetry is ‘direct’. Both poets also emphasize economy
and lack of ornamentation. And Pound’s third point suggests that the
imagist is more likely to write in free verse than a traditional metre:
the imagist poem must not be constrained, at least, by the metre used.

It is more difficult to ascertain how far the specifically Bergsonian
aspect of Hulme’s image is carried over to Pound’s. Pound was never
an enthusiastic Bergsonian himself, but there is a Bergsonian residue
in his main definition of the Image (unlike Hulme and Bergson, he
referred to it using a capital ‘I’). In the same March 1913 issue of
Poetry he wrote, ‘An “Image” is that which presents an intellectual and
emotional complex in an instant of time’, and elaborated, ‘it is the
presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense
of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space
limits’ (1960: 4). This comes very close to Bergson’s idea that images
can create a moment of intuition that apprehends reality directly, though
Pound attributes his use of the term ‘complex’ to a contemporary
psychologist, Bernard Hart (never mentioned again in Pound’s writings).
Pound also follows both Hulme and Bergson in describing images as
‘concrete’ rather than ‘abstract’. At the same time, there is an important,
if subtle, difference here. When Hulme and Bergson refer to the image
they use the term conventionally, describing a visual image like the


child’s balloon Hulme conjures up in ‘Above the Dock’. For Pound,
however, the Image is not a visual description, it is ‘an intellectual and
emotional complex’: the Image is that which the visual description
produces. It is what Hulme and Bergson refer to as the intuition.

This can be explained most clearly by looking at Pound’s ‘In a Station
of the Metro’ (1913), originally published with the following typography:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd :

Petals on a wet, black bough .

(1990: 109)

Like Hulme’s ‘Autumn’ and ‘Above the Dock’, the poem’s success is
dependent on a central metaphor: here, faces seen as petals. The poem
has its effect when the reader brings the two images together and sees
one in terms of the other. But where does this happen? The reader
pictures the first scenario, faces appearing out of a crowd; then pictures
the second, the petals stuck to a black tree branch. Only then can the
effect take place: at the end of the poem the reader superimposes faces
on petals, petals on faces. Unlike most poems, the effect of ‘In a
Station of the Metro’ is not cumulative, but sudden, and it occurs
outside the words themselves. This is underlined by the text’s innovative
typography (unusual in Pound’s imagist poems, but a feature of The
Cantos), which breaks the poem into discrete visual elements.

The point I want to stress here is that, although the poem is made
up of visual images (faces, petals, the bough), what Pound designated
the ‘Image’ is the effect that happens after the poem. He made this
explicit in a famous account of the poem’s composition, where he
describes how he came out of a Paris metro station and encountered
a crowd of beautiful faces. When it came to expressing the experience,
however, he could imagine no verbal equivalent, only ‘little splotches
of colour’. But, just as Hulme felt able to express the experience of
the Canadian steppes only when he encountered the free verse form
of the French symbolists, Pound’s breakthrough occurred when he
turned from his usual poetic models to Japanese haiku. It was the
example of this form, Pound wrote, that helped him to create this
archetypal imagist poem, a poem which records ‘the precise instant
when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a
thing inward and subjective’ (1970a: 89).

PHILOSOPHICAL DETAILS 39


40 KEY IDEAS

Haiku. Japanese poetic form that consists of seventeen syllables arranged

in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables. The traditional, pre


nineteenth-century form (‘hokku’) often juxtaposes two distinct elements

to create a single impression, a practice carried over into many modern

haiku, too.

So far I have emphasized imagism’s symbolist ancestry, but as ‘In a
Station of the Metro’ demonstrates, the imagists were not only
influenced by recent French poetry. A number of Pound’s poems draw
more or less loosely on Japanese and Chinese poetry. ‘Liu Ch’e’ and
‘Fan-Piece, for Her Imperial Lord’, for example, rework English
translations of Chinese poems by Liu Che and Pan Chieh-yu respectively,
and ‘Gentildonna’ and ‘The Encounter’ are a more general response
to the lingering fin-de-siecle fashion for japonisme and chinoiserie. H.D.’s
and Aldington’s verse reflects a close engagement with the poetry of
ancient Greece (and late romantic interpretations of it); Pound also
draws on the classics: Latin models were especially important for his
more satirical imagist poems.

Though detractors read imagism’s imitations of literary models as
evidence of their lack of originality, they should be read more positively.
They signify the importance the imagists attached to their self-training
in poetic technique. Pound’s infamous ‘A Few Don’ts’ (1913) for the
aspiring imagist stressed that an imagist poem was not only the product
of intuition; it required formidable erudition and hard work. Under
the heading ‘Rhythm and Rhyme’, Pound instructed his reader to:

fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign

language, [. . .] e.g. Saxon charms, Hebridean Folk Songs, the verse of Dante,

and the lyrics of Shakespeare – if he can dissociate the vocabulary from the

cadence. Let him dissect the lyrics of Goethe coldly into their component

sound values, syllables long and short, stressed and unstressed, into vowels

and consonants.

(1960: 5)

As the vocabulary of that last sentence suggests, Pound frequently
compared the poet to the scientist, who is expected to have a rigorous
knowledge of the subject before being allowed to practice science.


ELIOT AND BERGSON

After completing his undergraduate and Master’s degrees at Harvard,
Eliot spent the year 1910–1911 in Paris, during which time he attended
Bergson’s lectures at the College de France. He later admitted to a
‘temporary conversion to Bergsonism’ (1948b: 5), and Bergson was
the subject of one of the papers he wrote after returning to Harvard
to study for his doctorate in philosophy. The paper criticizes what
Eliot sees as inconsistencies in Bergson’s philosophy, particularly
Bergson’s attempt to reconcile idealism and realism by locating reality
in neither the consciousness nor the external world, but in the tension
between the two. For Eliot, only one or the other could logically be
true (Habib 1999: 49–54).

Despite this major disagreement, Bergson’s legacy can be discerned
in Eliot’s writings, especially in the poems he wrote while in Paris.
‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ (written 1911, published 1915) is the
most frequently cited example of Bergson’s influence. In this poem,
the speaker, or more precisely, the thinker, moves through a sordid
symbolist cityscape, letting his mind flit between observations of his
environment and memories they suggest. The thinker appears to enact
Bergson’s theory of memory, in which images from the past ‘must
constantly mingle with our perception of the present, and may even
take its place’ (Bergson 1988: 66; Childs 2001: 19). So, Eliot writes,
the night ‘dissolve[s]’

the floors of memory

And all its clear relations,

Its divisions and precisions.

The sight of a prostitute in a doorway is the cue for a chain of memories,
‘a twisted branch upon the beach’, ‘a broken spring in a factory yard’.
By the fourth stanza, the remembered details are as vivid as those seen:
a cat lit up by a street lamp ‘Slips out its tongue / And devours a
morsel of rancid butter’, which recalls ‘the hand of the child, automatic’
which ‘pocketed a toy that was running along the quay’ and a crab
that ‘Gripped the end of a stick which I held him’. At the end of the
poem the street lamp calls the thinker back from his reverie, and he
is confronted by the accoutrements of everyday external life: ‘The bed
is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall, / Put your shoes at the

PHILOSOPHICAL DETAILS 41


42 KEY IDEAS

door, sleep, prepare for life’. The triviality and, especially, the mechanization
expressed in the latter line represent for the thinker ‘The last
twist of the knife’ (1969a: 24–26; Childs 2001: 62).

ELIOT AND BRADLEY

Eliot’s critique of Bergson in his Harvard essay shows the early influence
of the philosopher who would become the topic of Eliot’s doctoral
dissertation: the English idealist, F.H. Bradley (1846–1924). In 1914
Eliot was awarded a fellowship to work on his dissertation in Oxford
under the tuition of Harold Joachim, one of Bradley’s disciples. The
dissertation, which focussed on Bradley’s 1893 book, Appearance and
Reality, was completed under the title ‘Experience and the Objects of
Knowledge in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley’ and sent to Harvard in
1916, by which time Eliot had moved to London and begun to publish
his poetry with the help of Pound. Harvard approved the dissertation:
Eliot’s dissertation supervisor called it ‘the work of an expert’ (Jain
1992: 30). However, Eliot did not return to Harvard for the necessary
oral examination of his dissertation (it was, after all, the middle of the
First World War), and the degree of PhD was not awarded. When
the dissertation was published in 1964, it was argued that Eliot’s
philosophical work illuminated his poetry and criticism. More recently,
critics have warned against transferring the arguments of Eliot’s
dissertation to his literary work, pointing out that to do so belies the
dissertation’s scepticism about philosophical truth itself (Menand 1987:
43). Such a transferral also, of course, fails to acknowledge any
substantial development in Eliot’s thought after 1916. Keeping these
warnings in mind, the rest of this chapter will set out the chief elements
of Bradley’s philosophy, and of Eliot’s response to it in his dissertation,
and finally suggest how we might make careful use of it in thinking
about one aspect of his literary criticism.

Like Bergson’s, Bradley’s philosophy concerns the relationship
between the mind and reality. Also like Bergson’s, its approach is
directed against positivism. For Bradley, the starting point of all
knowledge is ‘immediate experience’, a term he used technically to
denote the ‘general condition before distinctions and relations have
been developed’ (1897: 459). In its unified, unordered state, ‘immediate
experience’ is reminiscent of Bergson’s ‘real duration’. Similarly, his
characterization of the world of ‘appearance’ as that where experience


Idealism. Philosophical idealists believe that reality is fundamentally mental
rather than physical: the only reality we can know is the reality presented
to us by our minds. Among the varieties of philosophical idealism are
subjective idealism (for example, in the philosophy of George Berkeley
(1685–1753)), in which reality is constructed by the perceptions of the
individual mind; transcendental idealism (for example, in the philosophy
of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)), in which what we can know of reality is
limited to that which our minds are equipped to categorize; and absolute
idealism (for example, in the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Hegel
(1770–1831)), in which reality is the construction of a universal mind or
interpersonal consciousness, rather than the individual consciousness
of the subjective idealist.

is broken up into thoughts and concepts has much in common with
Bergson’s portrayal of the work of the intellect: for both, our everyday
world of common sense thought is a construction that conceals reality.
But Bradley’s work is fundamentally different from Bergson’s in that
it does not understand the self as the foundation of reality. Where
Bergson holds the view that reality resides in the real duration of our
individual consciousness (in this aspect of his philosophy he is a subjective
idealist), Bradley argues that there is a reality that transcends the
individual (making him an absolute idealist). He locates this transcendent
reality in a third stage of experience, which he calls ‘the Absolute’.
In the experience of the Absolute, ‘immediate experience’ and the
conceptual ordering of immediate experience are synthesized into a
harmonious, unified whole. It was this last stage of Bradley’s argument
that drew most criticism from his contemporaries: Bradley himself
admitted that the Absolute is unknowable, but argued that it is
intellectually necessary that it exists.

While Eliot’s dissertation accepted certain aspects of Bradley’s
philosophy, it was also critical of some of its most important concepts.
Eliot accepts Bradley’s relativist perspective on reality: it is not possible
to find a fundamental separation between the real and the ideal (and
the ideal, Eliot notes, includes the unreal) (1964a: 36). When we say
that these concepts are separate, we do so because it is practically
useful to do so, rather than because it is so. Eliot gives the example

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44 KEY IDEAS

of ‘the round square’, which is imaginary, but which is also a real idea:
‘It is not unreal, for there is no reality to which it should correspond
and does not’ (1964a: 55). Any separation we claim between reality
and unreality is relative, that is, it depends on our point of view.

Eliot is much more critical of Bradley’s categories of immediate
experience and the Absolute, and for the same reasons that he had
criticized Bergson’s philosophy. According to Eliot, the distinction
between the two strata of experience that both philosophers posit, the
unordered strata of immediate experience (Bradley) or real duration
(Bergson) and the ordered world of appearance (Bradley) and the
intellect (Bergson), is false: ‘the line between the experienced, or the
given, and the constructed can nowhere be clearly drawn’ (1964a:
18). Eliot argues that feeling never occurs without thought, indeed he
writes that ‘there is no greater mistake than to think that feeling and
thought are exclusive – that those beings which think most and best
are not also those capable of the most feeling’ (1964a: 18). He therefore
refuses the starting point of both Bergson’s and Bradley’s philosophies,
that rational thought can be peeled away from the feelings and sensations
on which it works. According to Eliot, we cannot know that there is
a pre-rational realm.

Furthermore, he argues that since we cannot know the pre-rational
realm Bergson and Bradley describe, it should not be taken as a
foundation for a theory of knowledge. Immediate experience is only
a hypothesis, argues Eliot, and therefore inadequate grounding for the
edifice Bradley builds upon it. The same is true for the concept of the
Absolute. Once again, this is a hypothesis, argues Eliot, not reality. In
an essay published six months after he completed his dissertation, Eliot
highlights this limitation of Bradley’s philosophy: ‘Bradley’s universe
[. . .] is only by an act of faith unified. Upon inspection it falls
away into the isolated finite experiences out of which it is put together
[. . .]. Pretending to be something which makes finite centres cohere,
it turns out to be merely the assertion that they do’ (1964a: 202).
Metaphysical systems such as those constructed by Bradley and Bergson,
he decides, cannot describe reality, because as soon as one defines an
experience, one substitutes the definition for the experience. All
theories, then, are a movement away from experience, and involve
interpretations and judgements that make the theory more and more
personal to the theorist. So the process of building connections between
experiences the theorist must enact to build a theory of reality is not,


as the theorist thinks, the process of reality, ‘the process is perhaps
only the process of the builder’s thought’ (1964a: 167).

This does not amount to a wholesale rejection of Bradley’s philosophy,
and in fact Eliot concludes his thesis by remarking that ‘I believe
that all the conclusions that I have reached are in substantial agreement
with Appearance and Reality’ (1964a: 153). But his argument has led
him to be highly sceptical about whether a philosophy of reality can
be verified through its correspondence to experienced reality, the only
reality we can know, in Eliot’s view. Hence his belief that a philosophy
can be founded on nothing but faith, and hence – despite his scepticism
of the Absolute’s reality – his agreement with Bradley that we are
impelled towards such a unifying concept (1964a: 169).

THE OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE

The philosophies of both Bergson and Bradley inform Eliot’s concept
of the ‘objective correlative’. Though it was not the first use of the
term or the idea, Eliot’s formulation, in ‘Hamlet and his Problems’
(later renamed ‘Hamlet’) (1919), was certainly the most influential.
Arguing that Hamlet is not Shakespeare’s masterpiece, but in fact an
‘artistic failure’, Eliot locates that failure in Shakespeare’s inability to
express ‘the essential emotion of the play’, which he takes to be Hamlet’s
feelings about the guilt of his mother:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective

correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events

which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the

external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the

emotion is immediately evoked.

(1976: 100)

Hamlet is disgusted by his mother, writes Eliot, but his mother is not
‘an adequate equivalent’ for his disgust. In contrast, in the ‘more
successful’ Macbeth, the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her
sleep is conveyed by an ‘accumulation of imagined sensory expressions’
(1976: 100). The sensory expressions are an adequate equivalent for
her state of mind. In his dissertation, Eliot had discussed Bradley’s
argument that emotion is never purely subjective, it is always inevitably
connected to that which stimulated it (its object), and ‘is ultimately

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46 KEY IDEAS

just as objective’. Anticipating the terms of the passage quoted above,
Eliot comments in his dissertation that ‘Hence when the object, or
complex of objects, is recalled, the pleasure is recalled in the same
way’ (1964a: 80). Bergson had made a similar point in Time and Free
Will when describing the power of the poetic image: ‘In seeing these
images pass before our eyes we in our turn experience the feeling
which was, so to speak, their emotional equivalent’ (1910: 15). Thus,
in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, we might see the chain of memories
set off by the prostitute and the cat as an early example of the objective
correlative.

However, by the time Eliot wrote ‘Hamlet and his Problems’, he
had become more remote philosophically from Bradley and Bergson
through the influence of the English analytic philosopher, Bertrand
Russell (1872–1970). Eliot had taken Russell’s course on Symbolic
Logic at Harvard in 1914, but he became much more influenced by
Russell’s philosophy after he had moved to England and developed a
close friendship with the philosopher (Eliot and his wife Vivien lived
with Russell during 1915). Russell’s analytic philosophy, with its
scientific methodologies and emphasis on empirical fact, contrasted
strongly with Bradley’s, and Eliot’s early literary criticism, written in
the years following the completion of his dissertation, shows a marked
turn from Bradley’s theory of knowledge through interpretation towards
Russell’s theory of knowledge based on analysis of facts. In his
dissertation, Eliot had privileged the subjective – ‘all significant truths
are private truths’, he wrote in his conclusion – yet his literary criticism
is notable for its insistence on objectivity (1964a: 165).

SUMMARY

In this chapter we have considered the philosophical influences on Eliot’s,
Hulme’s and Pound’s concepts of the objective correlative and the Image.
All three poets are concerned with the problem of conveying internal or
emotional life in poetry, and all three solve the problem by focussing their
poetry around the precise description of external objects, designed to
trigger an emotional effect in the reader. The poet is charged with the
role of intensifying language, of combating its everyday, utilitarian usage.


3

ANTI-DEMOCRACY

THE POLITICS OF
EARLY MODERNISM

In the previous two chapters, we have looked at the literary and
philosophical backgrounds to Eliot’s, Hulme’s and Pound’s poetry. This
chapter is the first of two that focus explicitly on their political
backgrounds (the other is Chapter 6). Until quite recently there were
relatively few critical discussions of early modernist literature’s politics:
the aestheticist ancestry of early modernist verse and its lack of direct
reference to contemporary events meant that it was often read as
apolitical or antipolitical. Recently, however, critics have paid more
attention to modernists’ pre-war political beliefs and discovered that
certain stylistic characteristics of their poetry were motivated by political,
as well as literary and philosophical, considerations. These considerations
can be broadly described as anti-democratic, though Pound’s version
of anti-democracy is quite different from that of Hulme and Eliot.

MODERNIST CLASSICISM

‘I want to maintain that after a hundred years of romanticism, we are
in for a classical revival’, declared Hulme (1994: 59). In the last
chapter we saw that Pound, H.D. and Aldington looked to the Greek
and Roman classics as one of several models for imagism. In this sense,
an affinity with classicism was built into the imagist strand of modernist
poetry from its beginning. But Eliot and Hulme use ‘classicism’ with


48 KEY IDEAS

a somewhat different force. When they use the term, they are not
referring to the direct influence of Greek and Roman authors; rather,
they are alluding to a set of politicized characteristics, summarized by
Eliot as ‘form and restraint in art, discipline and authority in religion,
centralization in government’ (Schuchard 1999: 27).

While the characteristics Eliot lists were loosely associated with
ancient Greece and Rome, this particular definition of classicism has a
specifically late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century resonance.
The clearest account of modernist classicism is Hulme’s lecture-essay
‘Romanticism and Classicism’ (written c. 1911–1912). For Hulme,
classicism and romanticism are essentially opposed beliefs about human
nature: the romantic, he says, believes in the infinite potential of the
individual and thinks that laws and rules inhibit and distort the
individual’s innate goodness. The classicist, on the other hand, believes
that man is a limited being who requires organization and restraint in
order to achieve anything of any value (1994: 61). Hulme declares
himself in favour of the Church, not simply because it provides rules
to live by, but because its doctrine of original sin corresponds to the
classicist’s view that man is naturally sinful, not naturally good. In fact,
Hulme sees romanticism as the misdirection of religious impulses into
the human sphere: instead of believing in God, the romanticist turns
man into a god. In typically pithy style, he calls romanticism ‘spilt
religion’ (1994: 62).

Romanticism. Movement across the arts, usually defined as stretching
from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, though
aestheticism is often understood as a late version of romanticism.
Romanticism emphasizes the value of the individual over the collective
and therefore privileges individual subjectivity, imagination, emotion and
spontaneity over objectivity, reason, the intellect and order. The movement
sees the emergence of the cult of the artist and artistic originality, and
the aim of art becomes identified with the expression of the artist’s emotion,
rather than conformation to agreed standards of beauty. In English
literature, the romantic movement includes Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797),
William Wordsworth (1770–1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Lord
Byron (1788–1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) and John Keats

(1795–1821).


But what does this mean for poetry? Hulme has much to say about
the merits of classical over romantic verse and he also gives a confident
list of those writers he assigns to each camp: the classicists are Horace,
the Elizabethans and the Augustans (he mentions Alexander Pope in
particular), the romantics are Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo,
‘parts of Keats’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe
Shelley and Swinburne. Hulme argues that the style and vocabulary of
poetry is determined by romantic or classical allegiance: the romantic
writes of the infinite because he thinks of man as unlimited, ‘you might
say if you wished that the whole of the romantic attitude seems to
crystallize in verse round metaphors of flight’ (1994: 62). This Hulme
connects to what he sees as romanticism’s high rhetorical pitch, and
he contrasts it with two lines from Shakespeare’s late play Cymbeline:
‘Golden lads and girls all must / Like chimney sweepers come to
dust’. Shakespeare, according to Hulme, is a classicist and the evidence
is his use of ‘lads’; a romantic, Hulme remarks, would have written
‘golden youth’ to elevate the verse (1994: 63). Hulme defines classicist
verse, therefore, as more reserved than the romantic, because the
classicist never forgets the limits of man. Hence Shakespeare’s ‘golden
lads’ may be golden, but they return to the earth, limited by their
mortality.

Although the essay is mainly about poetry, Hulme in fact begins
with a statement of politics. Revealing an unappealing taste for violence,
he tells his audience about a brawl at a Paris theatre the previous year,
when some audience members objected to a lecturer’s unfavourable
remarks about the seventeenth-century French dramatist, Jean Racine.
Hulme, it turns out, approves of the brawlers: ‘these people interrupted
because the classical ideal is a living thing to them and Racine is the
great classic. That is what I call a real vital interest in literature’ (1994:
60). The brawl he describes had been orchestrated by the Camelots
du Roi, a group known for its violent acts on behalf of the Action
Française, a nationalist and royalist movement on the extreme right of
the French political spectrum, and the impetus for Hulme’s and Eliot’s
classicism. Hulme prefaces ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ by confirming
that he uses the terms in a precise sense, the sense used by ‘the group
of polemical writers who make most use of them at the present day,
and have almost succeeded in making them political catchwords. I
mean Maurras, Lasserre and all the group connected with L’Action
Française’ (1994: 60).

