III

THE NEW AGE, for which Flint was now writing, was, in the years before the First World War, perhaps the quintessence of Edwardian radical culture – heterogeneous, eclectic, contradictory, sometimes brilliant, often cranky; above all, always open to anything new. It had existed as a left-wing magazine since the 1890s, but the present incarnation dated from 1907, when it had been given new backing by Bernard Shaw and a theosophical banker, Lewis Wallace. Its editor was A.R. Orage, for the first year jointly with his friend Holbrook Jackson, and after that by himself. Jackson had supplied the poetry criticism, and it was his departure that gave Flint his break. Jackson and Orage both came from Leeds, where Jackson had been a lace merchant and Orage a schoolteacher, and they had jointly set up the Leeds Art Club. Like Flint, Orage was a Nietzschean and a socialist, and, again like Flint, a socialist in the William Morris tradition. (Orage had also had a phase as a theosophist, hence the connection with the theosophical banker.) For Orage, social change required cultural change. He and Jackson, as his biographer put it, wanted ‘a reform of taste in art, manners, thought and discussion. This aesthetic revolution was gradually to engender a social force capable of overthrowing the supreme evil of the age, Plutocracy.’⁴⁷

By 1906 Orage and Jackson were both in London, trying to persuade the Fabian Society – then dominated by figures like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, with their passion for compiling factual information and statistics – that economic reform would never come on its own, nor simply through collectivist activity. Changing individuals was important. The Fabians’ mistake, Orage told H.G. Wells, was that they were too materialistic. Their ‘collectivist proposals have been designed solely to make economic poverty impossible; it is necessary to design them not only to make economic but also aesthetic poverty impossible’.⁴⁸ Jackson and he set up the Fabian Arts Group, which was to be ‘a platform for the discussion of the more subtle relationships of man to society … in the works of such modern philospher-artists as Nietzsche, Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Bernard Shaw.’⁴⁹ The New Age was in some ways an extension of the Fabian Art Group’s activities, a periodical in which political, philosophical and cultural issues were all debated. Orage and Jackson first published it under the title of The New Age: An Independent Socialist Review of Politics, Literature and the Arts, but by the time Flint joined it its subtitle had become simply A Weekly Review of Politics, Literature and the Arts, indicating the degree to which Orage wanted free and untrammelled debate. By 1909, Orage would write, ‘We are sometimes told by the old Socialist buccaneers that The New Age is too damned literary, or too damned aesthetic, or too damned something or other. But the fact is that Socialism in The New Age is losing its statistical aspect and putting on the colours of vivid life.’⁵⁰

Part of the charm of the New Age was that Orage rarely insisted that his contributors agreed with his views in any field. For most of the prewar years, there was no New Age line on any question. As Samuel Hynes put it, ‘If it had an editorial policy, it was simply an open-door policy.’⁵¹ Certainly it was generally leftish, though as the far from leftish G. K. Chesterton later wrote, Orage ‘very generously allowed that monster, the Chester-Belloc, to roll and wrestle all over his paper, in warfare with two such giants as Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells’.⁵² But left-wing politics in any case came in many forms, most of which found their way into the New Age. Socialism then, says Samuel Hynes, was ‘a slumgullion of fads and dissensions that could accommodate any view, so long as it was unconventional’.⁵³ Orage himself described early socialism as

a cult, with affiliations in directions now quite disowned – with theosophy, arts and crafts, vegetarianism, the ‘simple life’, and almost, one might say, with musical glasses. Morris had shed a medieval glamour over it with his stained-glass News from Nowhere, Edward Carpenter had put it in sandals, Cunninghame Graham had mounted it on an Arab steed to which he was always saying a romantic farewell. Keir Hardy had clothed it in a cloth cap and a red tie. And Bernard Shaw, on behalf of the Fabian Society, had hung it with innumerable jingling epigrammatic bells – and cap.⁵⁴

Orage himself came to favour Guild Socialism, a Morrisite return to craft-guilds though in support of direct action by the trade unions, a kind of modified syndicalism, but that was never more than one of the varieties of left-wing thought debated in its pages.

