British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (review)

Setting out to discover how an ongoing tradition of British poetry could have been temporarily eclipsed by the aberration of modernism in the first half of the twentieth-century before reasserting itself in the latter half, Peter Howarth soon poses an even greater riddle. Both sides in the poetry wars that erupted in the 1910s with the competing practices and claims of imagists and Georgians claimed to be fighting for the same cause of poetic sincerity, against the singular enemy of rhetoric. In many cases, both were published in the same places, such as Harold Monro's Poetry Review (later, Poetry and Drama). How is it, then, that Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington could launch such vitriolic critical attacks against the likes of Lascelles Abercrombie and W. H. Davies—that the champions of free verse could be so appalled by the ongoing use of traditional verse forms?

Howarth traces the roots of the dispute to the split between Coleridge and Wordsworth on the ideal relationship between form and content, with Coleridge accusing Wordsworth of all too often using an elevated, externally determined poetic form for an entirely mundane and uninspiring subject, as in the case of "Simon Lee." Responding to this argument on Wordsworth's behalf, Howarth argues that, in the case of "Simon Lee," the mismatch between form and content is functional because the poem is ultimately about the issue of agency. Just as the speaker in this poem wonders about the degree to which his act of apparent generosity towards an impoverished old man is actually freely chosen, so the poem is uncomfortably constrained by its regular metrical form: the form highlights the possibility that all actions are ultimately constrained by external forces.

For Howarth, "This unresolved debate about what is within the poem and what from outside it prefigures the relations between modernism and its contemporaries with uncanny foresight" (23). Despite their differences of poetic practice, both Pound and Eliot (initially, at least) subscribed to the ideal that all external agency needs to be eliminated, while Hardy, Thomas, and Owen were much more skeptical, maintaining "a degree of aesthetic artificiality and awkwardness, a certain irresolvable formal dissonance with their content" (23). In short, the modernists sided with Coleridge, while their contemporaries continued to entertain Wordsworth's dilemma.

Howarth then shows how the modernist side, as initially defined and championed by T. E. Hulme in such essays as "Romanticism and Classicism," is essentially self-contradictory since it claims the possibility of absolutely accurate rendition of finite things but is hopelessly compromised by the communal form of language. Hulme's dogmatic position, his preference for the naïve over the sentimental poet, the classical attitude rather than the romantic, is simply the latest assertion of an aesthetic idealism that runs from Kant through Schiller, Coleridge, and Bergson, before reasserting itself in modernist poetics.

Howarth then settles down to detailed analysis of poets closer to the traditionalist position, demonstrating how they were not naïve or reactionary practitioners of outmoded verse forms, but poets who genuinely recognized and struggled with the same crisis that animated Hulme and the modernists. Combining excerpts from Edward Thomas's prose with sustained prosodic analysis of his poetry, Howarth shows how Thomas's quest for ecstatic release from the limits of the self—whether as pseudo-tramp, poet, or soldier—paradoxically depended upon not searching for that release. While Walter Pater had insisted that "art is a matter of self-conscious selection" (74), Thomas recognized all too well that such self-consciousness precluded the possibility of ecstasy, and Thomas could only break into poetry when he uncovered a poetic mode and voice that avoided the Paterian fallacy. His poems veer towards free verse but maintain the vestiges of traditional metrical regularity, and for Howarth it is precisely this tension that defines the poems' unassertive sincerity and the poet's ecstatic release.

Anticipating Eliot's argument in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that poetry should be entirely impersonal, Walter de la Mare...