ANTI-DEMOCRACY 49


50 KEY IDEAS

THE ACTION FRANÇAISE

The Action Française was formed in 1898 in the wake of the Dreyfus
Affair, promoting an anti-democratic, anti-Semitic and nationalist
agenda. The writer and critic Charles Maurras (1868–1952) led the
movement with a call for a unified French nation, to be brought about
by a return to the monarchy and a rejection of the democratic values
of the French Revolution. For Maurras, the Revolution was a catastrophic
break in the core tradition of Western civilization that had begun in
Greece, continued in ancient Rome and spread to Latin Europe through
the influence of the Roman Catholic Church. This tradition he called
‘classical’, and he opposed it to the spirit of the Revolution, which he
termed ‘romantic’. The Swiss–French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712–1778) was for Maurras the embodiment of romanticism, and,
like many conservatives, he traced the intellectual source of the
Revolution to Rousseau’s writings on man’s natural virtue and equality.
More than any other figure, Maurras was responsible for turning the
terms ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ into starkly opposed political positions,
where classical stood for order, reason, hierarchy, community and
tradition, and romantic for chaos, emotion, equality, individualism and
revolution (Asher 1995: 23). The Vichy regime that collaborated with
the Nazis during the German occupation of France (1940–1944) declared
itself indebted to Maurras’s ideas, and Maurras and his fellow members
of the Action Française were enthusiastic supporters of the regime
(Weber 1962: 442–56).

The Dreyfus Affair. In 1894 a military court convicted the Jewish Captain
Alfred Dreyfus of spying and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The
case polarized public opinion: Dreyfus professed his innocence, and those
who supported him (the ‘Dreyfusards’) argued that he was the victim of
anti-Semitism and anti-liberal forces in the military. The novelist Émile
Zola was arrested for publishing an open letter under the heading
‘J’Accuse’, which claimed (correctly) that the military authorities had
suppressed evidence that could exonerate Dreyfus. The anti-Dreyfusards
used the case to shore up nationalist sentiment against those it saw as
France’s enemies within: Jews, socialists and liberals. Dreyfus was retried
in 1899, and again found guilty but pardoned; in 1904 he was retried by a

civilian court of appeal and finally cleared.


References to the Action Française began to appear in Hulme’s
writings during the spring of 1911 in the three instalments of ‘A
Note on the Art of Political Conversion’. Hulme holds up the French
movement’s success in attracting young French intellectuals to the
conservative cause as an example to which the British Tory party
should aspire: in France ‘the really latest and advanced thing is to be
a Neo-Royalist’, he writes (1994: 210). But while the Action Française’s
doctrine of classicism helped Hulme to organize ideas that had long
been part of his literary criticism, such as his aversion to aestheticism,
it was inconsistent with his interest in Bergson. The Action Française
condemned Bergson’s philosophy as romantic and, on his return from
the International Philosophical Congress in Bologna in April 1911,
Hulme visited one of the movement’s leading members, Pierre Lasserre
(1867–1930), to discuss the issue. In Hulme’s account (in ‘Balfour,
Bergson, and Politics’), Lasserre explains to Hulme that Bergson’s
theory of time is used by the French left wing to argue for progressive
politics and democratic rule. To the Action Française’s argument that
France should return to the monarchical rule of the pre-revolutionary
period, the democrats respond that it is useless to apply the political
lessons of the past to the present, citing Bergson’s conception of the
present moment as unique and unrepeatable (1994: 165). Hulme’s
initial response to Lasserre’s denunciation of Bergson was to find a
compromise: he suggested that Bergson’s analysis of time applied to
the individual consciousness, but not to collective human experience.
In writings produced during the autumn and winter of 1911–1912,
including ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, Hulme advocated both the
classicism of the Action Française and Bergsonism. But over the next
few years, Bergson was to lose his pre-eminent place in Hulme’s thought,
while the classicism of the Action Française endured, renamed in his
later work ‘the religious attitude’ (1994: 426).

Eliot first encountered Maurras, Lasserre and the Action Française
in one of his graduate courses at Harvard, ‘Literary Criticism in France’,
taught by Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), Professor of French and
Comparative Literature. Although Babbitt did not support every aspect
of the Action Française’s programme, he agreed with key elements:
its stance against romanticism, Rousseau and democracy, and its
commitment to tradition, order and cultural elitism. During his stay
in Paris the following year, Eliot read Maurras’s L’Avenir de l’intelligence
(The Future of Intelligence) (1905). When he delivered a lecture series

ANTI-DEMOCRACY 51


52 KEY IDEAS

Humanism. General term for philosophies or beliefs that prioritize the

human. Renaissance humanism developed from the study of Greek and

Roman classics and, though consistent with religious belief, signified a

shift of focus from God and the supernatural to the human. Since the mid-

nineteenth century, humanism has frequently been used to denote

anti-religious philosophy.

on ‘Modern French Literature’ in 1916, he followed the theories of
Maurras, Lasserre and Babbitt closely, characterizing the twentieth
century as a return to the ideals of classicism. Their books were included
in the course bibliography (Schuchard 1999: 27, 30–31).

Eliot was also drawing on Hulme’s writings in these lectures. Recently
uncovered evidence has proved that, despite Eliot’s statement to the
contrary, Eliot and Hulme met during the period between Eliot’s arrival
in London in August 1914 and Hulme’s death on 28 September 1917,
for much of which Hulme was fighting in France. Although he does
not appear to have known Hulme well, Eliot admired his writings, and
the information for the second lecture in the ‘Modern French Literature’
series not only gives the Action Française and Babbitt definition of
classicism, but adds Hulme’s particular contribution, that classicism
may be defined as a belief in original sin (Schuchard 2003: 66; Asher
1995: 37–39). In 1929, in the second of two essays on Babbitt and
humanism (‘The Humanism of Irving Babbitt (1928)’, ‘Second Thoughts
about Humanism (1929)’), Eliot compared Hulme’s religious classicism
favourably to Babbitt’s humanist classicism, in which he detected a
taint of romanticism. Eliot’s classicism is thus indebted primarily to
these three sources, and it became the basis for both his literary
philosophy and his right-wing conservative politics.

ELIOT’S CLASSICIST CRITICISM

Eliot’s classicism is more pronounced in his literary criticism than it
is in his poetry. In fact, in ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923), Eliot
states that criticism is necessarily classicist. Criticism presupposes the
existence of agreed principles and standards, he argues, whereas
the romantic faith in individual judgement and expression is opposed
to the very idea of such principles (1980: 31). The Criterion, the influential


journal Eliot edited from 1922 to 1939, was intended to be a critical
organ that expressed ‘the modern tendency’ of classicism. At the end
of a 1926 editorial, ‘The Idea of a Literary Review’, Eliot provided a
short reading list of books that illustrated this tendency: it included
works by Maurras and Babbitt alongside Hulme’s posthumous Speculations
(1924), a collection of his essays edited by Criterion contributor Herbert
Read (1926: 5).

But Eliot’s literary criticism is not only classicist in attitude; the arguments
themselves advance classicist values. One of the most important
of these is his argument that ‘in the seventeenth century a dissociation
of sensibility set in’ (1980: 288). This famous phrase makes its first
appearance in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), a review of an anthology
of seventeenth-century verse, which was returning to critical favour
at this time. Eliot had begun to develop the idea in 1917 (in ‘Reflections
on Contemporary Poetry’), but the argument was worked out more
fully in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ and two other articles from 1921,
‘Andrew Marvell’ and ‘John Dryden’ (published together as Homage
to John Dryden in 1924), and subsequently in the Clark Lectures, delivered
at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1926 and in the Turnbull Lectures,
delivered at Johns Hopkins in 1933.

Eliot’s claim in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ is that the dramatists of
the sixteenth century (such as George Chapman, Thomas Middleton,
John Webster and Cyril Tourneur) and their successors, the poets of
the seventeenth century (such as John Donne, George Herbert and
Henry King) had a sensibility that could ‘devour any kind of experience’
and transform it into art. But some time in the seventeenth century,
Eliot argues, a dissociation of feeling and thought takes place ‘from
which we have never recovered’. Thus, by the nineteenth century,
poets like Tennyson and Browning ‘do not feel their thought as
immediately as the odour of a rose’, whereas ‘a thought to Donne was
an experience; it modified his sensibility’ (1980: 287–88). Eliot does,
however, think that a unification of sensibility was achieved in the poetry
of certain nineteenth-century French poets, the symbolists Tristan
Corbiere (1845–1875), Laforgue and Baudelaire: he compares the latter
to Racine, whom, as we know from Hulme’s ‘Romanticism and
Classicism’, is for the Action Française the embodiment of literary
classicism (1980: 290).

‘The Metaphysical Poets’ at first appears to be making a solely literary
argument. But on closer inspection, the essay hints at a non-literary

ANTI-DEMOCRACY 53


54 KEY IDEAS

reason for the change in style it describes. First, Eliot locates the
dissociation of sensibility at the historical moment of the English
Civil War and the fall of the monarchy: he specifically notes that he
is interested in ‘the poets of the seventeenth century (up to the
Revolution)’ (1980: 285). Second, Eliot argues that the anti-royalist
Milton ‘aggravated’ the dissociation. Finally, Eliot chooses quotations
from Chapman and Baudelaire that portray humankind as a small part
of a greater universal scheme, that is, they embody a classicist world
view, while a quotation from Browning locates human value in the
individual self. Thus, Maurras’s account of classicism is transferred
from French to English literary history, with the Civil War replacing
the French Revolution as the hinge-point between classicism and
romanticism, and Milton replacing the arch-romantic Rousseau (Asher
1995: 46–48; Menand 1987: 148–50).

INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM: POUND AND
THE EGOIST

Pound’s pre-war politics were less well defined than either Hulme’s
or Eliot’s. Nevertheless, in 1913 he began to contribute to a magazine
that had a very definite place on the political spectrum: the individualist
anarchist New Freewoman. Initially publishing under the title of The
Freewoman, The New Freewoman (as it became in 1913) was founded as
a feminist periodical that campaigned for the psychological, social,
economic and political freedom of women. Its editor, Dora Marsden
(1882–1960), was a former suffragist who had come to believe that
the focus on gaining the vote had blinded women to their lack of
freedom in other, more important, areas of their lives. She argued
that, rather than achieving the vote as a means to obtain other freedoms,
women should focus on gaining their psychological freedom first. Her
conception of psychological freedom was indebted to Bergson’s work,
but also to that of the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
and, especially, Max Stirner (1806–1956), both of whom had had major
works recently translated into English. Despite the fact that, as Lasserre
told Hulme, French democrats used Bergson’s writings to justify their
politics, Bergson was claimed by others as a champion of anti-democracy,
of individualism (Schwartz 1992: 278–79): it was this interpretation
of his work that enabled Marsden to group him with Nietzsche and
Stirner. Her interpretation of their writings was articulated in the journal


Anarchism. Anarchists believe that government by the state is an
imposition on human freedom and advocate the abolition of all structures
of authority. Different strains of anarchism propose distinct forms of social
organization in their place: collectivism, mutualism and syndicalism, for
example, all advocate different types of economic reform designed to ensure
that workers are the main beneficiaries of their own labour. Individualist
anarchism, by contrast, is compatible with private property ownership
and emphasizes the removal of all constraints to the pursuit of individual
self-interest. Major theorists of anarchism include the collectivist anarchist
Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), the mutualist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
(1809–1865), the syndicalist Georges Sorel (1847–1822), and the individualist

Max Stirner.

as an individualist anarchism (or ‘egoism’ as it was called at the time),
in which the individual is opposed to the collective, and individual
experience, rather than abstract reason, is the ground for all knowledge
and action.

As Marsden became more interested in individualist anarchism, the
journal’s focus moved away from feminism towards broader philosophical
and intellectual concerns, as reflected in its change of name
to the non-gendered Egoist in 1914. By the time Pound was invited to
contribute in 1913, the journal had begun to develop an individualist
theory of art based on ‘experienced emotion’ rather than abstract ideas
(Marsden 1913: 82), a theory that brought it very close to the Bergsonian
philosophy Hulme had fed into imagism. Consequently, when Pound’s
imagist poetry appeared in The New Freewoman, it appeared remarkably
consistent with the journal’s philosophical and political content,
especially as it was introduced by a preface that described the imagists
as ‘a little band who desire the poet to be as disciplined and efficient
at his job as the stevedore’, reclaiming poetry from ‘learned persons,
given to soft living among veiled things and unaccustomed to being
sacked for talking too much’ (West 1913: 86). Marsden encouraged
Pound to develop the connection between his poetry and the journal’s
politics: when she asked him to explain his philosophy, he replied, ‘I
suppose I’m individualist, I suppose I believe in the arts as the most
effective propaganda for a sort of individual liberty that can be developed
without public inconvenience’, a point he explored in his essay ‘The

ANTI-DEMOCRACY 55


56 KEY IDEAS

Serious Artist’, run on the journal’s front page (Clarke 1996: 107).
There, Pound argued that the value of the arts lies in their ability to
provide psychological data, data that registers the individuality of human
experience: ‘men differ among themselves as leaves upon trees differ.
[. . .] they do not resemble each other as do buttons cut by machine’.
Even though he does so somewhat tentatively, he clearly connects this
argument to the journal’s political stance. Since the arts teach us that
‘all men do not desire the same things’, Pound argues that ‘it would
therefore be inequitable to give to all men two acres and a cow [. . .]
No perfect state will be founded on the theory, or on the working
hypothesis that all men are alike’ (1960: 42, 47).

These statements imply a disagreement with a fundamental tenet of
democracy, namely equality; and four months later the journal printed
a much more intemperate article by Pound in which he declared that
the artist ‘has been at peace with his oppressors for long enough. He
has dabbled in democracy and he is now done with that folly’. He
proposed instead an ‘aristocracy of the arts’, arguing that the artist
‘knows he is born to rule but he has no intention of trying to rule by
general franchise. He at least is born to the purple. He is not elected
by a system of plural voting’ (1914a: 68). But what could Pound mean
in practice by an ‘aristocracy of the arts’? Unlike Hulme, Pound did
not translate his anti-democracy into a party allegiance: later the
same year he commented that ‘as a syndicalist, somewhat atrabilious,
I disbelieve vigorously in any recognition of political institutions’ (1914b:
254). This aversion to political institutions, and to the state more
generally, is at the root of his attraction to anarchism and, later, to
Italian fascism. Throughout his life Pound proclaimed his commitment
to ‘civilization’, which he believed would best be preserved in a
hierarchical society with power given to artists.

A POETRY OF RESTRAINT

Around 1917 Eliot and Pound decided that ‘the dilutation of vers libre,
Amygism, Lee Mastersism, general floppiness had gone too far and
that some counter-current must be set going’ (Pound 1932: 590).
Their reaction against free verse was motivated by a number of factors,
the most immediate of which was that Pound disapproved of the
direction the imagist anthologies had taken under the editorship
of Amy Lowell. But this biographical factor is connected to a more


important issue: imagism’s very popularity suggested to Eliot and Pound
that free verse had for the time being played out its useful role in
changing Anglo-American poetry: the opportunities it afforded were
great, but its drawbacks were starting to become apparent. Chief among
these, according to Eliot and Pound, was its potential lack of rigour.
In the short pamphlet Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry (1917), Eliot
reviewed Pound’s career to date, emphasizing the metrical virtuosity
of even his free verse poems:

the freedom of Pound’s verse is rather a state of tension due to constant

opposition between free and strict. There are not, as a matter of fact, two kinds

of verse, the strict and the free; there is only a mastery which comes of being

so well trained that form is an instinct and can be adapted to the particular

purpose in hand.

(1978: 172)

The reaction against free verse is also the logical result of the political
and ethical associations Eliot and Pound were now attaching to their
poetry. In Eliot’s case, in particular, one can see how inconsistent a
poetry of ‘general floppiness’ would be with the classicist position he
was advancing in his criticism. Eliot, Babbitt, Hulme and Maurras
all drew direct connections between poetic form and political belief,
and the freedom of free verse was all too easily connected with the
democratic and revolutionary impulses of romanticism. Pound’s less
defined politics did not entail such a connection, and indeed his
individualist anarchism was historically associated with free verse via
the symbolists. However, like Eliot, Pound had always insisted that
free verse could be technically proficient. In ‘The Serious Artist’ his
argument that art’s value is in its supply of psychological data led him
to define good art as ‘art that bears true witness, I mean the art that
is most precise’, because ‘if an artist falsifies his report as to the nature
of man [. . .], then that artist lies’, and lies as seriously, Pound argued,
as the doctor who gives misleading information to advance his or her
career. ‘Good writing is writing that is perfectly controlled, the writer
says just what he means’ (1960: 43–44, 50). Even though Eliot and
Pound represent quite different strains of anti-democracy, therefore,
they both relate their beliefs in the political sphere to stylistic precision
and restraint in their poetry.

ANTI-DEMOCRACY 57


58 KEY IDEAS

To counter the fashion for free verse, Eliot and Pound prescribed
themselves a reading course ‘remedy’ of Émaux et Camées (Enamels and
Cameos) (1852), a collection of poetry by the French pre-symbolist
Théophile Gautier (1811–1872), and the Bay Psalm Book (1640) used
by the early Puritan settlers in New England. The lesson of both was
‘rhyme and regular strophes’, and the results were Eliot’s quatrain
poems in Ara vos Prec (1920; published in the United States as Poems),
and Pound’s poem sequence, ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ (1920) (Pound
1932: 590).

ELIOT’S ARA VOS PREC

The poem in Ara vos Prec which most directly relates to Eliot’s writings
on classicism is ‘Whispers of Immortality’ (1918): it anticipates the
argument of ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ published a year later. In the
first half of the poem Eliot describes the sensibility of John Webster
and John Donne, whom he thought achieved a union of thought and
feeling in their writings. Of Webster, best known for his macabre
tragedies, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, Eliot writes that he
‘knew that thought clings round dead limbs / Tightening its lusts and
luxuries’, and Donne ‘was such another / Who found no substitute
for sense, / To seize and clutch and penetrate’. The second half
of the poem provides a contrast with the first, suggesting that in
modern life sensuality (represented by the curvaceous Russian Grishkin,
unconstrained by corset) is proximate to, but has no contact with, the
shaping power of the intellect (‘Abstract Entities / Circumambulate
her charm’) (1969a: 52–53). Eliot adds a further classicist twist in the
title, which alludes to Wordsworth’s famous ‘Ode: Intimations of
Immortality’. Wordsworth’s poem, a classic of romantic literature,
addresses a six-year-old child as ‘Mighty prophet! Seer blest! / On
whom those truths do rest, / Which we are toiling all our lives to
find’ (1977: 527), because he does not have knowledge, specifically
knowledge of death. Wordsworth, the romantic, celebrates and envies
the child’s innocence; Eliot, the classicist, admires Webster’s and
Donne’s knowledge.

Just as important as the content, however, is the form; indeed,
Eliot later said of these poems that ‘the form gave the impetus to the
content’ (Hall 1959: 55). The use of quatrains (stanzas of four lines
each) and the (mostly) eight-syllable lines follow the structure of


Gautier’s verse in Émaux et Camées. But what does this strict style do
to the verse? If we compare the first few lines of ‘Prufrock’ with this
poem, we immediately become aware of the impact of the regular
metre and rhyme scheme. Despite the predominantly conversational
vocabulary, the regular metre forces the voice out of its normal speech
patterns so that it emphasizes certain syllables more heavily than it
would in conversation: ‘Wébster was múch posséssed by déath / And
sáw the skúll benéath the skín’ (1969a: 52). The effect on the poem’s
tone is striking: the intimacy of ‘Prufrock’ is replaced by formality.
‘Whispers of Immortality’ expresses not the exploratory private thoughts
of a particular mind, but the succinct public declarations of an aloof,
invisible speaker.

This volume, like its predecessor, is an exercise in satire, but the
change from free verse to regular quatrains sharpens the attack by
facilitating hard contrasts and making the reader aware of an authorial
presence outside the poem. So in ‘Whispers of Immortality’, the
thematic contrast between Webster and Donne, on the one hand, and
Grishkin on the other, is emphasized by the formal break between the
two halves of the poem; in ‘The Hippopotamus’, stanzas two to six
are split in half by rhyme and punctuation, with the first and second
lines referring to the hippopotamus and the third and fourth to the
‘True Church’ with which it is contrasted; and in ‘A Cooking Egg’
the first and last two stanzas represent the everyday companionship of
Pipit, contrasted in the central four stanzas with the ideal companionship
of a series of figures from history (1969a: 44–45, 49–50, 52–53).
Again and again, the target of the satire is revealed as the division
between the world of the intellect and the world of the senses, the
latter represented in three poems by ‘apeneck Sweeney’, the selfish,
lascivious natural man who is Eliot’s satire on the romantic faith in
man’s natural virtue.

POUND’S ‘HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLEY’

Once admired for their sense of order and intellectual toughness, Eliot’s
quatrain poems are less appealing to critical taste today: ‘the aridity
and frigidity that he praised he found’, remarks one critic succinctly
(Levenson 1984: 161). Conversely, the product of Pound’s study of
the quatrain form is one of his major works. ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’
tells the story of two failed poets, ‘E.P.’, who apart from being dead

ANTI-DEMOCRACY 59


60 KEY IDEAS

bears a striking similarity to Pound himself, and the Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley of the title. Pound portrays both poets as out of touch with
modern life, and the major question posed by the poem is: how should
one write in the twentieth century? This question is not resolved. In
the first poem of the sequence, we encounter E.P. trying ‘to resuscitate
the dead art / Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime” / In the old sense’,
but his audience is uninterested and he fails to respond to ‘the march
of events’. He dies a failed poet, ‘No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem’
(1990: 187). The rest of the first section of the poem elaborates on
the reasons for E.P.’s irrelevance by reviewing recent literary history:
Pound tracks the rise of mass culture and the fate of the artists who
will not or cannot respond to the new conditions and new audiences
it has created. In the second section, Mauberley makes his entrance.
He is a Prufrockian aesthete as out of place as E.P. His technical
precision, ‘his sense of graduations’, is ‘Quite out of place amid /
Resistance to current exacerbations’ (1990: 201).

The poem is filled with references to Gautier’s Émaux et Camées.
Like Eliot, Pound finds Gautier’s quatrain form a useful method of
creating sharp contrasts, such as those of the third poem where the
beauty of the past is compared to the degradation of the present. But
his most important allusion is to Gautier’s comparison of the poet with
the sculptor, which is used as a major conceit in ‘Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley’. In his poem ‘L’Art’ (‘Art’), Gautier tells the poet, sculptor
and painter alike to ‘Sculpte, lime, cisele; / Que ton reve flottant /
Se scelle / Dans le bloc resistant!’ (‘Carve, file, chisel, / So that your
floating dream / Is sealed / In the resistant block!’) (Gautier 1981:
150). Language, here, is figured as a hard substance, ‘resistant’ to the
touch. Shaping it will require labour and technical skill, but the reward
is that one’s most fleeting idea, one’s ‘floating dream’, will be made
permanent. The second poem of ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ uses this
metaphor to illustrate how far E.P. is out of step with the modern
age:

The ‘age demanded’ chiefly a mould in plaster,

Made with no loss of time,

A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster

Or the ‘sculpture’ of rhyme.