The treatment of the controversial issues of the day was equally unpredictable. Orage was personally against women’s suffrage, but there were articles both passionately for and steadfastly against in the magazine’s pages. The Irish question was asked and answered from all conceivable angles: the balance of opinion during the pre-war years perhaps moved slowly to the side of Home Rule, though earlier the favourite argument was that the common enemy of the English and Irish peoples was the capitalist class, which they should jointly resist. There was general agreement that the British were behaving disgracefully in many parts of their empire, but less unanimity about whether imperialism in itself was a good or bad thing. On the whole, the verdict was that British colonialism was a good idea badly executed. One writer argued, in protest against what he called the ‘oxonisation of the Empire’, by which was meant the pressure for all colonial universities to be modelled on Oxford and Cambridge, that what one should ideally have is ‘a commonwealth of nations, each with its own individual spirit exemplified in education and in life’, a surprisingly early recognition of the value of cultural diversity.⁵⁵ The rights and wrongs of contemporary marriage, the existence of the white slave trade, the laws against homosexuality, all were chewed over and pronounced upon emphatically from a whole range of positions.

As far as the arts were concerned, some of the coverage was deeply resistant to change – Pound would be parodied more than once, and attacked on numerous occasions – but in the years before the war the New Age also carried some of the most avant-garde literary and arts criticism in London. It gave the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1910 one of its most favourable reviews, and published in 1911 the first reproduction of a Picasso painting in London, admittedly to the horror of some of its readers. Pound, Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, Katherine Mansfield, Middleton Murry, Desmond FitzGerald and Richard Aldington were all to write for the New Age. It was notably internationalist in its coverage of the arts, publishing fiction by Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gorky and Anatole France, and discussing many other European novelists, such as the de Goncourts, Gide, Rémy de Gourmont and Turgenev, particularly in the columns written by Arnold Bennett from 1908 to 1911 under the pseudonym Jacob Tonson.⁵⁶ It introduced its readers to modern French poetry, aided by Flint, Bennett again, and later Pound. Modernist literature, art and sculpture were all championed – and denounced – in its pages.

Orage himself had little admiration for the avant-garde art and poetry that he published, and it speaks volumes for his tolerance, belief in artistic freedom and editorial shrewdness that he gave so much space to its noisy perpetrators. He would frequently enter the debates himself. He allowed Marinetti to publish his Futurist Manifesto one week, and the next wrote, ‘My view is that Mr Marinetti is reviving an old quarrel that ought to have been drowned and damned by the flood … and that he is on the wrong side of the controversy.’ He published Pound regularly from late 1911 until after the war; indeed, Pound was to say that Orage ‘did more to feed me than anyone else in England’.⁵⁷ Yet he thoroughly disliked Pound’s poetry, with the exception of Cathay (Pound’s 1915 translations from the Chinese), which he would describe as Pound’s ‘best and even … only good work so far’, adding to this barbed praise the comment that he would have enjoyed the poems even more if they had had rhyme and regular metre. Wyndham Lewis appeared in his pages, yet Orage wrote of Blast, Wyndham Lewis’ short-lived Vorticist magazine: ‘It is, I find, not unintelligible – as most of the reviewers will doubtless say – but not worth the understanding.’⁵⁸ He does appear to have liked the work of Jacob Epstein, as he had a bust of Hulme carved by Epstein in his house, but on the whole he had no time for modernist innovation. He was a radical himself, but of an earlier generation. As has been pointed out, the New Age cannot be called a modernist magazine, and indeed it grew more reactionary in aesthetic terms as the arts became more radical.⁵⁹ Yet Orage’s importance for those writers was not simply that he gave them a chance to publish and to eat. In one way his approach to the arts had a profound influence on the London modernists. The fundamental belief on which he had founded his arts groups and his magazine, that there is an intimate connection between the appreciation and state of the arts and the social health of a culture, was later to be central to many of them, particularly Pound, who perhaps had already imbibed some of this Ruskinian notion of culture from Brooke Smith.

At the time Flint started writing for it, the New Age had 22,000 readers. It was read by well-to-do intellectuals in London and elsewhere, but at threepence a week in 1911 (compare the English Review at 2s. 6d.) it was easily affordable to the new audience of educated working and lower middle class that emerged in the wake of the nineteenth-century Education Acts. D.H. Lawrence was a subscriber when he was in Croydon (in A Collier’s Friday Night Mrs Lambert reads her son’s copy of the New Age) and the New Age may well have been where Lawrence first learnt about Nietzsche, who was much discussed in its pages, as, later, were the philosophy of Bergson and Freudian psychoanalysis. The New Age was a higher education in itself. Ford Madox Ford in impressionistic vein wrote of its audience:

The readers of The New Age are very numerous and come from widely different classes. I have known several army officers who regularly studied its pages, together with at least two colonial governors, quite a number of higher Civil Service officials, solicitors, and members of the Bar. On the other hand, I have known it read regularly by board-school teachers, shop assistants, servants, artisans and members of the poor generally.⁶⁰

It was a natural home for the aspiring young Flint. Perhaps indeed Flint’s association with those connected with the Fabian Arts Group, like David Eder, and his early reading of the New Age had been what encouraged him to believe there was still a place for poetry other than socialist battle songs, and helped him to reconcile his aestheticism and his politics. Orage interviewed him before he started work, and clearly liked him. Perhaps they talked about Nietzsche. Flint left, he told Wallace Martin, with a pile of books under his arm.

Flint’s reviews were full of vigour and conviction: with scant respect for established reputations, he was ready to point out the weaknesses he saw in those he admired, like Yeats, and was scathing towards work he disliked. Even before he joined the Tour Eiffel group, these reviews show that he was beginning to question conventional poetic forms, though without any certainty of what he wanted to substitute. As he wrote on 26 November 1908: ‘Amid much that may be contradictory, one thing has been insisted upon in what I have written here about modern English poetry: the need for a revaluation of all poetical values.’ The second poem he had published in the New Age, ‘Palinode’, which had appeared the previous January, had begun:

I have grown tired of the old measures in which I beat my song,

And as the sounds on the hill-top where the winds and sea-birds throng,

And the broad and mournful monody of the singing sea,

In heart-harped rhythms my song henceforth must well from the soul of me.⁶¹

Though he is still using a rhymed, stanzaic form, the poem bears the seed of the later imagist belief that each poem should find its own form and rhythm, a continuation of the poetic doctrine, advocated by Coleridge, a poet often mentioned by Flint, of ‘organic form’.

Flint’s very first review was in itself a striking foretaste of later imagist ideas and practice. He was reviewing no fewer than six books, no doubt the pile he carried off from Orage’s office, and was not impressed by any except the first he mentions, translations from the Japanese. Even these he suggests have been spoilt by being turned into ‘heavy English rhymed quatrains’, typical of the florid versifications that English translations of Japanese and Chinese poems employed at the time. ‘I could wish,’ he wrote, ‘that the poems in this book had been translated into little dropping rhythms, unrhymed.’ He quotes a couple of examples of such translations of ‘haikai’, as he calls them, which he in turn had translated from the French:

Alone in a room

Deserted –

A peony

and

A fallen petal

Flies back to its branch:

Ah! a butterfly!

The haiku was to be more influential on the imagist movement overall than any other form, and this pair could lay claim, with their brevity and fleeting images, to be the first published imagist poems. Many imagist poems were to be translations, or quasi-translations, so that these haiku were translations of translations is entirely fitting. As J.B. Harmer first pointed out, Flint had found them in a series of articles in a French journal – his reviews indicate he was reading several of the leading cultural French journals even at this stage, as well as French poets such as Mallarmé and Verlaine. These articles had been sent home from Japan, shortly after the end of the Russo-Japanese war, by a remarkable young French doctor, poet and philosopher, Paul-Louis Couchoud, who had seen the delicate minimalism of Japanese poetry as the fulfilment of the ideals of l’orphisme mallarméen, the evocative, suggestive lyric style that Mallarmé thought had been lost to the West since Homer, and that he sought to recreate.⁶² Flint repeats the comparison:

‘to them in poetry as in painting, the half-said thing is dearest’ – the suggestion not the complete picture (one thinks of Stéphane Mallarmé) … To the poet who can catch and render, like these Japanese, the brief fragments of his soul’s music, the future lies open … The day of the lengthy poem is over – at least for this troubled age.⁶³

Couchoud’s account of the Japanese undoubtedly appealed to Flint, as he stresses that they are lovers of nature and of beauty, less materialistic than the West, simpler in lifestyle but richer in aesthetic response. The militarist West is at last beginning to treat them with respect, Couchoud says, solely because they have defeated Russia and Germany, whilst the respect should have been given sooner for their artistic and cultural life, in which all participate, not just an aristocratic few. Japanese art is perhaps less developed than the art of the West, Couchoud comments (though that is not a sentiment Flint ever echoes), but he insists it has a more valuable social function than European art. These points are just the ones the American supporters of imagism were to make about Native American life and poetry a few years later and, like them, Flint fears this utopian way of life is endangered by the West: ‘The Japanese, we are told, are quick to take an artistic hint; in fact even the most lowly are all poets (or should we say, were poets?)’.

