late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, (1837-1909), English poets.
when English writers such as John Dryden (1631? 1. Elsewhere in the essay, Hulme claims that
1700) and Alexander Pope (1688-1744)embraced every sort of verse has an accompanying receptive
a classicism likened to the Augustan Age of Rome. attitude by which readers come to expect certain
Alphonse Lamartine (1790?1869), French poet qualities from poetry. These receptive attitudes, he
and politician. Victor Hugo (1802-1885), French explains, sometimes outlast the poetry from which
poet and novelist. John Keats (1795-1821), Sam-they develop.
uel Taylor Coleridge (1772?1834), George Gordon 2. From The Duchess of Malfi (1623) 4.2, by the
(Lord) Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley English dramatist John Webster (ca. 1580-ca.
(1792?1822), Algernon Charles Swinburne 1625).
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2002 / MODERNIST MANIFESTOS
was on land or sea. It is always perfectly human and never exaggerated: man is always man and never a god. But the awful result of romanticism is that, accustomed to this strange light, you can never live without it. Its effect on you is that of a drug.
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* * * It is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things.
The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing is to recognise how extraordinarily difficult this is. It is no mere matter of carefulness; you have to use language, and language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise? that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle with language, whether it be with words or the technique of other arts. Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas. It is only by a concentrated effort of the mind that you can hold it fixed to your own purpose. I always think that the fundamental process at the back of all the arts might be represented by the following metaphor. You know what I call architect's curves?flat pieces of wood with all different kinds of curvature. By a suitable selection from these you can draw approximately any curve you like. The artist I take to be the man who simply can't bear the idea of that 'approximately'. He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind. I shall here have to change my metaphor a little to get the process in his mind. Suppose that instead of your curved pieces of wood you have a springy piece of steel of the same types of curvature as the wood. Now the state of tension or concentration of mind, if he is doing anything really good in this struggle against the ingrained habit of the technique, may be represented by a man employing all his fingers to bend the steel out of its own curve and into the exact curve which you want. Something different to what it would assume naturally.
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This is the point I aim at, then, in my argument. I prophesy that a period of dry, hard, classical verse is coming. I have met the preliminary objection founded on the bad romantic aesthetic that in such verse, from which the infinite is excluded, you cannot have the essence of poetry at all.
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* * * Poetry 4 * * 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. A poet says a ship 'coursed the seas' to get a physical image, instead of the counter word 'sailed'. Visual meanings can only be transferred by the new bowl of metaphor; prose is an old pot that lets them leak out. Images in verse are not mere decoration, but the very essence of an intuitive language. Verse is a pedestrian taking you over the ground, prose?a train which delivers you at a destination.
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F. S. FLINT AND EZRA POUND / 2003 * * * The point is that exactly the same activity is at work as in the highest verse. That is the avoidance of conventional language in order to get the exact curve of the thing.
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* * * A powerfully imaginative mind seizes and combines at the same instant all the important ideas of its poem or picture, and while it works with one of them, it is at the same instant working with and modifying all in their relation to it and never losing sight of their bearings on each other?as the motion of a snake's body goes through all parts at once and its volition acts at the same instant in coils which go contrary ways.
A romantic movement must have an end of the very nature of the thing. It may be deplored, but it can't be helped?wonder must cease to be wonder.
I guard myself here from all the consequences of the analogy, but it expresses at any rate the inevitableness of the process. A literature of wonder must have an end as inevitably as a strange land loses its strangeness when one lives in it. Think of the lost ecstasy of the Elizabethans. 'Oh my America, my new found land,'3 think of what it meant to them and of what it means to us. Wonder can only be the attitude of a man passing from one stage to another, it can never be a permanently fixed thing.
1911-12 1924
3. Line 27 of John Donne's 'To His Mistress Going to Bed.' F. S. FLINT AND EZRA POUND In the March 1913 issue of Poetry magazine, the English poet and translator F. S. Flint published an article summarizing an interview with an unidentified 'imagiste'? surely Ezra Pound. The article, partly dictated and rewritten by Pound, famously states the three principles of imagism?directness, economy, musical rhythm?which Pound later said he and the poets H. D. and Richard Aldington had agreed on in 1912. Flint's prefatory piece was followed in the same issue by Pound's manifesto, 'A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste.' There Pound defines the image and issues injunctions and admonitions to help poets strip their verse of unnecessary rhetoric and abstraction. Poets, he argues, should write direct, musically cadenced, image-grounded verse.