(1990: 188)


The modern age prefers the mass-produced art of the cinema, compared
with a plaster mould, to the labour-intensive poetry, compared with
alabaster sculpture. The carving metaphor is carried over to the second
section of the poem, too: Mauberley’s ‘tool [was] / The engraver’s’,
and both ‘L’Envoi’ and ‘Medallion’, usually understood as examples
of E.P.’s and Mauberley’s poetry respectively, identify the beauty they
aspire to with hardness and permanence: ‘roses [. . .] in magic amber
laid’, and ‘a basket-work of braids which seem as if they were / Spun
in King Minos’ hall / From metal, or intractable amber’ (1990: 197,
204).

In the use of Gautier’s metaphor we can discern aspects of Pound’s
individualism: not only is the plaster mould quick to produce and sell,
it is a copy of something else, rather than the original product of an
individual artist. It can therefore present no new data about human
nature, to use the language of ‘The Serious Artist’. Pound associates
hardness with precision: ‘Gautier is intent on being “hard”; is intent
on conveying a certain verity of feeling’, he writes in ‘The Hard and
Soft in French Poetry’ (1918) (1960: 285). The modern age’s lack of
interest in ‘hard’ poetry, then, is suggestive of a general degeneration

– another product of which is, the third poem suggests, the rise of
democracy (1990: 189).
SUMMARY

Eliot, Hulme and Pound all held anti-democratic political views during
their early careers. Eliot and Hulme identified themselves with ‘classicism’,
in the sense determined by Charles Maurras and the Action Française.
Pound, more equivocally, associated himself with the individualist
anarchism advanced by Dora Marsden in The New Freewoman/The Egoist.
The poetics of all three are shaped by these views: Eliot’s theory of the
‘dissociation of sensibility’ that took place at the time of the English Civil
War is partially indebted to Maurras’s arguments on the connection
between romanticism and the French Revolution. Pound connects
individualism to poetic precision and integrity. A poetic equivalent of
their politics can be found in the regular metre and cult of hardness of
the quatrain poems of Eliot’s Ara vos Prec and Pound’s ‘Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley’.

ANTI-DEMOCRACY 61


4

HISTORY AND
TRADITION

One of the defining features of literary modernism is the tension it
preserves between tradition and originality. Although modernism is
defined by its experimentation, its insistent difference from that which
has gone before, modernists are also devoted genealogists, energetically
tracing their ancestry back through literary traditions. If we return for
a moment to Pound’s slogan, ‘make it new’, we can see that it contains
an explanation of this apparent contradiction. To make something new
suggests that the something is not wholly new: it acknowledges a former
existence. Pound’s slogan registers a desire to bring things from the
past into the present, to make the historical contemporary. This chapter
outlines how Eliot, Hulme and Pound theorized literary tradition and
history, then explores specific sources for their theories. The final
section discusses one particular way that the past was made new by
modernist poets: through translation. This chapter opens up many of
the questions that will be worked through in more detail in relation
to The Waste Land and The Cantos in the next chapter, so it may help
to read the chapters as a pair.

THE USE OF ALLUSION

‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ presents a challenge to the reader that is
not presented by Pound’s imagist poems. In addition to questions of


64 KEY IDEAS

Allusion. Deliberate reference to, or quotation from, sources outside the

text. The sources may be literary or non-literary, and they may or may not

be textual. The source is not usually identified explicitly, but is intended

to enrich the text by inviting the reader to make a comparison between

the subject of the text and the source.

general interpretation, every page presents local difficulties: English
words outside our vocabulary, words in other languages, quotations
for which no source is given, unknown names. If this is less true of
Eliot’s quatrain poems, the title of the volume itself (Ara vos Prec)
presents the same kind of difficulty, and The Waste Land, published two
years later, presents at least as intimidating a surface as ‘Mauberley’.
Pound’s Cantos multiply these difficulties further.

Why is Eliot’s and Pound’s mature poetry so difficult in this way?
It is worth emphasizing that it is difficult for everyone: there is no ideal
reader who encounters these poems for the first time with total
comprehension, no one whose education has been so complete that
they can recognize every source. Perhaps we ask the wrong question
when we ask why the poetry is difficult. It might be more productive
to first ask why we imagine we should be able to understand poetry
immediately. After all, there are many types of writing we do not
expect to understand at first glance: advanced mathematical treatises,
for example, or eighteenth-century philosophy. Why should poetry be
different? The good poet is a specialist, someone who has trained in an
art, and, like the mathematician and the philosopher, works within a
discipline developed by others over many years. Just as the mathematician
and the philosopher make advances in their field by building on their
predecessors’ research, so the poet’s choice of each phrase is informed
by their knowledge of how previous poets have dealt with such a topic,
used such a word, worked in such a form. Eliot’s and Pound’s allusions
have the effect of highlighting the fact that their work does not stand
alone, but rather exists within a literary network.

ELIOT: TRADITION AND THE ‘HISTORICAL
SENSE’

Not every poet would describe their work in this way, but Eliot and
Pound did: their work is characterized by a remarkably close and self



conscious engagement with writing by others. In ‘Tradition and the
Individual Talent’, Eliot explains why. He argues that the poet should
have a ‘historical sense’, writing not only ‘with his own generation in
his bones’, but ‘with a feeling that the whole of literature of Europe
from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own
country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous
order’. It is only with this knowledge that the poet will be capable of
writing something genuinely new and worthwhile: ‘we shall often find
that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may
be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality
most vigorously’ (1980: 14). In Eliot’s view the most individual poet
is likely to be the one who is most ‘traditional’, in the particular sense
explained here.

Eliot’s definition of literary tradition is part of what he called his
‘Impersonal theory of poetry’, his (remarkably successful) attempt to
shift critical attention away from the poet to the poem and its literary
context. The other component of this argument in ‘Tradition and the
Individual Talent’ is an account of the process of poetic creation.
Characteristically, Eliot uses a complex analogy, that of a chemical
reaction brought about by a catalyst. He explains that when oxygen
and sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of the catalyst metal,
platinum, they create sulphurous acid. The platinum is necessary to
generate the reaction that creates the acid, yet the platinum itself is
not affected by the reaction and no part of the platinum is present in
the acid. It remains, Eliot writes, ‘inert, neutral, unchanged’. The
platinum represents the poet’s mind: ‘the more perfect the artist, the
more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and
the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and
transmute the passions which are its material’ (1980: 18). A more
anti-romantic account of poetic creation cannot be imagined, and indeed
Eliot quotes and rejects Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as
‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. For Eliot, ‘Poetry is not a turning
loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression
of personality, but an escape from personality’ (1980: 18, 21).

POUND: ‘THE METHOD OF LUMINOUS DETAIL’

Pound was Eliot’s prime example of a contemporary poet with the
‘historical sense’: in his introduction to Pound’s 1928 Selected Poems he
remarked that ‘Pound is often most “original” in the right sense, when

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66 KEY IDEAS

he is most “archaeological” in the ordinary sense’ (Eliot 1948a: 11). If
we are to look for an equivalent of ‘Tradition and the Individual
Talent’ in Pound’s oeuvre, we might turn to his series of essays ‘I
Gather the Limbs of Osiris’ (1911–1912), which, like ‘Tradition and
the Individual Talent’ argues that knowledge of literary tradition is
vital to the poet. Pound’s emphasis is somewhat different from Eliot’s,
however; the early instalments focus less on the writing of poetry than
they do on the writing of history or literary history. In a sense, Pound
starts his argument a stage earlier than Eliot: if poets are to be well-
informed about literary tradition, good literary histories are needed
to educate them. At present, he complains, histories either overwhelm
one with ‘multitudinous detail’ or they are all ‘sentiment and generalisation’.
He proposes instead a ‘method of Luminous Detail’, by which
the scholar presents a ‘few dozen’ carefully chosen facts that will sum
up the period under discussion (1973: 21, 22, 24). Imagism had not
been launched when Pound published this series, but we might see
Pound’s ‘method of Luminous Detail’ as a proto-imagist approach to
literary history.

Most of ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’ consists of Pound’s application
of his methodology to literary history: in the study of literature and
art, he writes, the luminous details are ‘particular works or the works
of particular authors’. This at first seems compatible with Eliot’s
conception of a literary history as a ‘simultaneous order’ of literary
works. But as Pound continues, the difference between the two poets
as historians becomes clear. If the emphasis on literary tradition is a
means for Eliot to shift attention away from the individual poet, it is
for Pound just the opposite: a way of highlighting the significance of
certain careers. Prefiguring the individualism of ‘The Serious Artist’,
Pound argues that:

in each soul there is some one element which predominates, which is in some

peculiar and intense way the quality or virtu of the individual; in no two souls

is this the same [. . .] it is by reason of this virtu that we have one Catullus,

one Villon.

(1973: 24)

He then lists the four writers whose virtu has been most powerful,
Homer, Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare, and claims that they ‘represent
four distinct phases of consciousness’. He suggests, in other words, that


history (up to the Renaissance, at least), can be divided into four phases
that can be mapped on to the careers of four men (1973: 28–29).

HULME: FROM FLUX TO STASIS

As we might expect, Hulme’s conception of literary tradition and history
changed fundamentally when he exchanged his Bergsonism for classicism
in 1911–1912. In his Bergsonian phase his views bear some similarity
to Pound’s; as a classicist he moves closer to Eliot’s position. In the
Bergson-influenced ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ (1908), for example,
he shares Pound’s view that literary history is consciously made by the
actions of individuals: ‘changes do not come by a kind of natural progress
of which the artist himself is unconscious’, he writes, ‘the new forms
are deliberately introduced by people who detest the old ones’. But,
unlike Pound, Hulme puts forward the orthodox Bergsonian view that
everything is impermanent, in flux, and therefore he sees literary
tradition as irrelevant to the modern poet; ‘I am of course in favour
of the complete destruction of all verse more than twenty years old’
(1994: 50–51).

However, in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ (c. 1911–1912), Hulme
takes quite the opposite position on tradition: his classicism leads him
to argue that ‘man is an extraordinary fixed and limited animal whose
nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organization
that anything decent can be got out of him’. As a result Hulme now
plays down the importance of both originality (‘there is nothing
particularly desirable about freshness per se. Works of art aren’t
eggs’) and emotion: ‘there is a general tendency to think that verse
means little else than the expression of unsatisfied emotion’ (1994: 61,
66, 70). Although there is a correspondence with Eliot’s argument in
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ here, Hulme has much less to say
about literary tradition than either Eliot or Pound. ‘Romanticism and
Classicism’ was his last important essay on literature: from this point
his attention turned to the visual arts and politics.

SPATIAL FORMS

The issue of literary tradition is connected to the more general topic
of the treatment of history in modernist poetry. In the next chapter
we will look at the historical content of The Waste Land and The Cantos,

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68 KEY IDEAS

but here I want to address the formal method by which the historical
material will be organized. We might reasonably expect that Eliot’s,
Hulme’s and Pound’s emphasis on literary tradition would be compatible
with a conception of history as a linear progression, an evolution. In
his early writings Pound occasionally hints towards this idea (1973:
25), but broadly speaking what is most striking about the three poets’
representation of history is its non-linear character. Eliot’s ‘simultaneous
order’ and Pound’s ‘method of Luminous Details’ represent history as
arranged in space, rather than developing through time.

‘We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence’, wrote
Pound in 1938. ‘It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the
table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know
by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our time (1970b:
60). In this statement (note the allusion to Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’) Pound
sums up his, Eliot’s and Hulme’s reaction against the dominant way
history had been characterized in the nineteenth century: as progress.
Not only does Pound substitute linear history with a circular or cyclical
history here, he also emphasizes that we cannot objectively know it.
History is our present-day interpretation of the past. The literary critic
James Longenbach has argued that their emphasis on history as an
experience, rather than an entity in itself, marks Eliot and Pound out
as part of the early twentieth-century move towards ‘existential
historicism’ (1987: 13).

‘Provincia Deserta’ (1915) and ‘Near Perigord’ (1916) are early
examples of Pound’s existential historicism. In these poems Pound
juxtaposes incidents from Provençal history with comments about his
own experience of interpreting them: ‘Take the whole man, and ravel
out the story. / He loved this lady in castle Montagnac?’ (1990: 152).
Eliot takes a more indirect approach in ‘Gerontion’ (1919) by criticizing
his protagonist’s non-existential perception of history: Gerontion is

Existential historicism. Fredric Jameson coined the term in his essay

‘Marxism and Historicism’: ‘existential historicism does not involve the

construction of this or that linear or evolutionary or genetic history, but

rather designates something like a transhistorical event [. . .]. For existential

historicism [. . .] the experience of history is a contact between an individual

subject in the present and a cultural object in the past’ (1979: 50, 53).


Juxtaposition. The Oxford English Dictionary definition is ‘the action of

placing two or more things close together or side by side, or one thing

beside another; the condition of being so placed’.

unable to experience history as a ‘simultaneous order’; for him it is
disordered, threatening: ‘History has many cunning passages, contrived
corridors / And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, / Guides us
by vanities’ (1969a: 38). In all three poems, moments from diverse
periods of history are placed side by side, as if experienced simultaneously,
rather than one after the other. This spatial approach to
history had a direct impact on Eliot’s and Pound’s major works, The
Waste Land and The Cantos, which reject linear and chronological narratives
in favour of organizing their material by juxtaposition. I now want to
look quite briefly at three contemporaneous influences on Eliot’s,
Hulme’s and Pound’s method of organizing history: anthropological
studies of myth and ritual, early twentieth-century visual art, and the
theory of Chinese language put forward by the American philosopher
Ernest Fenollosa.

MYTH AND RITUAL

The discipline of anthropology attracted widespread interest among
early twentieth-century writers who believed that ‘as it is certain that
some study of primitive man furthers our understanding of civilized
man, so it is certain that primitive art and poetry help our understanding
of civilized art and poetry’ (Eliot 1919: 1036). Both Eliot and Pound
were interested in the studies of mythology associated with the Scottish
anthropologist James Frazer (1854–1941) and the group of English
classicists known as the Cambridge Ritualists, which argued that the
continuities between different myths and religions (including Christianity)
could be explained by tracing them to a common origin in a
particular magical or religious ritual. Although their approaches differed
(Eliot’s, at least initially, was the approach of the scholar, Pound’s that
of the practitioner or believer), their recognition of the opportunity
myth presented to contemporary literature was similar.

In the third year of his doctoral study Eliot took a course on ‘A
Comparative Study of Various Types of Scientific Method’ with the
philosopher Josiah Royce (1855–1916). One of the papers he wrote

HISTORY AND TRADITION 69


70 KEY IDEAS

for this class concerned ‘The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual’ (C. Eliot
1926: viii). Drawing on his reading of Bradley and demonstrating his
existential historicist perspective, Eliot criticized anthropological
attempts to establish a science of religious ritual. The study of religion,
Eliot argued, can yield no objective facts from which to draw meaning
or situate a point of origin, because religion is a set of practices that
exist within particular historical contexts, and their meaning for their
practitioners changes over the course of time (Gray 1982: 109–114).
One cannot stand outside history.

However, Eliot’s paper concludes that from the study of religious
rituals and myths we can know ‘what men did at one period and another,
and can to some extent see the development of one form out of another’,
which may produce ‘enough cross-sections to interpret a process, if
not a purpose’. In this context, Eliot praised Frazer’s thirteen-volume
compendium of myth and ritual, The Golden Bough (1890–1915, 1936),
and ten years later he referred to it as ‘a work of no less importance
for our time than the complementary work of Freud’, and perhaps of
‘greater permanence’ than Freud’s ‘because it is a statement of fact
which is not involved in the maintenance or fall of any theory of the
author’s’ (Gray 1982: 128–131). What Eliot admired in Frazer’s
approach was that he juxtaposed descriptions of diverse myths and
rituals without subordinating them to his own interpretation. Eliot
would use both Frazer’s research and his method in The Waste Land.

Pound had also read Frazer, but, characteristically, he was more
interested in a marginal figure: the (briefly imagist) poet and popular
novelist Allen Upward (1863–1926). In 1913 Pound reviewed Upward’s
idiosyncratic history of Christianity, The Divine Mystery, as ‘the most
fascinating book on folk-lore that I have ever opened’ (1973: 403).
Though he criticized aspects of Frazer’s argument, Upward’s approach
through myth and ritual was indebted to The Golden Bough, and his
method was markedly similar: ‘it is not a mass of theories’, remarked
Pound, ‘it is this history told in a series of vivid and precise illustrations’.
Like Frazer, Upward stressed continuities between periods and cultures,
presenting history as a ‘stratification’, ‘a vertical section, for all these
stages of emotion and belief are present at the same time in the collective
and individual conscience of mankind’ (1913: 165; Longenbach 1987:
117). Pound, who had a lifelong interest in the occult, appears to have
believed in this form of historical simultaneity rather more literally
than Eliot, for in ‘Psychology and the Troubadours’ (1912) Pound


described the enduring relevance of Greek mythology as follows:
‘I believe in a sort of permanent basis in humanity [. . .]. I know, I
mean, one man who understands Persephone and Demeter, and one
who understands the Laurel, and another who has, I should say, met
Artemis’ (1968: 92). Nevertheless, Upward’s influence on Pound’s
poetry is comparable to Frazer’s effect on Eliot’s. Pound admires the
juxtaposition of diverse historical moments that reveal continuities and
patterns without overt intervention by the author.

MODERNIST VISUAL ART

Artists as well as writers engaged in the early twentieth-century interest
in primitivism. In France two of the most innovative artists of the
period, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Henri Matisse (1869–1954),
dramatically transformed their art in 1906 after being shown an African
mask; in London the sculptor Jacob Epstein (1880–1959) was inspired
by the African, Assyrian, and Oceanic sculpture he was able to see in
Paris and London ethnographic museums (Antliff and Leighten 2001:
32; Silber 1986: 22–26). Having ceased to write about literature, in
1913 and 1914 Hulme devoted himself to championing this new style
in art, praising in particular Epstein’s sculpture and the paintings and
sculptures produced by the group of artists known as the ‘vorticists’.

Hulme summarized the major points of his art criticism in a 1914
lecture since published as ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’. It argues
that the new style of art practised by Epstein, Picasso (‘cubism’) and
Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) (‘vorticism’) indicates the emergence
of a general change in outlook, or attitude towards the world (1994:
269). In many ways the change corresponds to the romanticism/
classicism shift he forecast earlier in relation to poetry, but Hulme
now moves the argument away from its original Action Française context
and renames his terms. Romanticism, which Maurras had traced to the
French Revolution of 1789, is now renamed ‘the humanist attitude’
and traced to an earlier point (earlier even than Eliot’s English Civil
War): the Renaissance. Classicism is renamed ‘the religious attitude’,
and this allows Hulme to include in it the primitive pre-classical and
Eastern cultures that lay outside the Action Française’s framework.
Hulme represents the emergence of the religious attitude, as he had
the emergence of classicism, as a re-emergence, a return to the attitude
of an earlier age. He argues that Epstein is interested in Assyrian

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72 KEY IDEAS

sculpture not because it is exotic or fashionable, but because he has
an emotional affinity with the Assyrian sculptor: primitive works of
art ‘are liked directly, almost as they were liked by the people who
made them, as being direct expressions of an attitude which you want
to find expressed’ (1994: 277).

The major source behind Hulme’s argument was a book by a German
art historian, Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965), entitled Abstraktion
und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy) (1908). Worringer argued that
the history of art should not be read as a history of ability, progressing
towards a Western-defined conception of naturalism or realism, with
non-Western art dismissed as primitive or technically inferior versions.
Instead, the history of art should be understood as consisting of two
opposed artistic intentions: one produces the art of naturalism, familiar
in the West, but there is also, Worringer argues, an artistic intention
that produces abstract art. Naturalist art is an expression of empathy,
produced by artists expressing their delight in the world. Abstract art
expresses anxiety about the artist’s place in the world – the defining
feature of the abstract artists, Worringer suggests, is their instinctive
agoraphobia, their ‘spiritual dread of space’. The empathetic artist
aims to represent the vital and organic nature of the world, and therefore
produces naturalist work. The space-shy artist, however, aims to make
sense of the world by drawing out individual forms from their
surrounding context and giving them a fixity, a permanence. Lines
tend to be less curved, more angular, and the three dimensions we
perceive in nature are flattened into two (1997: 15–22).

Hulme provides a long and fairly faithful account of Worringer’s
argument in ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’, but we should note
that he introduces certain emphases. First, while Worringer argues

Cubism. Considered by many to be the most important art movement of

the twentieth century. Cubism existed from about 1907–1920 and is

associated with the work of the Paris-based artists Pablo Picasso, Georges

Braque (1882–1963) and Juan Gris (1887–1927), among others. The cubist

style is characterized by fragmentation of the image (often into different

perspectives perceived simultaneously) and a move towards abstraction.

Cubism was one of the major influences on Wyndham Lewis’s London-

based vorticist group.


that abstraction is as important a tendency in art as naturalism, he
explicitly states that he does not intend to elevate one above the other
(1997: 30–31); Hulme, by contrast, represents abstract art as more
complex and a greater artistic achievement, and welcomes the return
of the religious attitude which produces it (1994: 284–85, 293). Second,
while Worringer raises the idea that the modern artist has an affinity
with the primitive artist, he rejects the conclusion that this will bring
about a general return to abstraction (1997: 18); Hulme states that
affinity more firmly, and explicitly explains the new art as its expression.
Finally, Worringer is somewhat obscure in his situating of the
abstraction/empathy hypothesis in history. It is not clear whether
the tendencies correspond to distinct historical periods, or different
stages in a people’s culture, or are simultaneously available throughout
all periods of history and stages of culture. Hulme, as we have seen,
relates them to specific time periods: the pre- and post-Renaissance
(Beasley 2006: 66).

Although Hulme did not himself explore how a distinction between
humanism and the religious attitude might be applied to literature, it
proved useful to Pound in his theorizing of modernist poetry, especially
because Hulme’s art criticism was written just when Pound was
separating himself from the imagist group and forging an allegiance
with the vorticists. Hulme’s distinction between ‘attitudes’ provided
a forceful account of the difference between the modern artist and his
or her immediate precursors; even better, Hulme’s argument did not
cut off the chosen modern works from all tradition, only recent tradition.
In the important essay ‘Vorticism’ (1914), Hulme’s essays provide
the background to Pound’s argument that modernist literature is
both new and rooted in a productively distant past. Comparisons
with the primitivism and abstraction of the visual arts are essential to
Pound’s argument: he compares his poem ‘The Return’, for example,
with sculptures by Epstein and the vorticist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
(1891–1915), and relates ‘In a Station of the Metro’ to the aesthetic
theories of the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) (1970a:
85–86; Beasley 2007: 98–106).

ERNEST FENOLLOSA AND THE IDEOGRAM

In December 1913, Pound began editing the papers of the renowned
American philosopher Ernest Fenollosa, at the invitation of Fenollosa’s

HISTORY AND TRADITION 73


74 KEY IDEAS

widow. Fenollosa had lived and worked in Tokyo for many years as a
professor of philosophy and political economy, and had become an
expert on Japanese and Chinese art and literature. Among his papers
was an essay, ‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry’,
which Pound edited and published in the American literary journal,
The Little Review, in 1919. In his preface to the essay Pound called it
a ‘study of the fundamentals of all aesthetics’ (1936: 7), and the fact
that the essay was published in a key modernist periodical underlines
Pound’s belief that this was no obscure scholarly text, but rather a
ground-breaking document of immediate relevance to modern poetry.