Flint ended the review by suggesting poetry of the future would be written with ‘more subtle rhythms and broken cadences’, and in November he found a poet who believed the same, and who like himself had ‘drawn inspiration from France’. This was Edward Storer, who would become one of the Tour Eiffel poets, and whose book of poems, Mirrors of Illusion, ended with an essay advocating free verse. Like Hulme, Storer began from the premise that ‘everything in this world is a convention’. Nothing is sacrosanct. ‘One does not despise one’s ancestors for having ridden in stage coaches,’ he writes, ‘but one can use a railway train oneself without disrespect to the dead.’⁶⁴ Storer, Flint told his readers, has rejected ‘mere wordiness and mechanical rhythm’ and ‘fought his way out of convention, and formed for himself a poétique’. This poétique or poetics – Flint signified his approval through use of the French – was radical:

Mr Storer makes war on all poetic conventions; sonnet, ballade, villanelle, stanza, poetic drama, narrative, didactic and descriptive poem, heroic blank verse – all are wrong; even rhyme is only admitted on sufferance, as an occasional embellishment; and the sole poetry is the vers libre – heroic blank verse cut up and phrased according to the flow of emotion and the exercise of the sixth sense.⁶⁵

Free verse in English was to be rather more than ‘blank [i.e. unrhymed iambic pentameter] verse cut up’, though perhaps a first step; as Pound would write, ‘To break the pentameter, that was the first heave’.⁶⁶ But as Storer’s essay shows, in the England of 1908, conventional rhyme and metre were – at any rate to a few – beginning to look like chains.

Although Flint praised Storer’s theories, he does not appear to have thought Storer’s poetry altogether successful. Storer drew on much the same poets as Eliot was to do shortly after, and some of his urban poems, which are often set in Paris, read like a cross between Jules Laforgue – the self-mocking flâneur-poet so admired by Eliot – and Edward FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyám: ‘Let us two go./Dances and song and purple laugh of wine,/And kisses if we pay for them’. Storer’s imagery and language has the feel of late nineteenth-century decadence, a very different tone from much of the modernist experiments to come, even though in form he sometimes anticipated them. His poetry is dreamlike, sensuous, exoticising, using assonance rather than regular rhyme, like much French vers libre (‘I heard the music of a violin/Pierce the pale night with silver sword of song’).⁶⁷ But in November 1908 Flint was not yet a total convert to free verse. He felt a little cheated, he said, that Storer often deprived the reader of the ‘sweet chime of rhyme’. The poem that he liked best, ‘The young Bride’ – as it happened, also the poem picked out by the Daily Chronicle and the Mercure de France – was in fact rhymed. Flint was not yet sure, as his own poems showed, quite how far the new forms should move from the old.

Yet if Flint was hesitating in late 1908, Hulme was not. Hulme had returned to England from Belgium in the spring, full of enthusiasm for poetic reform. A couple of weeks before Flint’s review of Storer appeared, Hulme delivered a lecture on ‘modern poetry’, as he firmly called it, to the Poets’ Club, in which he insisted on the need for vers libre. Like Ford he believed modern writing must be appropriate to the modern spirit, and, like Ford, he associated this modern form with Impressionism. ‘We can’t escape from the spirit of our times,’ he told the Poets’ Club. ‘What has found expression in painting as Impressionism will soon find expression in poetry in free verse.’ Old forms must go. ‘Those arts, like poetry,’ he argued, ‘whose matter is immortal, must find a new technique each generation. Each age must have its own special form of expression, and any period that deliberately goes out of it is an age of insincerity.’ In a declaration clearly designed to make the Poets’ Club bristle, he added, ‘Personally I am of course in favour of the complete destruction of all verse more than twenty years old.’⁶⁸