Fenollosa argued that Chinese was a naturally poetic language by
virtue of the pictographic quality of its ideograms. Unlike English, for
example, where the words ‘man sees horse’ have only an arbitrary
relation to the things and process to which they refer, Chinese, Fenollosa
writes, actually pictures that which it describes. Describing the Chinese
figures below, Fenollosa interprets them as follows:

First stands the man on his two legs. Second, his eye moves through space:

a bold figure represented by running legs under an eye, a modified picture of

an eye, a modified picture of running legs, but unforgettable once you have

seen it. Third stands the horse on his four legs.

(1936: 12)

Fenollosa was in fact wrong to think that Chinese was predominantly
pictographic (the majority of Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic
like English words), but his mistake was a productive one for Pound,
who only later realized the essay’s limitations. The imagist (and
symbolist) dream of a poetry that can present reality in all its immediacy
appeared to be realized in Chinese.


The aspect of the essay that most interested Pound was Fenollosa’s
argument that compound words in Chinese picture not only things,
but the relationship between things. They therefore reflect the activity
of the natural and human worlds: ‘the sun underlying the bursting


forth of plants = spring [. . .], ‘“Rice-field” plus “struggle” = male’
(1936: 14). As these examples show, meaning is being made through
metaphor: the abstract notion of ‘spring’ is conveyed by a picture of
something that occurs during spring. Metaphor was already fundamental
to Pound’s and Hulme’s modernism (the impact of ‘In a Station of the
Metro’, for example, rests on seeing the faces as petals), but Fenollosa’s
essay suggested that Chinese words were less static than their English
equivalents, that they were inherently dynamic.

But what has this to do with history and literary tradition? The last
few pages of Fenollosa’s essay turn to the subject of the evolution of
language. Like the symbolists and the modernists, Fenollosa laments
the utilitarian way language is used in modern life, robbed of its colour
and suggestiveness – and of its history. For in our language, he says,
there is nothing that shows how a word grows and changes, ‘it does
not bear its metaphor on its face’ (1936: 29). But in Chinese, a word’s
etymology is constantly visible: ‘thus a word, instead of growing
gradually poorer and poorer as with us, becomes richer and still more
rich from age to age, almost consciously luminous’ (1936: 29). Pound’s
university training in philology had taught him that words contain
history: tracking their use provides explanations of cultural change.
Fenollosa’s (mis)understanding of the Chinese ideogram led him to
believe it was a type of word that encapsulated history in spatial form
(Frank 1991: 5–66). Unsurprisingly, Pound saw a connection between
this aspect of Fenollosa’s argument and his ‘method of Luminous Detail’,
and by the 1930s he had renamed the latter ‘the ideogrammic method’
(1991: 18–23, 96). Under this name it became the major structuring
principle of The Cantos.

TRANSLATION

Given their insistence on non-English literature’s relevance to their
own poetry, it should come as no surprise that Eliot, Hulme and
Pound were active translators as well as poets. Pound is a particularly
significant and innovative translator, but Hulme and Eliot also composed
important translations. Between 1912 and 1914 Hulme published
translations of Bergson’s ‘Introduction a la métaphysique’ (1903) (An
Introduction to Metaphysics (1912, 1913)) and Georges Sorel’s Réflexions
sur la violence (1908) (Reflections on Violence (1914, 1916)), and Eliot,
besides translating for his journal, The Criterion, in 1930 published a

HISTORY AND TRADITION 75


76 KEY IDEAS

translation of Saint-John Perse’s French poem Anabase (1924) (Anabasis
(1930)). Eliot, Hulme and Pound translated in order to make foreign
writings available to English readers, but this chapter’s discussion should
have suggested how translation might also be more centrally connected
to the aims of the modernist poetic project. Eliot, Hulme and Pound
consistently thought of their poetry in an international context; they
were influenced by and measured themselves against poets from different
places as well as different times. The ‘tradition’ Eliot advocates in
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is ‘the whole of literature of
Europe’, from Homer onwards, and by the time he came to write The
Waste Land it had expanded beyond European boundaries.

Eliot’s, Hulme’s and Pound’s attitude towards language itself is also
relevant here. I mentioned in Chapter 1 that by the early twentieth
century there was a movement to understand language as a system,
a set of rules, rather than a ‘natural’ means of expression. In a sense,
therefore, all writing is translation – translation of experience into the
system of language. In Chapter 2 we saw Hulme expressing this
particularly vividly in his discussion of poetic imagery: ‘nowadays, when
one sees the hill is “clothed” with trees, the word suggests no physical
comparison’, he writes, ‘To get the original visual effect one would
have to say “ruffed”, or use some new metaphor’ (1994: 95). Pound
makes a related point when he tells aspiring poets that ‘translation is
likewise good training, if you find that your original matter “wobbles”
when you try to rewrite it. The meaning of the poem to be translated
can not “wobble”’ (1960: 7). For both poets there is a distinct gap
between language and that which it describes, and the poet must
manipulate language in order to find the most accurate and evocative
means of expressing the poem’s sense or ‘meaning’.

This implies a certain theory of translation, one where the translator
aims to recreate the sense of the original, rather than slavishly accounting
for every word and grammatical point. This was certainly Pound’s
attitude towards translation, and it marks a shift away from nineteenth-
century practice, which conceived of translation as a scholarly pursuit
rather than a creative act. In 1915 Pound published Cathay, made up
of ‘translations’ of fourteen Chinese poems drawn from Fenollosa’s
papers, and part of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer. Though he would
later learn Chinese, in 1915 he was not able to translate from the


original sources, and instead produced his translations from Fenollosa’s
notes, themselves made from Japanese versions of the Chinese poems.
The resulting poems are not, therefore, precise renderings of the Chinese,
and in fact in one, ‘The River Song’, Pound mistakenly conflated two
poems (Xie 1999: 235). Nevertheless, Cathay has been much admired
since its first publication: it prompted Eliot to describe Pound as ‘the
inventor of Chinese poetry for our time’, a description that captures
both the influence of the volume, and the fact that the Chinese poetry
it contains is a creation of Pound’s, rather than a translation (1948a:
14). The same understanding was notoriously not extended to Pound’s
poem ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’, intended, wrote Pound, not
as a translation but a ‘character sketch’ of the Roman poet Sextus
Propertius, but criticized at length for its inaccuracies in the press (Sullivan
1964: 5–12).

Eliot and Pound employed various types of translation in their own
poetry. As well as translated excerpts from foreign sources (for example,
Pound’s use of ‘Donna Me Prega’ (‘A lady asks me’), by Guido
Cavalcanti (c. 1255–1300), in Canto 36), Eliot’s and Pound’s poems
include many unacknowledged single lines and references (Eliot’s title
Ara vos Prec is a quotation from Dante’s Purgatorio, meaning ‘I implore
you’ in Provençal), and quotations of other poets’ metre and rhyme
schemes (Eliot uses an approximation of Dante’s terza rima in part
of ‘Little Gidding’; Pound uses a version of The Seafarer’s metre in
Canto 1). Learning the sources of these allusions undoubtedly contributes
to our understanding of Eliot’s and Pound’s poetry, and the excellent
guides now available make this straightforward (see ‘Further Reading’).
However, it is just as important to register the general point made
by the poets’ use of translation and allusion: our language is not our
own, that is to say, the words we use have been used by others, they
are formed by the intermingling of languages and cultures. Allusion
and translation highlight this essential second-handedness of language,
and the way it connects us to other language users. If a poet
wants to convey the richness of human culture, why confine oneself
to English? As Pound wrote in The Cantos, ‘it can’t be all in one language’
(1994: 577).

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78 KEY IDEAS

SUMMARY

This chapter began by establishing the importance of literary tradition to
Eliot and Pound, and noting that after his turn to classicism, Hulme also
emphasized the value of tradition. Eliot’s and Pound’s extensive use of
literary allusion is a means of bringing that literary tradition into their
poetry, so that the texts and poets of the past are brought into the modern
poetic text, collapsing historical time. All three poets reject the notion of
history as progression or evolution, in favour of history as alternating cycles
(classicism-romanticism-classicism, religious-humanist-religious). We
reviewed three sources that stand behind this use of spatial form. Frazer
and Upward made their arguments about the development of myth through
the juxtaposition of vivid descriptions, Fenollosa saw the same principle
of juxtaposition creating meaning within Chinese ideograms. The visual
arts were making related experiments, creating a style Hulme interpreted
as a return to a religious attitude. Juxtaposition suggested an organizing
principle that could present history in poetry as a ‘simultaneous order’.
The importance of translation to modernist poetry is part of the same
commitment to literary tradition.


5

THE FIRST WORLD WAR
AND THE LONG POEM

Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pound’s The Cantos are not only major
modernist poems; they have largely defined what we mean by modernist
poetry. If they appear to be the definitive products of ‘a new era of
high aesthetic self-consciousness and non-representationalism, in which
art turns from realism and humanistic representation towards style,
technique and spatial form in pursuit of a deeper penetration of life’
(Bradbury and McFarlane 1976: 25), as the modernist period has
been described, it is not because they conform to an already-existing
modernist template, but rather because the template itself was created
from these works. These poems, therefore, should be understood less
as representative of early twentieth-century poetry, than polemical
and highly successful arguments about what poetry should be.

This chapter frames The Waste Land and The Cantos as war poems
that present two specific challenges to their authors. First, they required
the creation of a new form adequate to the immensely ambitious task
of analysing the history of civilization; second, they required the
invention of a new method of relating history that could avoid propaganda
and maintain the integrity of the individual voice. The solution to the
first lay in versions of what Eliot called in an essay on Joyce’s Ulysses
‘the mythical method’, and the solution to the second was found in
the study of drama and dramatic poetry.


80 KEY IDEAS

WAR POETS

Britain declared war on the Central Powers on 4 August 1914. Eliot
and Pound, as Americans, did not enlist (although during the course
of the war both tried to). However, many of their friends joined the
army, including the imagist poet Richard Aldington, from whom Eliot
took over as assistant editor of The Egoist, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-
Brzeska, Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, the leader of the vorticist movement,
and Eliot’s closest friend from his year in Paris, Jean Verdenal. In May
1915 Verdenal was killed, and a month later Gaudier met the same
fate. Hulme was killed in September 1917.

Pound began serious work on The Cantos in 1915, during the second
year of the war; Eliot first mentioned The Waste Land in a letter of
November 1919, a year after the war ended, though the earliest
fragments of the poem had been written at least five years before. The
First World War shaped both poems substantially: it appears in the
texts not only in the form of references to the events of 1914–1918,
but also as a broader moral framework. Both poems treat the First
World War as a symptom of their main subject: the disintegration of
civilization in the modern world.

The Waste Land’s first section, ‘The Burial of the Dead’, contains a
Bavarian countess’s childhood memories of the pre-war Austrian empire
and references to sprouting corpses, ‘A Game of Chess’ describes Lil’s
preparations for welcoming her husband Albert home from the war,
and ‘What the Thunder Said’ includes a description of the post-war
collapse of Europe and the Middle East (lines 366–76). In The Cantos,
the wartime leaders of Britain and the United States, David Lloyd
George (1863–1945) and Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), appear in
the ‘Hell Cantos’ (14 and 15), their identity not quite obliterated by
libel-conscious dots; another of the poem’s villains is one of the war’s
wealthiest arms traders, Basil Zaharoff (1849–1936), called ‘Metevsky’
in the poem (1994: 61, 187). Canto 16 runs through anecdotes about
Pound’s friends who served in the war, including Hulme.

EPIC AMBITIONS

The subject matter of the war, and the deeper malaise it represented
for Eliot and Pound, shaped the poems’ form as well as their content.
The Waste Land and The Cantos are extremely broad in scope, seeking


to analyse contemporary history through comparison of events and
personalities in the present with those of past periods and other cultures.
Pound later described The Cantos as a sequel to Dante’s Divine Comedy:
‘the first thing was this: you had six centuries that hadn’t been
packaged. It was a question of dealing with material that wasn’t
in the Divina Commedia’ (Hall 1962: 38). Neither the imagist poem nor
the Laforguean dramatic monologue was appropriate to this task: the
traditional form for this subject matter was the epic.

But what would a modernist epic look like? When Eliot and Pound
faced this problem in the early twentieth century, the modernist epic
seemed a contradiction in terms. In the first chapter we saw that
Hulme defined modern poetry in opposition to the epic and the ballad
(1994: 53). The modernist poem, so far, had been concerned either
with the impressions of the individual mind, or – as in the recent
quatrain poems – social satire. In neither case had the poetry sustained
a narrative or moved beyond the representation of a single point
of view. And why would it? Narrative was no longer the preserve of
poetry: if Homer or Dante were to write the Odyssey or The Divine
Comedy in the twentieth century they would be unlikely to write in
verse; they would, instead, write in the more flexible and expansive
form of the novel.

Epic. A long narrative poem in an elevated style, celebrating the actions
of a legendary hero or heroes. Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey

(c. 900–750 BC), are the source of most conventions followed by subsequent
epics in the Western tradition, such as Virgil’s Aeneid (c. 29–19 BC), Milton’s
Paradise Lost (1667) and Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590–1596).
La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) (c. 1310–1314). Italian poem of a
hundred cantos by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) consisting of three parts,
Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory) and Paradiso (Paradise). The poem
describes the poet’s journey from hell to paradise, guided first by Virgil
and, through paradise, by Beatrice, the woman Dante had fallen in love
with in childhood.

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82 KEY IDEAS

But it was not simply a question of expanding the modernist poem’s
form to emulate the novel. There was a philosophical problem to be
solved: the intensely subjective mode of Eliot’s and Pound’s early
verse arose not only from their admiration for the French symbolists,
but also from their belief, following Bradley and Bergson respectively,
that one could only speak with integrity about one’s own experience.
The great epics, however, depended on a shared belief structure through
which to interpret and communicate experience: ‘An epic is a poem
containing history’, Pound explained in an interview:

The modern mind contains heteroclite elements. The past epos have succeeded

when all or a great many of the answers were assumed, at least between

author and audience, or a great mass of audience. The attempt in an

experimental age is therefore rash.

(Hall 1962: 47)

Where Dante had what Pound called an ‘Aquinas-map’, a theological
system derived from the Christian philosophy of Thomas Aquinas
(1225–1274) (1971: 323), to guide him and his readers, twentieth-
century poets and readers had no such agreed framework of ‘answers’.

Eliot and Pound responded to these challenges by turning to a range
of models – novels and dramatic works, as well as poetry. Eliot’s
clearest statement on this subject is ‘Prose and Verse’ (1921), in which
he explicitly rejects an absolute distinction between poetry and prose
and instead argues that ‘we must be very tolerant of any attempt in
verse that appears to trespass upon prose, or of any attempt in prose
that appears to strive towards the condition of “poetry”’. In sentences
which shed much light on the metrical variety of The Waste Land, Eliot
writes, ‘I see no reason why a considerable variety of verse forms may
not be employed within the limits of a single poem [. . .]; We seem
to see clearly enough that prose is allowed to be “poetic”; we appear
to have overlooked the right of poetry to be “prosaic”’ (Eliot 2005:
160, 163–64). Pound had been making the same point since 1913,
when he drew attention to what he called ‘“the prose tradition” of
poetry’, a poetic tradition more closely related to the development
of the realist novel than lyric poetry, and represented by the poetry
of George Crabbe (1754–1832), William Wordsworth and Ford Madox
Ford (1873–1939). In contrast to the introspection of pre-war modernist
poetry, this tradition ‘presents. It does not comment. It is irrefutable


Realism. In general, writing or art that appears to accurately record life,

especially everyday or ordinary life. As a trend in European literature it is

particularly associated with the mid-nineteenth century novel of middle-

class life, pioneered by the French novelists Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850)

and Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), and the English novelist George Eliot

(1819–1880).

because it does not present a personal predilection for any particular
fraction of truth [. . .]. It does not attempt to justify anybody’s ways
to anybody or anything else’ (1913: 662).

ULYSSES, ORDER AND MYTH

For Eliot and Pound alike the novelists they found most instructive
were the nineteenth-century French realist novelist Gustave Flaubert
and the contemporary they saw as Flaubert’s major inheritor, James
Joyce (1882–1941). Although Joyce’s Ulysses was not published in
book form until February 1922, Eliot and Pound were reading it up
to four years before, having been sent sections of the manuscript by
Joyce, and also in their editorial capacities at The Egoist (Eliot) and The
Little Review (Pound), where the novel was serialized until prevented
under obscenity laws. Pound’s judgement after reading the beginning
of the book was that ‘It looks to me rather better than Flaubert’, and
on reading episode fifteen (‘Circe’) he proclaimed Joyce the modern
Dante: ‘Magnificent, a new Inferno in full sail’ (1967: 130, 189). Eliot’s
reaction to the same chapter was similarly enthusiastic: ‘stupendous’,
he wrote to Joyce, ‘I have nothing but admiration; in fact, I wish, for
my own sake, that I had not read it’ (1988: 455).

Eliot’s remark captures the mixture of admiration and anxiety that
Ulysses induced: he and Pound immediately realized the significance of
the novel for their own literary projects. Indeed, at an early stage
of The Waste Land’s composition the poem opened with an account of
a trip to a brothel apparently inspired by the end of Joyce’s ‘Circe’
chapter (1971: 4–5). If Pound’s prominent use of the Odyssey in the
early cantos was independent of Joyce’s influence (Bush 1976: 193),
it nevertheless highlighted their common aims. Ulysses showed Eliot
and Pound that though the twentieth-century epic would necessarily

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84 KEY IDEAS

lack the shared belief structure of Dante’s ‘Aquinas-map’, mythologies
deeply embedded in Western culture could provide the same ordering
function. In 1923 Eliot published one of his most famous essays, ‘Ulysses,
Order and Myth’, which argued that Joyce’s use of the Odyssey had
‘the importance of a scientific discovery’ in providing ‘a way of controlling,
of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’.
Connecting Ulysses’s paralleling of the ancient and the contemporary
with that of the anthropologists and ethnologists he had studied at
Harvard, Eliot announced the birth of a new form: ‘instead of narrative
method, we may now use the mythical method’ (1975: 177–78).

‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ is as much an explanation of The Waste
Land as it is of Ulysses, drawing readers’ attention to the poem’s ‘mythical
method’ which Eliot also emphasized in its explanatory notes. There
he wrote that he was indebted ‘in general’ to Frazer’s The Golden
Bough, and more specifically to another anthropological work of the
same school, Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920), from
which ‘not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental
symbolism of the poem’ derived (1969a: 76). Weston’s subject is the
Christian legend of the search for the Holy Grail (the cup Christ used
at the Last Supper), which she argues derives from the pre-Christian
vegetation myths described by Frazer. Details vary between versions,
but the main features of the Grail legend are that a knight searching
for the Grail encounters an ill or injured king who rules a land wasted
by either drought or war. The king and his land will be restored to
health if the knight asks the correct question or questions. Weston
connects the ruler of the wasteland, sometimes called the Fisher King,
to the gods of vegetation myths, whose death and rebirth functioned
as explanations of the seasons (Weston 1980: 19, 48).

The Waste Land does not follow the narrative structure of the Grail
legend, as Ulysses follows the narrative structure of the Odyssey. Instead
Eliot juxtaposes images and symbols from Frazer and Weston with
literary allusions and sections of social satire to establish a continuity
between the wasteland of the Grail legend and the wasteland of modern
civilization, where ancient fertility rites have degraded into sordid sexual
encounters. Versions of Weston’s Fisher King recur throughout the
poem: Shakespeare’s King Alonso in The Tempest, thought by his son
to have been drowned in a shipwreck, but reunited with him in the
play’s final act (l. 124–25); and Phlebas the Phoenician, the drowned


sailor of ‘Death by Water’, whose nationality associates him with the
Phoenician-Greek god Adonis, whose effigy Frazer and Weston describe
thrown into the sea and recovered (‘resurrected’) as part of a vegetation
rite (Weston 1980: 40, 44; Frazer 2002: 224). Yet if The Waste Land
repeatedly enacts a sacrificial drowning, it is death rather than
resurrection that is emphasized, and the wasteland is not returned to
fertility by the end of the poem. ‘Shall I at least set my lands in order?’
the Fisher King asks in the final paragraph of the poem. The response
is a pile of quotations, ‘fragments I have shored against my ruins’,
disordered. The final refrain, ‘Shantih shantih shantih’, translated by
Eliot as ‘the peace which passeth understanding’ is inadequate to the
task of resolving these fragments, a ‘way of stopping’ rather than a
resolution (Crawford 1990: 149).

Eliot’s statements on the importance of Weston and Frazer to The
Waste Land are somewhat misleading: while their work enabled him to
draw together the central themes of religious and sexual sterility, the
mythic framework was grafted on to the poem at a late stage, and was
not part of its initial conception (Rainey 2005: 48–49). His statements
suggest a more coherent poem than the one he wrote, one that
corresponded more closely to his classicist ideal of the impersonal,
well-ordered work of art. Pound’s remarks about The Cantos have a
similar ordering intention that remains at odds with the poem itself:
he told Yeats that there would be ‘no plot, no chronicle of events, no
logic of discourse, but two themes, the Descent into Hades from Homer,
a Metamorphosis from Ovid, and, mixed with these, mediaeval or
modern historical characters’, organized in ‘a structure like that of a
Bach Fugue’ (Yeats 1961b: 4). Instead of a plot, which implies a narrative
progression, Pound proposes a repeating pattern, in which a subject
is introduced in a series of different forms (like the different voices of
a fugue), juxtaposed with a countersubject, or response.

The account of world history given in The Cantos, therefore, is one
structured by the descents and metamorphoses of civilizations and
individuals, but these ‘themes’ are very broadly conceived. Descents
can be a point of crisis or a test and not necessarily a fall in fortunes;
metamorphoses are the moment where an ideal is realized or made
permanent. Examples of such descents are the details of political intrigues
in Renaissance Italy that make up the Malatesta Cantos (cantos 8–11),
the founding of the American republic in the Jefferson and John Adams
Cantos (cantos 31–34, 62–71) and the description of five thousand

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86 KEY IDEAS

years of Chinese government in the China Cantos (52–61). Their
corresponding metamorphoses could be interpreted as the building
of the Tempio Malatestiano, the establishment of the Constitution of
the United States and the composition of the Confucian Five Classics
(Davenport 1983: 88). Pound coined the term ‘subject-rhyme’ to
describe how ‘various things keep cropping up in the poem’ to forge
comparisons between sections of cantos (1971: 210). Like Weston,
Frazer and Eliot, then, Pound draws out the continuity between myths,
legends and history, suggesting the permanence of certain ideas,
emotions and beliefs. However, in accordance with his individualist
politics, Pound differs from Eliot in attributing more control to
individuals. So where the protagonists of The Waste Land – the typist,
Lil, Mr. Eugenides, Phlebas – are victims or, at most, participants in
civilization’s degradation, the protagonists of The Cantos – Sigismondo
Malatesta, Confucius, John Adams – make the decisions that determine
civilization’s course.

The attraction of myth for Eliot and Pound was that it could be
used instead of narrative to bring order and unity to their long poems.
Where a historical narrative would tend to suggest progression (and a
romantic world view) the use of myth could present history as cyclical
(a classicist world view). This went a long way towards solving the
problem of form at the macro level of the poem. But it did not solve
the difficulties at the micro level: how could one retain the integrity
of individual experience, represented in Eliot’s and Pound’s early poetry
by the single speaking voice, with the multiplied cast of an epic?

ART vs PROPAGANDA

The circumstances of the war made this question more urgent. In ‘Hugh
Selwyn Mauberley’, Pound had attacked wartime propaganda and
rhetoric, pouring scorn on the words and phrases used to justify the
war and to persuade men to join the armed forces. But what particularly
appalled him was that such rhetoric was not only circulated by the
government’s official propaganda bureau; it was widely taken up by
newspapers and journals, too, and so established as the truth about the
war. His wartime essays argue that newspapers and journals contribute
directly to international conflict by circulating nationalistic clichés that
make their way into the public consciousness (1915: 449, 471).


The experience of wartime propaganda generated widespread
suspicion of writing that sought to persuade one of a particular point
of view or circumvent analytical thought. This affected not only
journalism, but literary work too – after all, well-known writers, like
Arnold Bennett, Ford Madox Ford, John Masefield and H.G. Wells,
had worked for the government’s propaganda bureau (Buitenhuis 1989:
14–15). If Eliot and Pound were to write poetry that analysed their
historical situation with integrity, they would need to find a way of
presenting their interpretation that was emphatically anti-propagandist
and resisted easy phrasing.

Hulme addresses these issues in some of his last writings, though
the propaganda he opposed was not the pro-war propaganda Pound
was discussing, but, on the contrary, the arguments of the pacifist
movement. In his series of ‘War Notes’ (1915–16) Hulme argues that
the war is necessary to preserve British freedom, and that pacifist
arguments against war are based on unexamined abstractions about
man’s natural goodness that take no account of the ‘facts’ of the current
political situation. These abstractions have been internalized and
naturalized to the point that the pacifist believes them to be universal
truths. The problem for Hulme is that because these arguments have
been so thoroughly internalized as truths, facts about the war will not
change the pacifists’ minds. So, he says, one must address the broader
beliefs that underpin pacifism: romanticism or humanism (1994: 351,
359, 380–86).

Although there is much in this argument that we have encountered
in Hulme’s writings before, the specific focus on how ideas are
internalized draws on the work of Georges Sorel, a French anarchist-
syndicalist allied with the Action Française, whose Réflexions sur la violence
(Reflections on Violence) Hulme had translated in 1914. In an introduction
added to the translation in 1916, Hulme praised Sorel for revealing
democracy as an ideology, rather than ‘a natural and inevitable
equipment of the emancipated and instructed man’. Ideologies, wrote
Hulme, have to be removed ‘from their position “behind the eye”’ and
put ‘facing one as objects which we can then consciously accept or reject’.
A ‘historical method’ that shows ‘the intimate connection between
such conceptions – that of Progress for example – and certain economical
conditions at the time of their invention in the eighteenth century,
does more than anything else to loosen their hold over the mind’
(1994: 248). Eliot reviewed Hulme’s translation in 1917, describing

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88 KEY IDEAS

Ideology. A world view or system of belief that determines political and

social action. It is most often used pejoratively, for example in Marxist

philosophy, where ideology refers to the world view of the ruling class.

Sorel as ‘representative of the present generation, sick with its own
knowledge of history’, and longing ‘for the pessimistic classical view’
(1917: 478–79). Not surprisingly, Eliot was sympathetic to Sorel’s
anti-romantic theory of history – so much so that when he gave a series
of lectures on ‘Modern French Literature’ to university extension
students in 1916, he included Hulme’s translation of Reflections on
Violence in his reading list (Schuchard 1999: 30).

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

The Waste Land and The Cantos may be read as an ideology critique of
the kind Hulme set out in his introduction to Reflections on Violence.
Both poems question and severely criticize the religious, social and
political ideologies that structure our lives. But to retain the integrity
of the poetry, the poems’ arguments cannot be made in the authorial
voice: that would be to descend to the level of the propagandist. Instead,
Eliot and Pound make their poems out of many voices – some imaginary,
some quoted from written sources – that speak as if directly to the
reader, without the mediation or interpretation of the author. ‘You
cannot create a very large poem without introducing a more impersonal
point of view, or splitting it up into various personalities’, remarked
Eliot (1980: 321). To use Hulme’s terms, in these poems, ideas appear
‘facing one as objects which we can then consciously accept or reject’
(1994: 248).

Before Eliot’s reading of Jessie Weston suggested the title of The
Waste Land, the poem was called ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’,
a quotation from Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865) by Charles Dickens
(1812–1870) that praises a character’s newspaper-reading skills. The
original title is an apt summary of the poem’s dramatic qualities, and
indeed drama and dramatic poetry were important models for The
Waste Land and The Cantos. During the period in which he was conceiving
and writing The Waste Land, Eliot wrote a series of journal articles
on drama, most of which were collected in The Sacred Wood (1920).


In ‘The Possibility of Poetic Drama’, he foregrounds the problem of
finding an appropriate form to represent contemporary concerns. The
Elizabethans, he argues, found it in blank verse drama, but the new
experiences of industrial modernity that began in the nineteenth century
have as yet found no equivalent form to express them. What Eliot is
calling for here is not just a metrical form, but a ‘framework’ that
contains within it ‘a precise way of thinking and feeling’, ‘the “temper
of the age”’. Poetic drama seems to suggest that one can maintain the
integrity of subjective experience, while presenting that experience in
an expanded, objective form: ‘The essential is to get upon the stage
this precise statement of life which is at the same time a point of view,
a world’ (1976: 63–64, 68; Bush 1984: 47–48).

While Eliot was thinking through this problem in relation to
Elizabethan drama, Pound found inspiration in two quite different
locations: Japanese Noh drama and the dramatic poetry of Robert
Browning. In 1914, at the end of his essay, ‘Vorticism’, Pound had
related that he was ‘often asked whether there can be a long imagiste
or vorticist poem’. His answer then was that he ‘saw nothing against
a long vorticist poem’, and as evidence he cited the Noh drama he was
at that time translating from Ernest Fenollosa’s papers: ‘in the best
“Noh” the whole play may consist of one image. I mean it is gathered
about one image’ (1970a: 94). However, unlike imagism, and the
Japanese haiku to which it was indebted, Noh plays were part of a
series: five plays were typically performed together, and the whole,
Pound thought, ‘presents, or symbolizes, a complete diagram of life
and recurrence’ (1970c: 222). Indeed, in 1917 Pound compared The
Cantos to what has been called the archetypal Noh play, Takasago (Bush
1976: 108). Although Pound was specifically drawing attention to
their shared theme (that of human and divine love, mirrored in an
ideal relationship between humanity and nature) Noh drama also made
a vital contribution to The Cantos’ structure. Just as Eliot saw that the
formal qualities of poetic drama expanded the insights of the single
speaker without losing integrity, Pound admired Noh drama for its
presentation of single units built up into a complex statement of meaning

– what Pound now called the ‘ideogrammic method’.
If Noh drama showed Pound how his long poem could be built up
from sections of poetry ‘gathered about one image’, the work of
Robert Browning suggested how he might solve the equally pressing
problem of relating those sections to each other and conveying their

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90 KEY IDEAS

significance. Browning’s poetry had been a major model for Pound
since his college years, when he had written imitations of the dramatic
monologues. When planning The Cantos, however, Pound turned for
inspiration to Browning’s long, famously difficult poem about the
thirteenth-century Provençal troubadour, Sordello (1840). Sordello begins
with the narrator explaining that to relate the story of Sordello he will
not use the method of dramatic monologue, where the protagonist
speaks directly to the reader, instead he will adopt the method of a
showman of a diorama (an early form of cinema), who presents the
images to his audience with apparent objectivity, but also adds a
commentary. Browning thus creates a framework in which the story
of Sordello can be told with the immediacy of a dramatic monologue,
but which also accommodates substantial intervention from the narrator,
who comments on the story, explains jumps in the narrative and discusses
the relationship between the thirteenth-century story and the nineteenth-
century present. Pound recorded his admiration for Sordello and its
device of the narrator-showman in the first published canto (1917),
which began with the lament ‘Hang it all, there can be but one Sordello!’,
and went on to suggest ways of adapting Browning’s poem for ‘the
modern world’ (1917: 113). That canto, along with the second and
third published, was all but deleted from The Cantos as it now exists,
and the debate with Browning disappeared. But the method remains
and is literalized in cantos 4 and 12 where Pound pictures himself in
the Verona Arena, looking down and commenting on the action of the
poem (1994: 16, 53).

Pound dramatizes this method succinctly in his opening canto, a
translation of the section of the Odyssey in which Odysseus calls up the
souls of the dead. What Pound seems to want to suggest by beginning
with this passage is that he will not merely describe the actions and
ideas of figures from history; instead he will, like Odysseus, call up
the dead and let them speak directly to the reader. This, indeed, is
the method of much of The Cantos, which is so full of direct quotation
from the diaries, letters and documents of what Pound called ‘factive
personalities’ that it verges on an anthology (1970b: 194). United States
presidents such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, sages and prophets
such as Confucius, Renaissance rulers such as Sigismondo Malatesta,
are quoted at length as sources of wisdom. But at the same time, even
in the first canto, Pound reminds us that history is never conveyed
without some form of mediation. The section from the Odyssey is, after


all, a translation, and in fact, Pound reveals at the end of the first canto
that it is a translation of a translation. His English translation derives
not from a Greek source, but from Andreas Divus’s Renaissance Latin
translation of the Greek. In this way Pound performs a delicate balancing
act: he affirms the integrity of the individual voice, but he simultaneously
reminds us that transmission inevitably affects the voice.

The Waste Land does not begin with such a directly programmatic
account of its intentions, but it does contain vignettes which, like
Pound’s use of the Odyssey, can be read as descriptions of the poem’s
method. In ‘The Burial of the Dead’, we attend a tarot card reading
by Madame Sosostris, ‘famous clairvoyante’, who sets out a series of
cards before the reader that introduce several of the poems’ key figures.
Like Madame Sosostris, Eliot presents us with a series of fragmented
images or condensed narratives that singly are meaningless, but
juxtaposed suggest an interpretation of the present, if not the future.
But, like Pound, Eliot establishes his integrity by pointing out the
shortcomings of his own method, and Madame Sosostris is implicitly
compared with the rather more famous prophet, the blind Tiresias, on
whom Eliot provides a tantalizing note: ‘Tiresias, although a mere
spectator and not indeed a “character”, is yet the most important
personage in the poem, uniting all the rest [. . .]. What Tiresias sees,
in fact, is the substance of the poem’ (1969a: 78).

Critics have tended to see Eliot’s remark about Tiresias’s unifying
eye, like his insistence on the importance of Frazer and Weston, as
truer to the poet’s intention than to the poem’s actuality. But this
disjunction itself is important, and indicative of a characteristic feature
of modernist writing. As readers, we may choose to emphasize either
the poems’ will to order, or the fragmentation that is a sign of their
integrity – but both are present. In The Waste Land, Tiresias’s eye
might try to unite the poem’s protagonists, but Eliot also invokes
Bradley’s arguments on the privacy of the self (1969a: 74, 80). In The
Cantos, the fugal structure suggests an overall coherence and completion,
but Pound approvingly quotes Confucius on ‘historians [who] left blanks
in their writings, / I mean for things they didn’t know’ (1971: 210;
1994: 60).

The Waste Land and The Cantos make us question many of our presuppositions
about poetry, authors, readers and even the act of reading
itself. If we turn back to the previous chapter, we can see that these
poems are the practical application of many of the ideas on these subjects

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92 KEY IDEAS

Eliot and Pound explored in their essays. Most obviously, both poems
highlight the fact that they exist within a literary tradition, through
allusion, quotation and translation. We are encouraged to see The
Waste Land and The Cantos as parts of a vast textual landscape, parts of
the ‘simultaneous order’, which also contains Dante’s Divina Commedia,
Homer’s Odyssey, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and the letters of Thomas
Jefferson. Eliot’s ‘Impersonal theory of poetry’ is pushed to an extreme,
demonstrating the collaborative nature of all literary works, however
original they seem to be (Eliot 1980: 14, 18).

The Waste Land was a collaborative work in a very literal way. When
the facsimile of The Waste Land manuscripts was published in 1971, it
showed the extent of Pound’s editorial work on the poem; the
manuscripts provided, as Eliot had remarked, ‘irrefutable evidence
of Pound’s critical genius’ (Sutton 1963: 17). Pound worked on the
drafts during January 1922, making major cuts from the beginnings of
parts one, three and four and from the middle section of part three
(the typist section), and suggesting many more changes to individual
words and phrases. This is not the place to give a detailed account of
Pound’s editing (see Badenhausen 2004: 62–110, Eliot 2005: 23–25);
the point to emphasize here is that Eliot and Pound had successfully
created a literary context where editorial intervention and collaboration
could be celebrated as part of the creative process. Their essays, as we
saw in the previous chapter, emphasized the close relationship between
the critical and the poetic, and in fact Eliot saw this as a marker of the
modern classicist stance. In 1923 he wrote that the romantic tends to
‘propound the thesis that the great artist is an unconscious artist’ and
therefore ‘overlooks the capital importance of criticism in the work
of creation itself. Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labour of an
author in composing his work is critical labour; the labour of sifting,
combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful
toil is as much critical as creative’ (1980: 30).


SUMMARY

In The Waste Land and The Cantos Eliot and Pound reinvented the long
poem for the twentieth century. They did so without returning to a narrative
style, but instead using allusion to myth and legend as a framework that
could order their historical material and provide structural signposts, an
equivalent of Dante’s ‘Aquinas-map’, for their readers. Nevertheless, few
first-time readers are struck by the structural unity of the poems: the
impression is more reliably one of fragmentation and disorder, produced
by the lack of a consistent authorial presence to direct the reader through
the poems. The reader must make their own way through the sections of
the poems, working out the ideas and arguments of the many personae
as they proceed, for Eliot and Pound supply minimal explanation and
interpretation. In this, they react against the tendency, so evident during
the First World War, to turn literature into propaganda.

THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE LONG POEM 93


6

MODERNISM AND THE
IDEAL SOCIETY

The First World War turned the modernists from poet–aesthetes
cultivating the objective correlative and the image into poet–critics
concerned with the regeneration of society. In his preface to the 1928
edition of The Sacred Wood, Eliot commented that, since writing its
emphatically literary essays eight years before, he had ‘passed on to
another problem not touched upon in this book: that of the relation
of poetry to the spiritual and social life of its time and of other times’
(1976: viii). Pound, more candidly, remarked that ‘the symbolist
position, artistic aloofness from world affairs, is no good now’ (1921:
1). During the 1920s, as Europe struggled to recover from the social
and economic effects of the war, Eliot and Pound joined many other
intellectuals disillusioned with the political leadership in setting out
their own analyses of the post-war situation and their prescriptions for
a way forward.

This chapter is concerned with Eliot’s and Pound’s social beliefs –
and ‘belief’ is an appropriate word here. Eliot joined the Anglican
Church in 1927 and presented his social proposals from a Christian
standpoint. Pound, profoundly averse to institutional religion, nevertheless
underwent what critics have described as an ideological
‘conversion experience’ after the war: to a theory of economics that
was the major formative influence on his political and social ideas
(Surette 1999: 13). In turning from the literary to the public sphere,


96 KEY IDEAS

Eliot and Pound sought out new audiences, and their writing began to
cross a range of genres: in the 1920s both poets founded periodicals
that published social comment alongside literature, Pound began to
popularize his literary and economic ideas in the form of textbooks,
and Eliot began to write for the theatre.

CONVERSIONS I: ELIOT AND CHRISTIANITY

‘It is proverbially easier to destroy than to construct’, Eliot begins his
1928 essay ‘The Humanism of Irving Babbitt’, ‘when a writer is skilful
in destructive criticism, the public is satisfied with that. If he has no
constructive philosophy, it is not demanded; if he has, it is overlooked.
This is especially true when we are concerned with critics of society’
(1980: 471). Here Eliot sums up the problem he faced as he turned
to social criticism in the 1920s: the philosophy he had developed in
reference to Babbitt, Hulme and Maurras had provided tools for the
diagnosis of society’s problems, but not for their cure. The classicist’s
pessimistic view of human nature gave little hope that individuals could
solve the problems of post-war civilization by themselves.

This was the main point of Eliot’s argument against Irving Babbitt’s
social criticism. Babbitt’s humanism was inadequate to the task of
social reform because it placed too much emphasis on the individual’s
ability to improve him or herself. Without an external framework,
such as religion, ‘there is nothing left for the individual to check
himself by but his own private notions and his judgment, which is
pretty precarious’ and, furthermore, nothing to bring individuals
together into a unified group (1980: 476). Extending the argument of
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot argued that social reform
could not be achieved by individual responses to the contemporary
situation, it must draw on the social traditions individuals already shared:

Our problem being to form the future, we can only form it on the materials of

the past; we must use our heredity instead of denying it. The religious habits

of the race are still very strong, in all places, at all times, and for all people.

There is no humanistic habit.

(1980: 473)

For Eliot, like Hulme, classicism led logically to religion. Without
chronological knowledge of Eliot’s thought, one might have assumed


that his Christianity was responsible for his conservative philosophical
and aesthetic ideas; in fact, the reverse was true. Eliot’s philosophy
and aesthetics led to and shaped his Christianity.

Eliot was baptized into the Anglican Church on 29 June 1927, and
the following year he publicly announced his new affiliation in the
preface to a volume of essays, For Lancelot Andrewes (1928). The essays
were intended to mark a change of direction in Eliot’s criticism, to
‘indicate certain lines of development’ that would be elaborated in later
work, and to disassociate himself ‘from certain conclusions which have
been drawn from [. . .] The Sacred Wood’. He described the ‘point of
view’ of his criticism as ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and
anglo-catholic in religion’ and the first essay, on Lancelot Andrewes,
the seventeenth-century Bishop of Winchester (1555–1626), indicates
how this might be distinguished from the point of view of his earlier
criticism (1928a: ix). In the essay’s comparison of Andrewes and Donne,
Eliot implies a distinction he made explicit elsewhere between
philosophical poetry, in which ‘a philosophical system is felt as a whole
by the poet, when it affects the structure of his poem; when in fact
it is believed’ and metaphysical poetry, which ‘can occur either with
or without belief’ but shows ‘the intimate relation between our
philosophical beliefs and private feelings and behaviour’ (1993: 293).
Donne is Eliot’s prime example of the metaphysical poet; Dante, and
now Andrewes, are examples of the philosophical poet. In his earlier
criticism, Eliot had represented metaphysical poetry as a type of
philosophical poetry without favouring one over the other, but the final
pages of ‘Lancelot Andrewes’ suggest that Eliot now rates the
philosophical poetry of belief more highly:

Andrewes’s emotion is purely contemplative; it is not personal, it is wholly

evoked by the object of contemplation, to which it is adequate; his emotions

wholly contained in and explained by its object. But with Donne there is always

the something else [. . .], Donne is a “personality” in a sense in which Andrewes

is not: his sermons, one feels, are a ‘means of self-expression’.

(1980: 351)

Eliot’s earlier criticism had represented philosophical and religious
systems as useful tools for the poet; in For Lancelot Andrewes they are
no longer tools to be taken up or discarded at will: they inform every
aspect of the poet’s work.

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98 KEY IDEAS

‘ASH-WEDNESDAY’

Dante and Lancelot Andrewes provide the main sources for ‘Ash-
Wednesday’ (1930), traditionally read as Eliot’s conversion poem.
Drawing on Dante’s Vita Nuova (c. 1292–1294), a volume of poetry
Eliot considered ‘antiromantic’ in its refusal ‘to expect more from life
than it can give or more from human beings than they can give’, ‘Ash-
Wednesday’ describes the speaker’s struggle to turn away from human
desires and ambitions towards a spiritual life, caught in ‘the time of
tension between dying and birth / The place of solitude’ (1980: 275;
1969a: 98). The dominant motif of the poem, the ‘turn’ to God and
away from the world, is taken from Andrewes’s 1619 Ash-Wednesday
sermon on a Biblical text: ‘Therefore also, now (saith the Lord); Turne
you unto Me’ (Moody 1980: 137). The discipline and austerity of the
religious life is conveyed by the tightly controlled style and simple
vocabulary: key phrases and images are repeated and patterned
throughout the poem (such as the phrase ‘I do not hope to turn again’
in the first and final sections, and the oppositions between rocks and
trees throughout). Eliot had been refining this mature style in earlier
poems, ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) and the first Ariel poems, ‘The
Journey of the Magi’, ‘A Song for Simeon’ and ‘Animula’ (1927–1929),
and it is a marked departure from the style of The Waste Land. Where
The Waste Land was characterized by the fragmented images and dissonant
rhythms of modern life, ‘Ash-Wednesday’ conveys the unity and order
of religious liturgy.

CONVERSIONS II: POUND AND ECONOMIC
REFORM

Pound’s recommendations for post-war civilization were strikingly
different from Eliot’s call for a return to Christian values. Like many
in Britain’s depressed post-war period, Pound believed the answer
lay in economic reform, specifically the Social Credit proposals of C.H.
Douglas (1879–1952), an engineer-turned-economist he had met in the
office of The New Age in 1918. Douglas was one of a number of economists
during the early twentieth century who criticized orthodox capitalism
and classical economics from an underconsumptionist standpoint.
Douglas argued that, despite the industrial expansion of the last century,
the majority of producers and consumers were not better off than


before: wealth was becoming ever more concentrated in a small number
of pockets. The key problem was not with the production of wealth,
but with its circulation. The majority of people could not afford to buy
their share of the nation’s produce, and the wealthy had no desire to
buy up the shortfall. Instead, the wealthy either saved their money,
withdrawing it from circulation, or invested it to finance further
production, increasing the surplus of products and, as they were paid
back on their investments, their own wealth. One category of the
wealthy which came under particular scrutiny during this period was
that of banks and financiers who, by extending credit to producers
(including the State) at interest, could potentially exert more control
over the economy than could the State (Douglas 1920a: 22, 1920b:
30, 77; Redman 1991: 52–53, 59).