This faith in the importance of a new poetry is very different from Hulme’s despair at the moribund conventions of human communication two years earlier in Canada, when for the first time he felt the need for poetry just at the moment when his faith in language crumbled away. What had happened to change him? It has been claimed that his lecture is simply a patchwork of translated quotations – the same, of course, could be said for much modernist poetry; later indeed, with Eliot and Pound, the quotations were not always even translated. Yet like the later modernists, Hulme has made something new from the pieces. His lecture was the fruit of his search to find how he could ‘fix’ the kind of ‘impressions’ that he had had on the vast prairies. While he was in Belgium, Hulme had put down his thoughts in a second collection of aphorisms and comments, apparently a continuation of ‘Cinders’, but now concentrating more on the possibilities of poetry than on the disease of language.⁶⁸ His mood is more positive here, with only occasional references to grit and cinders; he spends more time devising the startling analogies that he loves to make. Analogy and metaphor – or images, as he would come to call them – are in fact his chief concern. In ‘Cinders’ he had written, while wrestling with his sense of the inadequacy of language and systems: ‘The truth is that there are no ultimate principles, upon which the whole of knowledge can be built once and for ever as upon a rock. But there are an infinity of analogues, which help us along, and give us a feeling of power over the chaos when we perceive them.’⁶⁹ Poetry, depending as it does on metaphor and analogy, could therefore, at the least, ‘help along’. But he wanted it to do more.

While he was in Belgium, Hulme had read all he could on language, poetry and perception. Like Ford and Flint, he had come to believe in the value of selection; like Pound, Pater and Flint again, he believed in the heightened moment. He wrote in his notes: ‘Life as a rule tedious, but certain things give us sudden lifts. Poetry comes with the jumps, cf. love, fighting, dancing. The moments of ecstasy. Literature, like memory, selects only the vivid patches of life … Life composed of exquisite moments and the rest shadows of them.’⁷⁰ Yet there were other elements in his approach to poetry that go further, and which would have an important and different influence on the development of modernist poetry. Among the thinkers that Hulme discovered, he came across the work of the Nietzschean French writer, Rémy de Gourmont, poet, novelist and critic, a figure forgotten today by all but the most assiduous modernist critics, but deeply influential on the Anglo-American modernists, including Pound and Eliot.⁷¹ De Gourmont was a libertarian who championed sexual openness and individualism. Richard Aldington described him as ‘the defender of liberty of expression, liberty of morals, liberty of action … All Gourmont’s work is a magnificent protest against the over-organization of society for the benefit of human mediocrity’.⁷² ‘Truth tyrannises; doubt liberates’, was how de Gourmont summarised his philosophy.⁷³ Hulme, was very taken by de Gourmont’s argument (a development of Nietzsche’s view of language) that poetry introduced fresh and vital metaphors into the language, which would eventually pass as dead metaphors, or in Hulme’s terms, ‘counters’, into prose. Hulme was now convinced, as he phrased it, in typically aggressive terms – he would later take to wearing knuckle-dusters – that ‘Poetry [is] always the advance guard of language’. ‘Prose,’ on the other hand, ‘is a museum where the old weapons of poetry are kept.’ ‘The Prose writer drags meaning along with the rope. The Poet makes it stand on end and hit you.’ As he put it in his lecture to the Poets’ Club: ‘The direct language is poetry … because it deals in images. The indirect language is prose, because it uses images that have died and become figures of speech … One might say that images are born in poetry. They are used in prose, and finally die a long lingering death in journalists’ English.’⁷⁴

This might now seem a very arbitrary division between poetry and prose, and many of the later imagists would not have made such a distinction, for all that they embraced Hulme’s emphasis on the image. In this respect Flint’s views prevailed. Flint had already quoted that August, as an epigraph to a review in the New Age, Stéphane Mallarmé’s words: ‘In truth there is no prose; there is the alphabet, and there are verses more or less compact, more or less diffuse. Each time there is effort after style there is versification.’ This argument, that it was simply intensity of language, not a special form, that produced poetry, was one that Flint maintained, and that was essential to the later imagist programme. But Hulme is really talking about two different kinds of language use, and indeed two different kinds of knowledge, which he had found defined in Bergson’s philosophy.