From Pound’s point of view, one of Douglas’s most important
insights concerned the ‘cultural heritage’ of society: everyone should
share in the world’s wealth because it is not produced by individuals
or individual businesses in isolation, but rather by an accumulation of
knowledge and invention over centuries. Douglas proposed to increase
the consumption of products, and therefore the circulation of wealth,
by two methods. First he advocated that the State distribute a national
dividend to employed and unemployed alike: wages alone would
never enable adequate consumption because prices were set to cover
the cost of paying wages and the cost of production. Douglas’s second
proposal was that the State determine a fixed ‘just price’ for each
product, calculated to limit profit (Douglas 1920b: 113–14, 134;
Redman 1991: 64–65).

Douglas’s proposals were not adopted in Britain, though his underconsumptionist
critique played a part in the revolution of economics
launched by John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) in the 1930s. Pound,
however, advocated Social Credit in his journalism, in specialist tracts,
in letters to people he believed might influence government policy,
and in his poetry. In the mid-1930s he came across the work of the

Underconsumptionist economics. Explains economic stagnation and

depression as caused by the inability of consumer demand to keep pace

with production.

MODERNISM AND THE IDEAL SOCIETY 99


100 KEY IDEAS

German economist Silvio Gesell (1862–1930), whose practical proposals
for monetary reform seemed to provide a way of putting Social Credit
ideas into action. Gesell proposed a system of paper money, ‘stamp
scrip’, whose value depreciated over time, and therefore discouraged
hoarding and financial speculation and compelled circulation and the
transformation of money into material wealth. From this point Pound
advanced economic policies that were a synthesis of Social Credit’s
general analysis of the relationship between the economy and society,
and Gesell’s theory of money.

Pound writes his economic beliefs into The Cantos both literally and
figuratively. They appear literally in the form of passages of theoretical
explanation, such as the description of Douglas’s ‘A + B theorem’
in Canto 38, and in accounts of economic history, for example, in
Cantos 42 to 44, in which Pound presents his research into the founding
of the seventeenth-century Sienese bank, the Monte dei Paschi, and
Cantos 88 and 89, where he discusses the US Bank War of the 1830s.
Pound’s aim is to educate his readers in the background to the contemporary
economic situation, which he had come to believe was the
major cause of the First World War: ‘no one can understand history
without understanding economics’, he wrote (1935: 5).

One critic has described the ‘central drama’ of The Cantos as ‘the
historical struggle between abundance and scarcity’ (Marsh 1998: 117),
which succinctly describes how Pound uses economics more figuratively
in the poem. The equations he draws between economic practice
and much broader issues are most clearly articulated in Canto 45,
known as the ‘Usura Canto’. Here, usury (lending money at interest)
is represented as the source of all social and cultural problems: it stifles
creativity (‘no picture is made to endure nor to live with / but it is
made to sell and sell quickly / with usura’), devalues individual labour
(‘Stonecutter is kept from his stone / weaver is kept from his loom /
WITH USURA), and prioritizes international profit over local produce
(‘wool comes not to market / sheep bringeth no gain with usura’)
(1994: 229–30). Above all, usury is a ‘sin against nature’ and Pound
associates it with unnatural excess: it changes values at will and blurs
the correct relationships between things. Nature, by contrast, is
associated with the values he had been promoting since his imagist days:
order, balance and precise definitions, or in Pound’s Chinese shorthand,
‘ching ming’: ‘right name’ (1994: 252, 333, 382, 400).


FASCISM

In 1921 Pound moved to Paris; in 1924 he left Paris for Italy. Italy
had always played an important role in Pound’s life and poetry: he
regularly holidayed there, he read and researched medieval Italian
poetry, and he considered the early Italian Renaissance the high
point of human civilization. In 1922 he began researching the life of
Sigismondo Malatesta (1417–1468), the fifteenth-century ruler of
Rimini. Sigismondo was a tyrannical ruler, but in The Cantos Pound
chose to emphasize instead his patronage of the arts and his love for
his mistress (later wife), Isotta degli Atti. Pound thought that these
two defining aspects of Sigismondo came together in his rebuilding of
the thirteenth-century church of San Francesco, known as the Tempio
Malatestiano, which Pound erroneously believed to have been dedicated
to Isotta (Rainey 1991: 33–36). Pound saw the Tempio as a monument
to productive patronage and romantic love, and he was willing to
argue that Sigismondo’s duplicitous and violent nature was justified by
his achievements: ‘tyrants / Were most efficient in all that they set
their hands to (1994: 31)’.

1922 was also the year that Benito Mussolini and his Fascist Party
seized control of the Italian government, and there is evidence to suggest
that this was a factor in Pound’s move to Italy. Certainly, his journalism
and letters demonstrate that he saw Italy as more vibrant than London
or Paris during this period, and by 1924 he had begun to hope that
Mussolini’s rule would inaugurate a new Renaissance and, what is more,
that there would be a role in it for Pound himself. Pound gained an
audience with Mussolini in 1933, at which Mussolini pronounced The
Cantos ‘divertente’ (amusing), as Pound tells us in Canto 41: he chose
to interpret this comment as evidence of Mussolini’s perspicacity.
Though some of his economic and social reforms shared common ground

Fascism. Term first used by Mussolini in 1919 for his Italian political

movement, and later adopted by Adolf Hitler in Germany and Francisco

Franco in Spain. Common elements of fascist movements are nationalism

(often racist and anti-Semitic in nature), anti-communism and anti-

democracy, and a cult of strong leadership.

MODERNISM AND THE IDEAL SOCIETY 101


102 KEY IDEAS

with Pound’s ideas, Mussolini did not see Pound as a potential adviser.
Nevertheless, Pound actively promoted Mussolini and Italian fascism,
notably through his book Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), his letters
to US politicians and his radio broadcasts to US troops during the
Second World War. For Pound, Jefferson and Mussolini were examples
of intelligent leaders who acted decisively to improve material and
cultural conditions – like Sigismondo. Their actions were creative,
according to Pound, and by the 1930s the distinction has disappeared
between the strong leader and the artist: both are seen as bringing
order to chaos.

How do we approach The Cantos, knowing the extent of Pound’s
fascist sympathies? Should we protect ourselves from its propaganda
and remove it from our reading? Should we read it despite the fascism
and seek out its less politically charged sections? The weight of critical
opinion is against both repression and censorship: fascism is part of
our history, including our cultural history, and to pretend otherwise
is to delude ourselves. It is in this intellectual climate that critical
attention has begun to extend from Pound’s early cantos and the lyrical
Pisan Cantos (1948), to the authoritarian Rock-Drill (1955) and Thrones
(1959). In 1943 Pound was indicted for treason against the United
States, and in 1945 incarcerated by the US army in Pisa. The cantos
he wrote while imprisoned there begin with a lament for Mussolini
and the sense of hope he had represented for Pound and, Pound thought,
for the Italian people. The execution of Mussolini represents, he writes,
‘the enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent shoulders’
(1994: 439). After his release from St Elizabeth’s Hospital for the
Criminally Insane in 1958, Pound neither reiterated nor recanted his
fascism. His retreat into depression and virtual silence during the last
decade of his life, and the last fragmentary lines of The Cantos, have
been interpreted by some as contrition.

Pound and Eliot are usually seen as part of a single political trend
in modernism, but in fact their politics are in many ways antithetical.
Both were anti-democratic and, from the 1920s, authoritarian, but
Pound’s politics were revolutionary, whereas Eliot’s were conservative.
Eliot himself spelled out the difference between their politics in his
notorious After Strange Gods (1934), three lectures delivered at the
University of Virginia in 1933. There Eliot criticizes Pound’s ‘Hell
Cantos’ for not distinguishing between ‘essential Evil and social


accidents’ (1934: 42). Eliot is right: Pound, unlike Eliot, does not
believe in ‘essential Evil’: he believes evil to be socially produced, and
that education and knowledge can eradicate it. The Cantos is, therefore,
directed towards educating its readers and providing a blueprint for a
paradise on earth. Eliot, on the other hand, believes in the reality of
original sin and therefore that the human race cannot create an earthly
paradise. In ‘Catholicism and International Order’ (1933), he contrasted
his own Anglo-Catholic position with that of the ‘heretic’, a category
in which he included Pound:

The Catholic should have high ideals – or rather, I should say absolute ideals

– and moderate expectations: the heretic, whether he call himself fascist, or
communist, or democrat or rationalist, always has low ideals and great

expectations. For I say that all ambitions of an earthly paradise are informed

by low ideals.

(1936: 122)

Pound’s support for Italian fascism was unequivocal; Eliot’s position
on fascism is the subject of continued debate. Central to the issue is
his editorship of The Criterion, founded in 1922 as a literary review,
but by the time of Eliot’s conversion in 1927 eschewing the ‘narrowly
literary’ in favour of presenting the ‘tendency’ of classicism as
exemplified by Sorel, Maurras, Julien Benda, Hulme, Jacques Maritain
and Babbitt (1926: 3, 5). In 1928, Eliot published ‘The Literature of
Fascism’ in The Criterion, a review of five books that argued for and
against Mussolini’s government. His tone is sceptical: while approving
of a political system that prioritizes order and authority, he doubts
these are the preserve of Italian fascism, or that an exported fascism
would establish those values in England. He recommends instead the
politics of Charles Maurras’s Action Française: ‘Most of the concepts
which might have attracted me in fascism I seem already to have found,
in a more digestible form, in the work of Charles Maurras’ (1928b:
288–89). It seems clear, therefore, that Eliot explicitly rejects fascism
and reasserts his support of Action Française. But, as C.K. Stead has
pointed out, ‘in every respect Action Française, which he favoured, was
more illiberal, more “reactionary”, than Mussolini’s party’ (1986:
205). Maurras, indeed, collaborated with the fascists after France fell
to the Nazis in 1940, and was found guilty of treason in 1945.

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104 KEY IDEAS

ANTI-SEMITISM

This discussion of Eliot’s and Pound’s attitudes towards fascism also
raises the issue of their anti-Semitism. Pound was virulently anti-Semitic
in his poetry, prose, radio broadcasts and personal letters, especially
during the 1930s; Eliot’s anti-Semitic remarks in his poetry and prose
are limited to a smaller number of instances. While the extent of
Pound’s anti-Semitism is unquestioned, Eliot’s continues to be debated.
The anti-Semitic lines of ‘Gerontion’, ‘Burbank with a Baedeker’,
‘Dirge’ (a deleted section of The Waste Land) and After Strange Gods, to
take the most notorious examples, have long been the subject of
discussion, but the debate intensified with the publication of Anthony
Julius’s thorough and uncompromising T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and
Literary Form (1995). Julius argued that the instances of anti-Semitism
could not be separated out from Eliot’s oeuvre; rather, they were part
of an active, creative ‘exploitation of anti-Semitic discourse’ that was
‘an inseparable part of his greater literary undertaking’ (1995: 29). In
2003, when the journal Modernism/Modernity published a debate on the
topic between seven leading modernist scholars, five of the seven argued
that Eliot and his writings were anti-Semitic.

Looking back from our post-Holocaust perspective, we might think
this anti-Semitism was a product of, and evidence of, fascist sympathy.
In truth, it was largely independent of the fascist influence, but the
fact that it was maintained during the period of fascist atrocities against
Jews is relevant and deplorable. It is often, rightly, pointed out that
anti-Semitism was extremely widespread in the early twentieth century.
But this is no excuse, and in any case Eliot’s and Pound’s anti-Semitism
was not in the mode of casual prejudice: it was a structural component
in their ideologies. Pound made Jews a scapegoat in his conspiracy
theory of history, identifying them with the banking practices he
deplored. Eliot’s belief in a homogeneous Christian society led him to
state in After Strange Gods that ‘reasons of race and religion combine
to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable’ (1934:
20). Although after the Second World War, Eliot regretted ‘the whole
tone’ of After Strange Gods and refused to allow it to be reprinted, he
did not retract that sentence, nor the pre-war anti-Semitic poems (Ricks
1988: 47). Similarly, though Pound later referred to his anti-Semitism
as ‘a stupid, suburban prejudice’, he made no adequate or public apology
(Carpenter 1988: 899).


CULTURE

Eliot’s and Pound’s mature work is profoundly concerned with the
maintenance of culture. Whether we agree or disagree with their
definitions of culture and their recommendations for its protection,
their insistence on its importance for all parts of society is one of the
most valuable elements of their legacy. Both poets wrote treatises on
culture: Pound published Guide to Kulchur in 1938; Eliot published
Notes towards the Definition of Culture in 1948. But what do they mean
by this famously difficult word? For Eliot, culture is ‘a way of life’,
which includes ‘all the characteristic activities and interests of a people’.
For mid-twentieth-century Britain Eliot suggests an indicative list of:
‘Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup
final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese,
boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century
Gothic churches and the music of Elgar’. It is also closely related to
religion, in fact the culture of a people is ‘the incarnation of its religion’:
‘we can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people [. . .] and
that way of life is also its culture’. According to Eliot, ‘no culture can
appear or develop except in relation to a religion’ (1967: 27, 31, 41).

Where Eliot argues that culture develops in relation to religion,
Pound argues for its relationship with philosophy. In fact, he deplores
the rise of Christianity in the West, which he sees as taking the place
in everyday life that philosophy had occupied in ancient Greece. By the
twentieth century, he laments, philosophy is thought of as highbrow,
‘I mean as distinct from roast beef and the facts of life, as distinct from
the things that come natural’. However, in the East, philosophy, in the
form of the teachings of Confucius (551–479 BC), remained integrated
with daily life, and Pound recommends Confucian values as a basis for
culture, as Eliot had recommended Christianity: ‘Confucius offers a
way of life, an Anschauung or disposition toward nature and man and
a system for dealing with both’. (Between 1928 and 1954 Pound
published five book-length translations of Confucian texts.) Like Eliot’s,
Pound’s definition of culture is inclusive and anti-elitist: he explicitly
distinguishes between book-learned ‘knowledge’ and ‘culture’ that is
‘in people, “in the air”’. To specify this latter sense of culture Pound
used the term ‘paideuma’, coined by the German anthropologist Leo
Frobenius (1873–1938), and defined by Pound as ‘the tangle or complex
of the inrooted ideas of any period’ (1970b: 24–26).

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106 KEY IDEAS

FOUR QUARTETS

Eliot’s Four Quartets begins, in ‘Burnt Norton’, with abstract speculations
about time, returning to the Bergsonian concepts that had governed
his early verse: ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present
in time future / And time future contained in time past’. But the
problem that this conception of time presents to Eliot in the 1930s
and 40s is that it amounts to a rejection, or at least a devaluation, of
history and culture, in favour of the subjective experience of the
moment. The aim, then, is to relate the subjective moment to shared
history, ‘to apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless’,
though the speaker admits that this is ‘an occupation for the saint’ and
in practice ‘For most of us, there is only the unattended / Moment,
the moment in and out of time’ (1969a: 171, 189–90). Nevertheless,
taken together, these barely perceived moments in and out of time are
what constitute our collective history:

history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

(1969a: 197)

History is not only a time but a place, and the geographical
particularity of Four Quartets, with each quartet named after a location,
looks forward to Eliot’s argument in Notes towards the Definition of Culture
that ‘a culture should be analysable, geographically, into local cultures’.
Culture, according to Eliot, is best transmitted between generations
by families living in the region of their ancestors, preserving local
cultures that contribute to but are not identical with the national culture
(1967: 15, 52, 58). In ‘East Coker’, named after the village in Somerset
from which Eliot’s ancestor Andrew Eliot emigrated to Massachusetts
in the 1660s, Eliot presents a vision of the local culture passed down
through his own family, quoting from a 1531 treatise written by another
ancestor, Sir Thomas Elyot (c. 1490–1546). In an open field, we hear
‘the music / Of the weak pipe and the little drum’ and watch the
sixteenth-century villagers ‘dancing around the bonfire / The association
of man and woman / In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie, a dignified
and commodious sacrament’. The dancing, and Eliot’s description of


it, repeats the orderly pattern of the seasons, ‘Keeping time, / Keeping
the rhythm in their dancing / As in their living in the living seasons’
(1975: 177, 178), and repeats the pattern of history itself.

The governing motif of the Quartets is identical with that of Notes
towards the Definition of Culture, and also looks back to Eliot’s doctoral
research at Harvard: Eliot has consistently been concerned with the
philosophical examination of the relationship of the part to the whole,
the one to the many. On this issue, Eliot is a cultural relativist: in
Notes towards the Definition of Culture he affirms ‘the vital importance
for a society of friction between its parts’ in generating creativity and
preventing totalitarianism (1967: 58–59). At the same time, his
association of culture with religion, and English culture with the history
of the Anglican Church, leads Eliot to aspire towards a society based
on Christian principles. In 1939 Eliot published a volume that was a
forerunner of Notes Towards the Definition of Culture: The Idea of a
Christian Society. The book developed from conversations with a small
group of Christian thinkers called the Moot, especially from discussion
of proposals for a new Christian order put forward by the French
Catholic philosopher (and former Action Française member) Jacques
Maritain in his treatise True Humanism (1936) (Eliot 1982: 42, Kojecky
1971: 131). The Idea of a Christian Society was also a response to the
threat of fascist and communist totalitarianism, as Europe moved toward
a second world war. ‘Deeply shaken’ by Britain’s capitulation to Hitler
in the Munich Agreement, Eliot wrote, ‘we could not match conviction
with conviction, we had no ideas with which we could either meet or
oppose the ideas opposed to us’ (1982: 82). To Eliot, the only ‘positive’
element in a culture he deemed ‘mainly negative’ was Christianity,
and he therefore recommended that England be restructured and run
according to Christian principles.

Munich Agreement. Agreement made on 29 September 1938 between the
leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Italy that required Czechoslovakia
to surrender the German-speaking Sudetenland adjacent to the German
border to Germany. The agreement was made to avert war with Germany,
but Hitler reneged on the agreement and marched into Prague the following
March.

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108 KEY IDEAS

Four Quartets resolves its questions in ‘Little Gidding’, the title referring
to a Cambridgeshire village whose history represented an ideal sympathy
between Church and State for Eliot: it is the site of a seventeenth-century
Anglican community that sheltered Charles I during the Civil War.
Eliot describes the approach to the community, imagining Charles I’s
arrival at night, a ‘broken king’, but emphasizing the continuity of the
village’s culture:

If you came this way,

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season,

It would always be the same: you would have to put off

Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation

Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

(1969a: 192)

The intersection of the timeless moment occurs not through individual
thought (‘sense and notion’), but behaviour that has been repeated by
generations (‘kneel / Where prayer has been valid’). This is why religion
and culture are so closely connected: ‘behaviour is also belief’, Eliot
wrote in Notes towards the Definition of Culture, and this ‘gives an
importance to our most trivial pursuits’, not only praying, but dancing
around the bonfire, or – to use his 1940s examples – watching a cup
final and eating Wensleydale cheese (1967: 32). All contribute to the
local and national culture.

MIDDLE AND LATE CANTOS

The Cantos’ discussion of culture also proceeds by comparison between
present and past, but it does so in quite a different manner from Four


Quartets. In place of Eliot’s intricate arguments, Pound presents ‘whole
slabs of the record’, in the form of long passages copied out of history
books and original historical documents, to bring to our attention high
points of culture that mainstream histories have ‘shelved, overclouded,
and buried’ (1970b: 30). This method is used most intensively in
Cantos LII–LXXI (1940): the first half presents translated passages from
a history of China from 3000 BC to the eighteenth century (Histoire
Générale de la Chine (1777–85) by J.A.M. de Moyriac de Mailla) and
the second half quotes at length from The Works of John Adams
(1850–1856), which records the establishment of the American republic
during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pound suggests
a continuity of civilization between Confucian China and the United
States under Adams’s guidance, before the cultural decline (in Pound’s
opinion) of the nineteenth century (1973: 147).

The China and Adams Cantos contain some of the densest material
of the poem. Pound moves through his source material extremely
swiftly, and the juxtaposition of names, abbreviated phrases, Chinese
ideograms and foreign quotations is not easy to follow: even while we
are invigorated by the welter of information, we are likely to become
frustrated by the gaps in our understanding. But that is part of Pound’s
point: we should know these histories, and our difficulties make us
aware of our ignorance of important elements of our past. For Pound,
alerting readers to these little-known areas of history and highlighting
their main lessons was more important than presenting a complete
and accurate account, and this he achieved (1970b: 151, 231). The
major points of these cantos are clear: the Chinese emperors he praises
are those who improve their subjects’ lives, both practically (‘Chin
Nong [. . .] made a plough that is used five thousand years’ and ‘held
market at mid-day’) and intellectually (‘Ti Ko set his scholars to fitting
words to their music’) (1994: 262). The diaries and letters of John
Adams reveal a personality with a similarly inclusive sense of cultural
values, a leader in the struggle for American independence, who was
also able to appreciate the importance of a ‘fine bowling green and
fine turtle, madeira’, pleasures that make up a daily life worth living
(1994: 364).

Pound had always intended The Cantos to mirror the design of Dante’s
Divine Comedy, depicting hell, purgatory and paradise, but it was only
after a quarter of a century’s work on the poem that he was ready to
begin planning his Paradiso, his vision of an ideal world, his equivalent,

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110 KEY IDEAS

in some senses, of Eliot’s Four Quartets. ‘My economic work is done
(in the main)’, he remarked in 1939, ‘I shall have to go on condensing
and restating, but am now definitely onto questions of BELIEF’ (1971:
328). But Guide to Kulchur’s chapter ‘The Promised Land’ records
Pound’s doubts about his ability to compose this final section: comparing
his poem to Dante’s, he writes that the Paradiso is ‘undiscussable
[. . .] any reach into it is almost a barrier to literary success’. While
he asserts that a ‘certain truth exists’, he questions whether it can
exist, or even be represented, outside the individual mind, and even
then it is perhaps ‘perceptible in our own minds only with proper
“lighting”, fitfully and by instants’ (1970b: 292, 294–95).

Remarkably, it was the calamitous public and personal events of the
Second World War that provided that ‘lighting’ needed to produce
The Pisan Cantos LXXIV–LXXXIV (1948), Section: Rock-Drill De Los Cantares
LXXXV–XCV (1955) and Thrones de los Cantares XCVI–CIX (1959), most
of which Pound wrote during his incarceration, first at the Disciplinary
Training Center of the US army in Pisa, and then in St Elizabeth’s.
Under these conditions, Pound initially had to abandon the compositional
method of the China and Adams Cantos: in the training centre the
only books available to him were the volume of Confucius and the
Chinese dictionary he was carrying when arrested, and a small anthology
of poetry he found (Carpenter 1988: 658, 667). Thrown back on the
resources of his own memory, The Pisan Cantos are a work of culture
in the specific sense defined in Guide to Kulchur: ‘Knowledge is NOT
culture. The domain of culture begins when one HAS “forgotten-whatbook”’
(1970b: 134). The fragmented memories of former friends,
splinters of quotation from favourite works (including his own), and
contemplation of the concrete details of daily life are as close to
Dante’s Paradiso as is possible for the modern mind:

Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel

but spezzato apparently

it exists only in fragments unexpected excellent sausage,

the smell of mint, for example,

Ladro the night cat.

(1994: 452)

While The Pisan Cantos contains some of Pound’s most technically
accomplished and highly praised poetry, its placing of the long



anticipated paradise in the individual mind, rather than in the external
world, draws attention to a major difficulty in the poem. The early
cantos related history through a multitude of voices, deliberately resisting
the use of a controlling authorial voice. But as Europe moved towards
a second world war, and Pound became more convinced of his own
solutions, his voice is heard in the poem increasingly insistently. By
the time Pound published The Pisan Cantos, the authority of the poem,
once dispersed across history, is firmly concentrated on the author,
and the poem’s successful conclusion now relies on the correctness of
his solutions. The last books of the poem attempt to externalize the
subjective paradise of The Pisan Cantos, ‘to move out from egoism and
to establish some definition of an order possible or at any rate conceivable
on earth’, as Pound told an interviewer (Hall 1962: 49). The task
proved impossible, and some of the most famous lines from the end
of the poem (Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII (1969)) attest to
Pound’s sense of failure, ‘I cannot make it cohere’, he writes in Canto
CXVI, and in Notes for CXVII et seq, ‘I have tried to write Paradise
/ [. . .] Let the Gods forgive what I / have made’ (1994: 810, 816).

What is the relevance of a poet’s social and political views to their
poetry? This question was keenly debated in the press when The Pisan
Cantos won the Bollingen Prize for the best volume of verse by an
American poet published in 1948, while Pound was incarcerated in St
Elizabeth’s. The many opponents of the award argued that in honouring
Pound the prize committee (which included Eliot) had effectively
condoned fascism and anti-Semitism. For some commentators the award
signified not only a crisis in poetry, but in literary critical values, too.
They argued that it highlighted the fundamental irresponsibility of the
‘Impersonal theory of poetry’, first defined by Eliot and subsequently
taken up by a group of university teachers known as the New Critics:
The Pisan Cantos could be admired only by refusing to connect the
political views of the poet to the poem, and by focussing on its formal
qualities, rather than its anti-Semitic and fascist content. But in fact
neither Eliot nor the New Critical members of the committee defended
their decision in this way: though The Pisan Cantos expressed political
views they condemned, it was nevertheless the book that had overwhelmingly
won the committee’s vote. To award the prize to a different,
inferior, book, seemed to them dishonest. As one of the many letters
from the public pointed out: it is not the case that ‘good poetry can

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112 KEY IDEAS

only be written by a good democrat about democratically acclaimed
ideals and emotions’ (Leick 2002: 20, 21, 24, 29).

From the 1920s onwards, Eliot and Pound insistently connected
poetry and politics: indeed, they believed that poets had a responsibility
to speak out on political issues, and that their poetic training in the
use of language was a relevant skill. Eliot begins The Idea of a Christian
Society by remarking that ‘while the practice of poetry need not in
itself confer wisdom or accumulate knowledge, it ought at least to
train the mind in one habit of universal value: that of analysing the
meanings of words’ (1982: 43). Pound comments in ‘How to Read’
that ‘the individual cannot think or communicate his thought, the
governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws, without
words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of
the damned and despised litterati’ (1960: 21). One might say that over
the course of their careers Eliot’s and Pound’s attention shifts from
poetry in particular to language in general, and this is borne out by
the extension of their writing into new genres in their middle and later
years. After publishing Four Quartets, Eliot wrote primarily for the
theatre, believing that ‘the ideal medium for poetry, to my mind, and
the most direct means of social “usefulness” for poetry, is the theatre’
(1964b: 153); alongside The Cantos, Pound published translations,
anthologies, economic tracts and textbooks. These works were not only
intended to reach a larger audience than the poetry, they were intended
to reach a different kind of audience: not the private individual, poring
over a volume of verse in isolation, but the public community, listening,
reading and – Eliot and Pound hoped – acting together.


SUMMARY

This chapter has explored Eliot’s and Pound’s engagement with social
and political questions, focussing in particular on how Eliot’s conversion
to Christianity and Pound’s commitment to Social Credit economics shaped
their poetry and their understanding of the poet’s role in society. Both
poets move away from the ideologically open texts of The Waste Land and
the early Cantos to a more didactic form of poetry: rather than analysing
the contemporary situation, this poetry aims to provide answers. Pound
thought he had found these answers in the fascist Italy of Mussolini, Eliot
in Anglo-Catholicism. Both poets wrote important prose works that
integrate their literary and social views under the banner of ‘culture’, and
their late poetry encapsulates their broad conception of this term,
prescribing it as an antidote to the political turmoil of mid-twentieth-century
Europe.

MODERNISM AND THE IDEAL SOCIETY 113


AFTER ELIOT,
HULME AND POUND

The poetic and critical legacy of Eliot, Hulme and Pound shaped the
literary landscape of the twentieth century, and in the twenty-first
century they remain essential reference points. But this is not to say
that responses to their work have been wholly positive. Their influence
has been consistently challenged, and in this concluding chapter we will
examine, first, the response to their work by subsequent poets, then
changes to the field of modernism they helped to create, and, finally,
their continuing influence in English Literature as a subject of study.

MODERNIST POETRY

Just as Eliot, Hulme and Pound shaped their poetry through complex
interactions with their literary predecessors, so the poets who came
after them defined themselves in various ways against the modernist
tradition. During the 1920s Eliot and Pound were the vanguard of
poetic revolution: The Waste Land and The Cantos dramatically expanded
the possibilities of what one could do in poetry. Their sophisticated
metrical experiments established free verse as a flexible yet demanding
medium and provided a form that could express the variety of rhythms
of conversation. They returned the venerable form of the long poem
to use in modern poetry by replacing continuous narrative with
juxtaposed images, vignettes, and quotations. In terms of content, the


116 AFTER ELIOT, HULME AND POUND

city and modernity replaced nature and universal values. These writers
also changed the very way the poet conceived of her or himself: they
rejected the romantic conception of the poet as natural genius, in
favour of the poet as a technically skilled professional.

Only a decade after the publication of The Waste Land, however, a
new generation of poets was proclaiming a break with modernism. In
1932 Michael Roberts’s anthology New Signatures appeared, grouping

W.H. Auden, C. Day Lewis and Stephen Spender, who, with Louis
MacNeice, would become the main representatives of the Thirties Poets.
In his introduction, Roberts sharply contrasted these poets with their
modernist predecessors who had, he wrote, shown contempt for
society and ‘become aloof from ordinary affairs’, producing ‘esoteric
work which was frivolously decorative or elaborately erudite’. He
characterized the Thirties Poets as engaged with their political and social
context (they were strongly drawn to Communism), appealing to a
wider, less highbrow audience, and returning rhyme and regular metre
to modern poetry (1932: 10–11, 16). The Thirties Poets had been far
more influenced by modernist poetry, especially Eliot’s, than this
description allows, and Auden especially would later be associated
with Eliot by the neo-romantic poets of the 1940s, such as Dylan
Thomas and W.S. Graham, who reacted against their intellectual, urban
poetry. In fact, one can see the beginnings of the romantic revival that
would be the key factor in the British turn against modernist poetry
in the Thirties Poets’ belief in the poet as a spokesperson, communicating
in ordinary speech. The ‘Movement’ poets of the 1950s, including
Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin and Elizabeth Jennings, turned
against both urban modernism and neo-romanticism, and instead traced
their lineage back through an English literary history unbroken by the
American interruption of Eliot and Pound. The early twentieth-century
poetry they admired was the modest, keenly observed and less
experimental verse of Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman and the Georgian
poets. By the middle of the twentieth century British poets seemed to
have moved away from modernism: Eliot, seen as by far the most
significant modernist, was rejected by most poets (despite the fact
that, as poetry editor at Faber, he was responsible for publishing many
of them), Hulme was known more as a philosopher and critic than a
poet, and Pound, who had left Britain in 1920, seemed irrelevant.
Poets in the United States have proved more consistently receptive
to modernism, and many of the twentieth century’s most important


poets identified themselves with the tradition of Eliot or Pound, though
rarely both. Eliot’s influence was deeply felt in the 1920s and 1930s
in, for example, the poems of Hart Crane, the early poetry of Robert
Lowell and in the work of the Fugitives (later known as the Southern
Agrarians), especially Allen Tate. As the century progressed, it was
the Eliot of Four Quartets, the formally-controlled guardian of tradition,
rather than the poet of The Waste Land, who was admired and imitated.
In 1960, however, Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology revealed
a new generation of poets who had been working in a different direction.
Allen’s introduction explained that the new poets rejected ‘all
those qualities typical of academic verse’, by which he meant the Eliot-
influenced verse that predominated, and instead were following the
example of Pound and Pound’s college friend and former imagist,
William Carlos Williams (1960: xi). Poets included in Allen’s anthology
included Charles Olson and the Black Mountain poets (named after
the experimental college in North Carolina with which many of them
were associated), the poets of the San Francisco renaissance, such as
Robert Duncan and Gary Snyder, and the Beat poets, including Allen
Ginsberg. These diverse poets extended Pound’s and Williams’s formal
experiments in a variety of ways, but if one were to look for a shared
approach, it would be in interpreting modernist achievement as an
energetic opening out of the poetic text. It is worth noting that much
of this experimentation went against the grain of Pound’s intention in
The Cantos, specifically in rejecting coherence as a major poetic value.
In fact, as a number of critics have commented, it was precisely the
‘failure’ of The Cantos, its lack of coherence, which proved most enabling
for these poets.

The emergence of a new generation of modernist poets in the 1960s
brought to light other, older, poets who had been working in the
Pound–Williams tradition in Britain and the United States, the most
important of whom were Basil Bunting and the Objectivist poets Louis
Zukofsky and George Oppen. It is these figures, along with other
modernists such as H.D. and Gertrude Stein, more than the once-
dominant Eliot, who stand behind the poets who today identify
themselves closely with the modernist tradition. Though too numerous
and various to describe here, some of the most important contemporary
modernists include Roy Fisher, Christopher Middleton, J.H. Prynne
and the Cambridge School, John Ashbery, and Language poets such as
Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein. Despite Eliot’s and Pound’s shared

AFTER ELIOT, HULME AND POUND 117


118 AFTER ELIOT, HULME AND POUND

history, their poetic legacies have become almost opposed traditions,
Eliot standing for the meditative lyricism and metrical order of Four
Quartets, Pound for the perceptual precision of imagism and the open
form of The Cantos.

MODERNISMS, ANTI-MODERNISMS AND
NEW MODERNISMS

The reaction against Eliot by experimental poets, especially in Britain,
was in part a response to his remarkably high reputation among the
general public and the academic establishment. From the 1920s to the
1960s Eliot’s poetry and criticism formed the basis not only for modern
poetry courses, but for a whole approach to literary study. It was
during these years that ‘modernism’ came to be defined as a period
and a literary style, and it was defined largely in relation to Eliot’s and
Hulme’s ideas.

Modernism is not a descriptive term like ‘nineteenth-century
literature’, and if it has a meaning it is a historically specific one. It
was invented as a literary category in the 1920s and first influentially
used by Laura Riding and Robert Graves in A Survey of Modernist Poetry
(1927), a guide that drew most of its examples from Eliot’s poetry
and that of e.e. cummings, an associate of Pound’s. The term entered
critical use at just the point the young discipline of English was being
transformed into a serious university subject and, when universities
began to consider offering courses in modern literature, the intellectual
rigour Riding and Graves’s Survey had shown was demanded by
modernism recommended it as an appropriate subject of study. When
students at Columbia asked for a course on modern literature, its
difficulty contributed positively to the faculty’s decision. One of its
members recalled the faculty’s attitude as ‘We shall give the course,
but we shall give it on the highest level, and if they think, as students
do, that the modern will naturally meet them in a genial way, let them
have their gay and easy time with Yeats and Eliot, with Joyce and
Proust and Kafka, with Lawrence, Mann and Gide’ (Trilling 1965: 8).

Not only was modernist literature appropriately difficult, it was
also morally serious. For a new generation of academics and critics in
both Britain and the United States, Eliot’s poetry and criticism provided
a means to analyse and criticize the direction of modern culture. In
Britain, the Cambridge academic F.R. Leavis and the critics around his


journal Scrutiny set the study of literature against what they perceived
as a national slide into mass or popular culture. In the United States,
the New Critics (who incorporated the Southern Agrarian poets) posited
literary criticism as a corrective to scientific and utilitarian approaches
to knowledge. Eliot’s key concepts of tradition, impersonality and the
dissociation of sensibility defined the new literary values, and Eliot’s
poetry provided the paradigmatic examples of modernist literature.
Hulme had a place in this new critical landscape, too: one of the most
influential New Critical essays, Joseph Frank’s ‘Spatial Form in Modern
Literature’ (1945) elevated Hulme’s account of Worringer’s theory of
abstraction to a defining principle of modernism. Frank argued that
modernist literature’s major innovation was in disrupting the way we
read in time (one word after another), by using the cubist technique
of juxtaposition. In poems such as The Waste Land and The Cantos, he
argued, fragments are juxtaposed in space, requiring the reader to
apprehend the fragments simultaneously, as a unity (1991: 5–66). The
first substantial book-length studies of Eliot (F.O. Matthiessen’s 1935
The Achievement of T.S. Eliot) and Pound (Hugh Kenner’s 1951 The
Poetry of Ezra Pound) appeared during this period and, like most studies
of modernism until the late 1970s, they emphasized the formal and
intellectual unity that Eliot’s essays had trained them to recognize as
the supreme literary value.

When the critical tide turned against Leavisite criticism and the
New Criticism in the 1970s, it also turned against the perceived sources
of its values: modernism and, especially, Eliot. The new critical
approaches, loosely grouped under the label of ‘postmodernism’, defined
themselves not only as after modernism, as the term suggests, but
often against modernism, too. Though notoriously difficult to define,
for our purposes postmodernism can best be understood as a critique
of modernity and its major beliefs and values, such as progress,
rationality, the unified self and ‘grand narratives’ (like religion, science
or history). According to many critics of the 1970s and 1980s modernism
was the artistic embodiment of these values.

In his Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974, English translation 1984) the
German critic Peter Bürger argued that modernism was not the break
with the past it claimed to be, but rather the last gasp of romanticism.
The real break with the past was made by what he called ‘the historical
avant-garde’, the proto-postmodernist movements of Dada and
surrealism, which became prominent in the 1920s. Previously, ‘avant-

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120 AFTER ELIOT, HULME AND POUND

garde’ had been a term synonymous with modernism, both taken to
mean self-consciously experimental art, and indeed Dada and surrealism
were usually described as modernist movements. Bürger, however,
used ‘avant-garde’ in a very specific sense. He argued that the historical
avant-garde did not simply create new styles of art, as the modernists
did, and as the romantics had before them; they changed the nature
of art itself. They did this by taking art out of its separate sphere and
making it part of everyday life: they made collages and constructions
of mass-produced objects and poems from newspaper cuttings, thereby
negating the concept of the individual artist creating an ‘original’ work.
They created for the crowd, rather than the individual (1984: 51–53).
Bürger’s argument was extended by another critic, Andreas Huyssen,
who argued that modernism instituted a ‘Great Divide’ between high
art and mass culture, and postmodernism, born from Bürger’s historical
avant-garde, rightly rejected that divide (1988: vii-viii).

Influential as these arguments have been, it has since been pointed
out that the version of modernism presented here is somewhat of
a straw man. If postmodernism is a critique of modernity, so is
modernism: Eliot’s and Hulme’s cyclical view of history, all three poets’
preference for intuition over reason and the questioning of grand
narratives undertaken by Pound in The Cantos and Eliot in The Waste
Land all suggest that modernism and postmodernism have significant
shared interests. The modernism that postmodernism is post is not so
much the early twentieth-century experimental art movement than it
is the New Critical and Leavisite version of modernism, and in freeing
modernism from these associations the postmodernist critique has
rejuvenated modernist studies. In the 1980s critics such as Maud
Ellmann, Marjorie Perloff and Jean-Michel Rabaté provided vibrant
new readings of The Waste Land and The Cantos that highlighted their
postmodernist potential. More recently, critics have begun to dismantle
canonical modernism itself, and have started to explore previously
obscured modernisms, the plural form influentially used as the title of
Peter Nicholls’s 1995 study. Bonnie Kime Scott’s The Gender of Modernism
(1990) and Suzanne Clark’s Sentimental Modernism (1991) have returned
female writers to the overwhelmingly male modernist canon; Michael
North’s The Dialect of Modernism (1998) highlighted the centrality of
race; and Laura Doyle and Laura Winkel’s collection of essays
Geomodernisms (2005) reminds us that modernism was not only an Anglo-
American movement. Eliot, Hulme and Pound are by no means excluded


from these new modernisms – indeed Hulme appears to be enjoying
somewhat of a resurgence – but their dominance in literary history is
rightly being questioned.

HOW TO READ

The subject of English Literature is no longer dominated by Eliot’s,
Hulme’s and Pound’s critical values. In place of a theory of impersonality,
we have the rise of life writing; political engagement is valued over
critical disinterestedness; originality is once again a term of praise.
Their influence over the literary canon has lessened: Milton, Shelley
and Swinburne can now be studied without shame. But in one area
our study of literature is still directed by these poets: in the priority
given to close reading.

By ‘close reading’, I mean the detailed analysis of a short work or
extract from a work, where the focus is primarily on the interrelation
of the text’s linguistic elements, rather than its authorial or historical
context. It is often an exercise set in examinations, and it is a fundamental
building block of most other (more contextual) kinds of criticism
taught in school and university English departments. It may seem so
normal, so natural, a practice that it is hard to imagine how one would
study literature without it. Yet, there was criticism before close reading.
It usually took the form of ‘gossipy, and often highly metaphorical,
description and unspecific praise’, as one early twentieth-century critic
remembered (Tillyard 1958: 84). Close reading was effectively invented
in the mid-1920s by a young Cambridge lecturer called I.A. Richards,
who had been deeply impressed by Eliot’s, Hulme’s and Pound’s
work. Richards’s Practical Criticism (1929) aimed to provide a new
technique of poetic analysis: it isolated a series of ‘reading malfunctions’
Richards had observed in his students’ analyses of poems when contextual
material (such as author and date) was removed. Like Eliot’s, Richards’s
educational background was in philosophy, and like Eliot’s, his criticism
drew on its analytical procedures. And although Eliot criticized aspects
of Richards’s approach, it was his criticism, especially in The Sacred
Wood and Homage to John Dryden, which provided the basis of Practical
Criticism, particularly its tools of ‘comparison and analysis’, as opposed
to interpretation from context, and its aim of discerning (in poets) and
developing (in readers) ‘the unification of sensibility’ (Eliot 1980: 33,
286; Richards 1929: 9–12, 304). More generally, Richards’s method

AFTER ELIOT, HULME AND POUND 121


122 AFTER ELIOT, HULME AND POUND

also drew on Hulme’s and Pound’s criticism, in particular their aversion
to rhetoric, their emphasis on visual imagery and precise statement,
and, above all, their very close attention to language.

Practical Criticism institutionalized Eliot’s, Hulme’s and Pound’s
early theories of poetry and criticism and disseminated them to universities
and schools across Britain and the United States. It is no longer
the only way we approach literature, and we are now well schooled
in the intellectual dangers of reading literature out of context. But,
nevertheless, close reading is a modernist approach to criticism: Eliot,
Hulme and Pound taught us to read, and they continue to do so.


FURTHER READING


PRIMARY WORKS

Works by T.S. Eliot

–––– (2004) The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, London: Faber
& Faber

This is the most comprehensive edition of Eliot’s poetry and drama
available.

–––– (1971) The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original
Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot, London:
Faber & Faber

When this facsimile was published it transformed how people read
The Waste Land. It reproduces Eliot’s typescripts and manuscripts
(including his, his wife’s and Pound’s annotations), with very useful
notes by Eliot’s second wife. The American critic Lawrence Rainey
has recently published a new edition of The Waste Land with an
introduction that provides a very detailed analysis of these drafts: The
Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, New Haven: Yale
University Press.

–––– (1999) Selected Essays, London: Faber & Faber

Although this is a relatively small selection of the many essays Eliot
wrote, it contains most of the essays you will find critics citing, and


124 FURTHER READING

is certainly the place to start with Eliot’s prose. A very good alternative
selection, harder to obtain in the UK, is Frank Kermode’s 1975 Selected
Prose of T.S. Eliot, New York: Harvest.

–––– (1996) Inventions of the March Hare, ed. Christopher Ricks, New
York: Harcourt Brace & Company

This collection presents Eliot’s early, pre-Prufrock poetry, most of
it unpublished elsewhere, and is invaluable for showing the early
development of his style. It has an excellent introduction and notes by
a leading Eliot scholar.

–––– (1988) The Letters of T.S. Eliot, 1898–1922, ed. Valerie Eliot,
London: Faber & Faber

This is the first and, currently, only volume of Eliot’s letters available.
It provides a fascinating insight into his youth and college years, and
documents the beginning of his career in London.

Works by T.E. Hulme

–––– (1994) The Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri,
Oxford: Clarendon Press

This is the most complete and accurate collection of Hulme’s essays
and poetry, with an authoritative introduction and notes. It corrects
the mis-datings present in the two previously available collections of
Hulme’s essays, Speculations, ed. Herbert Read, London: Routledge
and Further Speculations, ed. Sam Hynes, Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press.

–––– (2003) Selected Writings, ed. Patrick McGuinness

This excellent selection contains more of Hulme’s poetry, but fewer
essays, in particular fewer of the essays on Bergson. Nevertheless,
Hulme’s most important work is here, the introduction is good and,
unlike the edition above, it is easily available and affordable.

Works by Ezra Pound

–––– (2001) Personae: Collected Shorter Poems, London: Faber & Faber

This has for years been the standard collection of Pound’s non-
Cantos poetry and contains most of his important work, but the


recently published Library of America edition (below) is much more
comprehensive.

–––– (2003) Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth,
New York: Library of America

Excellent collection of Pound’s non-Cantos poetry, chosen by one
of the best Pound scholars. It combines previously separate volumes
of early poetry, shorter poetry and translations. More difficult to
obtain in the UK than in the US.

–––– (1994) The Cantos, London: Faber & Faber

The Cantos was published in sections during Pound’s lifetime, and
this edition collects the separate books together. A Selected Cantos is
published by New Directions.

–––– (1976) Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. Michael John
King, New York: New Directions

This contains Pound’s early poetry, both his first published volumes
and also notebooks and poems unpublished elsewhere.

–––– (1954) Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot, London:
Faber & Faber

The first collection of Pound’s essays to be published, it appeared
in 1954 while Pound was held in St Elizabeth’s, and therefore excludes
his more controversial writings. It is somewhat idiosyncratic in its
choices, and should be supplemented by Selected Prose.

–––– (1973) Selected Prose, ed. William Cookson, New York: New
Directions

A more representative collection than Literary Essays, but both are
needed because no essays are repeated across the volumes. Includes
essays on economic and political topics as well as important literary
essays.