Henri Bergson was then almost fifty, and at the height of his influence over French art and culture. His lectures at the Collège de France had become famous, and drew a wide range of students, intellectuals, artists, writers and the cultured haute bourgeoisie, much as did Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel in the 1930s, and Lacan’s seminars in the 1950s and 1960s. The intellectual star is of course a strictly Parisian phenomenon, for which there is no trace of a parallel in London. Hulme, however, was not to hear Bergson lecture until 1911. At this stage he knew him only through his writing. Bergson’s theory of language, like Nietzsche’s, was an attack on the artificiality of conventional systems, but it gave Hulme hope in a way that Nietzsche had not. Language, Bergson says, breaks up into crude segments the fluidity of experience, the stream of time: it is a pragmatic tool that makes human action possible, yet the intellectual knowledge it yields is always a distortion and simplification. Language and the intellect prevent one from making contact with the ceaseless flux of being, which we can only know through intuition. As Hulme paraphrased it, ‘one must dive back into the flux … if one wishes to know reality’.⁷⁵ Hence for Bergson the importance of art, which works through intuition and the imagination and leads one back into contact with the complex, shifting mutability of experience. Philosophers, artists and writers of the period were coming to understand the world in similar terms: the dead cloak of convention, rationality, factuality, measurement, hid the vital, dynamic, pulsing nature of human life; the rational, conscious ego was unaware of its unconscious passions and desires; the unruffled surface hid its tumultuous depths.

Hulme was particularly interested in the relevance of Bergson’s thought to poetry. He seized on the suggestion that Bergson makes in Introduction to Metaphysics, an essay written in 1903 that Hulme and Flint were later to translate, that the juxtaposition of disparate images sparks intuition. ‘Now the image,’ Bergson writes, ‘has at least this advantage, that it keeps us in the concrete. No image can replace the intuition of duration, 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.’⁷⁶ Bergson, who recommends using images ‘as dissimilar as possible’, is here describing the practice of the French symboliste and post-symboliste poets, whose strange and unexpected images were created to convey, as Mallarmé puts it, like the Impressionists, not the object seen but the emotion it evoked. In his lecture Hulme gives his own version of this poetic programme: ‘Say the poet is moved by a certain landscape, he selects from that certain images which put into juxtaposition in separate lines … suggest and … evoke the state he feels. To this piling-up and juxtaposition of distinct images in different lines, one can find a fanciful analogy in music … Two visual images form what one may call a visual chord. They unite to suggest an image which is different to both.’⁷⁷ This selectivity, brevity and duality of images is evident in his poem ‘Autumn’:

A touch of cold in the Autumn night –

I walked abroad,

And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge

Like a red-faced farmer.

I did not stop to speak, but nodded,

And round about were the wistful stars

With white faces like town children⁷⁸

The vivid association of the ‘ruddy moon lean[ing] over a hedge’ with the ‘red-faced farmer’, and the ‘wistful stars’ with the ‘white faces’ of ‘town children’ employs the very traditional device of personification in a new way. Given that Hulme had come to poetry to fix the terrifying spaces of the vast prairie skies, one might guess this homely evocation of the English night sky is his effort on his return to tame and re-domesticate those cosmic depths, a constant preoccupation of his verse.

Yet there is another element in Hulme’s writing, less attractive, though also significant in the formation of a certain strand of modernism. Hulme is always more confidently brash in his presentation of ideas than Bergson, for whom art is an approximation, a hint, the closest one might get, but never an entire escape from the limitations of the intellect. For Hulme, visual images are responded to physically and directly, and are intimately connected with a test of male virility. ‘All poetry,’ he had written in ‘Cinders’, ‘is an affair of the body – that is, to be real it must affect body … Teachers, university lecturers on science, emancipated women, and other spectacled anaemics attending the plays at the Court Theatre, remind me of disembodied spirits, having no bodies to rest in.’⁷⁹ In his lecture on modern poetry, he identified the poetry that he wanted to sweep away with these effeminate wraiths: ‘The latter stages in the decay of an art form are very interesting and worth study because they are peculiarly applicable to the state of poetry at the present day. They resemble the latter stages in the decay of religion when the spirit has gone and there is a meaningless reverence for formalities and ritual. The carcass is dead and all the flies are upon it. Imitative poetry springs up like weeds, and women whimper and whine of you and I, alas, and roses, roses all the way. It becomes the expression of sentimentality rather than of virile thought.’⁸⁰ This association of the whimpering women with the decomposing, fly-ridden carcass indicates a deep revulsion from the feminine, and suggests that his fear of open spaces and his fear of uncontrolled emotionality are closely connected. What the Poets’ Club made of this one can only guess. Hulme would have more luck in expounding his theories to those at the Tour Eiffel, though they had their theories too. Although Pound, in his visits to the Tour Eiffel, was to take little notice of what Hulme had to say on many matters at this stage, two years later these ideas would take on a fresh importance for him; but Hulme’s desire to prove that poetry was virile was already close to his heart.