–––– (1971) The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D.D.
Paige, New York: New Directions

Many of Pound’s most important statements about poetry were
made in his letters. Like the Literary Essays, this collection was first
published when Pound was in St Elizabeth’s and emphasizes his literary
work rather than his political and economic interests. There are many
further editions of Pound’s letters available, organized by correspondent.

FURTHER READING 125


126 FURTHER READING

SECONDARY WORKS

Works on T.S. Eliot

Asher, Kenneth (1995) T.S. Eliot and Ideology, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press

This book provides the most detailed analysis of Eliot’s interaction
with Charles Maurras and the Action Française.

Bush, Ronald (1984) T.S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style, Oxford:
Oxford University Press

Probably the best general account of Eliot’s work in the last 25
years. This is an even-handed, extremely perceptive account of Eliot’s
poetry and thought and it also provides discussion of the various critical
debates Eliot’s work has inspired.

Chinitz, David E. (2003) T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press

Influential recent work that argues against the standard view of
Eliot as a highbrow, by reading his poetry through his popular culture
interests, such as detective fiction, music hall and jazz.

Crawford, Robert (1990) The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S.
Eliot, Oxford: Clarendon Press

Wide-ranging discussion on Eliot’s poetry and prose, which is
particularly strong on Eliot’s interest in anthropology and myth.

Gordon, Lyndall (2000) T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, New York: Norton

This biography, a synthesis of Gordon’s two previous biographies
on Eliot, Eliot’s Early Years (1977) and Eliot’s New Life (1988), is the
most detailed and literary critical of the extant biographies. Peter
Ackroyd’s 1993 T.S. Eliot, London: Penguin is also good.

Jain, Manju (1992) T.S. Eliot and American Philosophy, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press

Of the several excellent books on Eliot’s philosophical studies, this
is the best to begin with. It provides a clear, detailed account of Eliot’s
education in philosophy at Harvard, including his Bergsonian year in
Paris, and gives a good sense of the state of American philosophy
during the early twentieth century. It also has a useful appendix of the
courses Eliot took at Harvard. Rafey Habib’s study, The Early T.S. Eliot
and Western Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, is also
very good, especially on Eliot and Bergson.


–––– (2002) A Critical Reading of the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, Delhi:
Oxford University Press

This is the best line-by-line guide to Eliot’s poetry, although B.C.
Southam’s more easily available A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems
of T.S. Eliot will also explain most local difficulties. Neither includes
Four Quartets, which is covered by Harry Blamires’s Word Unheard: A
Guide Through Eliot’s Four Quartets, London: Methuen.

Julius, Anthony (1995) T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Julius is unequivocal in his argument that Eliot’s anti-Semitism is
an integral part of his poetic and prose projects. Although this is the
most famous and most thorough discussion of the topic, Christopher
Ricks’s 1988 study, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice, London: Faber, contains
an important chapter on anti-Semitism, and current opinion is summed
up in the roundtable ‘Eliot and Anti-Semitism: The Ongoing Debate’
in Modernism/Modernity, 10 (2003), 1–70

Kojecky´, Roger (1971) T.S. Eliot’s Social Criticism, London: Faber &
Faber

Still the only book to provide a sustained account of Eliot’s writings
on society and culture.

Menand, Louis (1987), Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context,
New York: Oxford University Press

Readable, insightful account of Eliot’s role in the creation of
modernism, with an emphasis on the way Eliot’s strategic packaging
and marketing of his critical ideas created an audience for his and his
colleagues’ poetry.

Works on T.E. Hulme

Comentale, Edward P. (2004) Modernism, Cultural Production, and the
British Avant-garde, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

This has a chapter on Hulme that argues for his centrality to modernism,
and is particularly insightful on the context of the romanticism/
classicism opposition.

–––– and Gasiorek, Andrzej (eds) (2006), T.E. Hulme and the Question
of Modernism, Aldershot: Ashgate

FURTHER READING 127


128 FURTHER READING

This collection of essays on all aspects of Hulme’s writing (poetry,
philosophy, art criticism, politics) gives an excellent sense of the current
state of Hulme studies.

Ferguson, Robert (2002) The Short Sharp Life of T.E. Hulme, London:
Penguin

The most recent of the Hulme biographies, and therefore able to
draw on the most collective wisdom. This is the place to start, but
the two previous biographies, Michael Roberts’s 1938 T.E. Hulme,
London: Faber & Faber, and Alun Jones’s 1960 The Life and Opinions
of T.E. Hulme, London: Gollancz, remain important, even though they
are hampered by the mis-dating of Hulme’s essays which obscures the
trajectory of Hulme’s thought.

Rae, Patricia (1997) The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme,
Pound, and Stevens, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press

This is a well-regarded scholarly work that places Hulme’s and
Pound’s theories of poetry in the American philosophical tradition of
pragmatism. It is not an easy read, but its description of an American,
rather than French, philosophical background for modernism is
important.

Works on Ezra Pound

Bell, Ian F.A. (1981) Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra
Pound, London: Methuen

Excellent account of Pound’s criticism and poetry, focussing on the
influence of new scientific writing on Pound’s thought. Very helpful
in analysing some of the most distinctive aspects of modernism, such
as its concern with precision, energy and pattern.

Bernstein, Michael André (1980) The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and
the Modern Verse Epic, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

One of the most important general accounts of The Cantos. This
book interprets the poem in the context of the epic tradition, and also
looks at the legacy of the poem in the work of William Carlos Williams
and Charles Olson.

Brooker, Peter, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound,
London: Faber & Faber


There are several good line-by-line guides to Pound’s Selected Poems,
but this guide, and Christine Froula’s 1983 A Guide to Ezra Pound’s
Selected Poems, New York: New Directions, are particularly helpful.
They gloss most difficulties in the shorter poetry and selections of The
Cantos.

Bush, Ronald (1976) The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press

Engaging and thorough account of the early stages of The Cantos,
which provides the best introduction to the major aims and themes of
the poem. It also reproduces Pound’s ‘Three Cantos’ (1917), important
but discarded early cantos.

Carpenter, Humphrey (1988) A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound,
London: Faber & Faber

This enormous biography is exhaustive in its detail: a fascinating
read, but also an invaluable resource (its index is excellent). The other
biography that is also worth consulting is Noel Stock’s 1970 The Life
of Ezra Pound, Harmondsworth: Penguin, written by a poet and critic
who knew Pound and was able to consult him while writing the
biography.

Kenner, Hugh (1973) The Pound Era, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA:
University of California Press

This is the best-known book on Pound and, indeed, one of the most
influential works of criticism in modernist studies. It is impressionistic
and partisan, but brilliant and wide-ranging. Essential reading.

Nicholls, Peter (1984) Politics, Economics and Writing: A Study of Ezra
Pound’s Cantos

Excellent analysis of the impact of Pound’s economic theories on
his poetry. Even for readers uninterested in the economic angle, this
is one of the most important books on The Cantos.

Redman, Tim (1991) Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press

The best book on Pound’s politics, combining detailed biography
with perceptive literary criticism. It also contains the clearest summary
of Pound’s economic theories.

Terrell, Carroll F. (1993) A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound,
Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press

FURTHER READING 129


130 FURTHER READING

Essential guide to serious study of The Cantos, which explains every
reference in the poem, apart from those that continue to elude scholars.
It does not, however, provide overview critical interpretations (as
Brooker and Froula do, above). A much less comprehensive guide, but
one that may be more useful for initial encounters with The Cantos is
William Cookson’s A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, London: Anvil
Press.

Witemeyer, Hugh (1969) The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms and Renewal,
1908–1920, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California
Press

Though a number of studies have been written about Pound’s early
poetry since this book appeared, this is still the most accessible and
astute introduction to the pre-Cantos verse.

WORKS ON MODERNISM

Armstrong, Tim (2005), Modernism: A Cultural History, Cambridge:
Polity

The best of the many recent introductions to modernism. Remarkably
wide-ranging account of modernism that represents the concerns of
modernist studies in the 2000s as Nicholls’s volume did in the 1990s.

Bürger, Peter (1984) Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw,
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press

Key work in modernist studies, which distinguishes between
modernism and ‘the historical avant-garde’, to the detriment of
modernism. It is written in dense, philosophical prose, but provides a
penetrating analysis of modernism, the avant-garde and, indeed, the
role of art more generally.

Jones, Peter (ed.) (2001) Imagist Poetry, London: Penguin

This is an anthology of imagist poetry, invaluable in itself, but listed
here because its introduction provides one of the clearest short accounts
of the imagist movement.

Kermode, Frank (2001) Romantic Image, London: Routledge

First published in 1957, it was this ground-breaking work that
established the romantic and aestheticist heritage of modernism.

Longenbach, James (1987) Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and
the Sense of the Past, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press


This is a scholarly work that works through some difficult material:
it is the best of the surprisingly small number of critical works that
deal with modernism’s theories of history.

Levenson, Michael H. (1984) A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study in
English Literary Doctrine, 1908–1922, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press

Much admired analysis of the critical connections that produced
modernism. This book is more literary critical, less philosophical, than
Schwartz’s (below), and is renowned particularly for its re-dating of
Hulme’s essays, which transformed our understanding of his career.
The best single introduction to the Eliot–Hulme–Pound strand of
modernism.

Nicholls, Peter (1995) Modernisms, Basingstoke: Macmillan

This book is representative of the shift away from the New Critical
version of modernism in the 1990s, expanding the modernist canon
and showing the relevance of theoretical questions raised by studies of
postmodernism.

Rainey, Lawrence (1999) Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and
Public Culture, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press

Highly detailed and compelling account of modernism’s dissemination
through its ‘institutions’: its publishing houses, journals, patronage
system and drawing rooms. One of its two chapters on Pound concerns
Pound’s marketing of imagism, the other discusses the Malatesta Cantos
in relation to fascism; the chapter on Eliot analyses the publication of
The Waste Land.

Schwartz, Sanford (1985) The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and
Early Twentieth Century Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press

A pioneering account of the philosophical and critical ideas that
underpin modernism, written in very clear and accessible prose.

FURTHER READING 131


WORKS CITED


Allen, Donald M. (ed.) (1960) The New American Poetry, London: Grove
Press

Antliff, Mark and Leighten, Patricia (2001) Cubism and Culture, London:
Thames & Hudson

Asher, Kenneth (1995) T.S. Eliot and Ideology, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press

Badenhausen, Richard (2004) T.S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Balakian, Anna (ed.) (1982) The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of
the European Languages, Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó

Baudelaire, Charles (1964) Baudelaire as a Literary Critic: Selected Essays,
trans. Lois Boe Hyslop and Francis E. Hyslop, Jr, University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press

Beasley, Rebecca (2006) ‘“A Definite Meaning”: The Art Criticism of

T.E. Hulme’, in Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek (eds)
T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, Aldershot: Ashgate
–––– (2007) Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press


134 WORKS CITED

Bentham, Jeremy (1825) The Rationale of Reward, London: Hunt

–––– (1988) A Fragment on Government, ed. J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Bergson, Henri (1910) Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate

Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson, London: Swan Sonnenschein

–––– (1913) An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T.E. Hulme, London:
Macmillan
–––– (1988) Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and

W. Scott Palmer, New York: Zone Books
–––– (2002) Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey,
New York: Continuum

Bloom, Harold (1973) The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, New
York: Oxford University Press

Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane (eds) (1976) Modernism,
1890–1930, Harmondsworth: Penguin

Bradley, F.H. (1897) Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay, London:
George Allen and Unwin

Buitenhuis, Peter (1989) The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda,
1914–18 and After, London: Batsford

Bürger, Peter (1984) Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw,
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press

Bush, Ronald (1976) The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press

–––– (1984) T.S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style, Oxford: Oxford
University Press

Carpenter, Humphrey (1988) A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound,
London: Faber

Childs, Donald J. (2001) From Philosophy to Poetry: T.S. Eliot’s Study of
Knowledge and Experience, London: Athlone Press

Clarke, Bruce (1996) Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender,
Individualism, Science, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press


Crawford, Robert (1990) The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S.

Eliot, Oxford: Clarendon Press
Davenport, Guy (1983) Cities on Hills: A Study of I–XXX of Ezra Pound’s
Cantos, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press

Douglas, C.H. (1920a) Credit-Power and Democracy with a Draft Scheme
for the Mining Industry, London: Cecil Palmer

–––– (1920b) Economic Democracy, London: Cecil Palmer
Eliot, Charlotte (1926) Savonarola: A Dramatic Poem, ed. T.S. Eliot,
London: Cobden-Sanderson


Eliot, T.S. (1917) ‘[Review of] Reflections on Violence. By Georges Sorel’,
Monist, 27: [478]-479.
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INDEX


‘Above the Dock’ (Hulme) 36–37,
39
Action Française 4, 9, 49–54, 71,

87, 103, 107
aestheticism 21–31, 51, 95
After Strange Gods (Eliot) 11,

102–104
Aldington, Richard 6, 37–38, 40,

47, 80
allusion 10, 27, 63–64, 77, 92
anarchism see individualism
Andrewes, Lancelot 97–98
Anglo-Catholicism 8, 11, 95–98,

102–104, 107–108, 113
anthropology 9, 10, 69–71, 79,
84–86
anti-democracy 47–61, 87–88,

101–102
anti-Semitism 50, 101, 104, 111
Ara vos Prec (Eliot) 9, 58–59, 61, 64,

77
Ariel poems (Eliot) 98
‘Ash-Wednesday’ (Eliot) 98
‘Autumn’ (Hulme) 29, 34, 37, 39
avant-garde 119–120

Babbitt, Irving 9, 10, 51–53, 57, 96,
103

Baudelaire, Charles 25, 27, 53, 54

Beat poetry 117

Bentham, Jeremy 22–23

Bergson, Henri 4, 6, 9, 13, 14,
33–46, 51, 54–55, 67, 75, 82, 106

Black Mountain poets 117

Bloom, Harold 20–21

Bradley, F.H. 9, 14–15, 42–46, 70,
82, 91, 107

Browning, Robert 28–29, 53, 54,
89–90

Bürger, Peter 119–120

Cambridge School 117

The Cantos (Pound) 1, 5, 7, 10, 39,
63–64, 69, 77, 79–86, 88–93,
100–103, 108–113, 117–118, 120;
Adams Cantos (Cantos 62–71)
85–86, 90, 109–110; China Cantos
(Cantos 52–61) 85–86, 90,
109–110; Drafts and Fragments
(Cantos 110–117) 111; Hell Cantos
(Cantos 14–15) 80, 102; Jefferson


142 INDEX

Cantos (Cantos 31–34) 85–86, 90,
92; Malatesta Cantos (Cantos 8–11)
85–86, 90, 101–102; The Pisan
Cantos (Cantos 74–84) 7, 102,
110–112; Rock-Drill (Cantos 85–95)
102, 110 ; ‘Three Cantos’ 90;
Thrones (Cantos 96–109), 102, 110

capitalism 22, 98; see also economics

Cathay (Pound) 6, 76–77

Chinese language 6, 69, 74–75, 100

Chinese poetry 40

‘The Chinese Written Character as a
Medium for Poetry’ (Fenollosa/
Pound) 74–75

‘Cinders’ (Hulme) 3, 12

classicism 4, 9, 40, 47–54, 57–59,
61, 67, 71, 86, 92, 96–97, 103

communism 101, 116

Confucius 6, 7, 86, 90–91, 105, 109,
110

cream-puffs, stale 28

The Criterion 10, 11, 52–53, 75, 103

criticism 10, 11, 52–53, 92, 95

cubism 71–72, 119

culture 99, 102, 105–113, 118

Dada 119–120

Dante 66, 77, 81–84, 92–93, 97–98,
109–110

difficulty 10, 15, 63–64, 109, 116,
118; see also allusion

dissociation of sensibility 53–54, 61,
119, 121

Donne, John 53, 58–59, 97

Douglas, C.H. 6, 98–100; see also
economics

dramatic poetry 5, 28–29, 79, 81,
88–91

Dreyfus Affair 50

economics 6–7, 95, 98–101, 110, 113

The Egoist 6, 9, 38, 54–56, 61, 80, 83

English studies 10, 118–119, 121–122;
see also criticism

Epstein, Jacob 4, 6, 71–73

Faber 10, 116

fascism 5, 7, 50, 56, 101–104, 107,
111, 113

Fenollosa, Ernest 6, 69, 73–78, 89

First World War 2, 4, 6, 79–80,
86–87, 95

Flaubert, Gustave 83

Flint, F.S. 33–34, 37

Ford, Ford Madox 82, 87

For Lancelot Andrewes (Eliot) 97

Four Quartets (Eliot) 11, 77, 106–110,
112, 117, 118; ‘Burnt Norton’ 11,
106; ‘The Dry Salvages’ 11, 106;
‘East Coker’ 11, 106–107; ‘Little
Gidding’ 11, 77, 108

Frazer, James 69–71, 84–86, 91

free verse 1, 3, 14, 26–31, 34, 38,
56–58, 115

French symbolism 3, 14, 19, 24–34,
36, 39–40, 57, 74–75, 95

Freud, Sigmund 70

Frobenius, Leo 105

Fugitive poets see Southern Agrarian
poets

‘The Function of Criticism’ (Eliot) 52

Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 6, 73, 80
Gautier, Théophile 58–61
Georgian poetry 116
‘Gerontion’ (Eliot) 68, 104
Gesell, Silvio 100
Guide to Kulchur (Pound) 7, 105, 110

‘Hamlet and his Problems’ (Eliot)
45–46

Hart, Bernard 38

H.D. 6, 37, 40, 47, 117
historical sense 64–66, 68
history 67–70, 75, 79–82, 84–86, 88,
104, 106–109, 119, 120
‘The Hollow Men’ (Eliot) 98
Homage to John Dryden (Eliot) 53–54,
121
‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’
(Pound) 77


Homer 65, 66, 81, 83–85, 90–92
‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ (Pound) 7,
58–61, 63–64, 86
humanism 4, 52, 71–73, 87, 96; see
also romanticism
‘The Humanism of Irving Babbitt’
(Eliot) 52, 96
Huyssen, Andreas 120

The Idea of a Christian Society (Eliot)

11, 107, 112
idealism 41–44
ideogrammic method 6, 7, 14, 65–66,

75, 89
‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’ (Pound)
6, 66–67
imagism 1, 3, 6, 15, 31–34, 36–40,
55, 63, 66, 74, 81, 89, 118, 122
impersonality 10, 65, 88, 92, 111,
119, 121
‘In a Station of the Metro’ (Pound)
39–40, 75
individualism 6, 22, 54–57, 61,
66–67, 86

Jameson, Fredric 22, 31, 68
Japanese poetry 34, 39–40, 89
Jefferson and/ or Mussolini (Pound) 7,

102
Joyce, James 10, 79, 83–84, 118
Julius, Anthony 104

Kahn, Gustave 26, 30
Kenner, Hugh 8, 119

Laforgue, Jules 8, 25, 29, 53
Language poetry 117
Lasserre, Pierre 4, 9, 49, 51–52, 54
Leavis, F.R. 8, 10, 118–120
‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’

(Hulme) 3, 20, 30–31, 38, 67
Lewis, Wyndham 4, 6, 71–72, 80
literary tradition 20–21, 63–68, 75,

92, 119
The Little Review 74, 83

Longenbach, James 68
‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’


(Eliot) 9, 28–30, 59, 60
Lowell, Amy 38, 56
luminous detail see ideogrammic

method

Mallarmé, Stephane 25–27
Maritain, Jacques 103, 107
Marsden, Dora 54–55, 61
mass culture 60, 119–120
Maurras, Charles 4, 9, 10, 49–54, 57,

61, 71, 96, 103
‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (Eliot)

53–54, 58
Milton, John 54, 81, 121
‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’

(Hulme) 4, 71–73
modernism, major issues of 1–2,

11–12, 19, 79, 118–121
Morris, William 5, 28
Movement poets 116
music 5, 23–24, 85
Mussolini, Benito 5, 7, 101–103, 113
myth see anthropology

‘Near Perigord’ (Pound) 68–69
The New Age 6, 33–34, 36, 98
New Critics 8, 111, 119–120

The New Freewoman see The Egoist

Nietzsche, Friedrich 54
Noh drama 6, 89
‘Notes on Language and Style’

(Hulme) 3

Notes towards the Definition of Culture

(Eliot) 11, 105–108

objective correlative 15, 45–46
objectivist poetry 117
Ovid 85

paideuma 105
Pater, Walter 22
Picasso, Pablo 71–72
Poetry 6, 9, 37–38

INDEX 143


144 INDEX

Poets’ Club 3, 33–34

politics 2, 4, 47–61, 95, 101–104,
107, 112, 121; see also anti-
democracy, fascism, individualism

positivism 35, 42

‘The Possibility of Poetic Drama’
(Eliot) 89

postmodernism 119–120

‘Prose and Verse’ (Eliot) 82

Racine, Jean 49, 53

realist novel 82–83

religion 4, 35, 48, 69–73, 82, 84–85,
95–98, 102–108, 110, 113, 119;
see also Anglo-Catholicism

‘The Return’ (Pound) 28–29, 73

‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ (Eliot)
41–42, 46

Richards I.A. 8, 10, 121–122

romanticism 4, 9, 47–54, 57, 58–59,
71, 86, 87–88, 92, 116, 119–120

‘Romanticism and Classicism’
(Hulme) 4, 20, 47–49, 51, 53, 67

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 28

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 50–51, 54

Royce, Josiah 69

Russell, Bertrand 4, 46

The Sacred Wood (Eliot) 9–10, 21, 88,
95, 97, 121

San Francisco renaissance 117

Saussure, Ferdinand de 27

Second World War 7, 50, 102–104,
110–111

‘The Serious Artist’ (Pound) 55–56,
57, 61, 66

Shakespeare, William 40, 45, 49, 66,
84

Social Credit see economics

Sorel, Georges 4, 10, 55, 75, 87–88,
103
Southern Agrarian poets 117, 119
The Spirit of Romance (Pound) 6, 13
Stirner, Max 54
surrealism 119–120
Swinburne, Algernon 5, 22–24,
28–29, 49, 121
Symons, Arthur 8, 25

Thirties poets 116
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’
(Eliot) 10, 20, 65–66, 67, 76, 96
translation 27, 75–78, 91–92
troubadour poetry 5, 24, 28

Upward, Allen 70–71
utilitarianism 21–23, 31, 35, 46, 75,
119

Verdenal, Jean 80
visual art 4, 60, 69, 71–73
vorticism 71–73, 89

‘War Notes’ (Hulme) 4, 87
The Waste Land (Eliot) 1, 10, 63–64,
69, 70, 76, 79–86, 88–89, 91–93,
98, 104, 113, 117, 120
Webster, John 53, 58–59
Wensleydale cheese 105, 108
Weston, Jessie 84–86, 88, 91
‘Whispers of Immortality’ (Eliot) 58
Wilde, Oscar 22
Williams, William Carlos 117
Wordsworth, William 48, 58, 65,
82
Worringer Wilhelm 4, 72–73, 119

Yeats, W.B. 24–26, 28, 85, 118