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Writing a roundup review of Ezra Pound’s Personae and Exultations in the London Daily News in 1909, R. E. Scott-James praises a poetry that shows “no eking out of thin sentiment.” This is a verse that “suggests virility in action combined with fierceness, eagerness, tenderness,” demonstrating an admirable capacity for “passionate conviction.” If, accordingly, Pound sometimes “writes out of an exuberance of incontinently struggling ideas,” the youthful poet eludes any censure by this measure: “exuberance,” it turns out, is the temperament Scott-James has established as the major category of value a year earlier in Modernism and Romance. He is now romancing a modernity of vital energy and optimistic progress in Pound, whose youth and New World background may suit him especially to the agenda of that critical book. In Pound’s early poems, Scott-James is finding the qualities of the literature that, in his critical conception, expresses best the temper of the new century.

Writing about the same poet in the same year in the English Review, Edward Thomas takes a different tack. “To say what this poet has not is not difficult; it will help to define him. He has no obvious grace, no sweetness, hardly any of the superficial good qualities of modern versifiers.” In a review that seeks at least – or at most – to be not uncomplimentary, Thomas offers a set of negative definitions to the positive qualities Scott-James appreciates in his account. These two reviews may be seen as oppositional complements. They reveal the qualities the two critics would unite in opposing, and they join as representatives of a consensus center in English literary culture at this moment.

In this inter-chapter, I want to recover a dialect in cultural history that has not found its place in the critical language we have used in representing the tradition of literary modernism. In this language, the ostensibly progressive methods and advanced attitudes of modern art and science are working in the service of an observably antithetical force. It is not primitivism, whose synergy with modernist aesthetics has been well researched. What I am looking at comes instead under a heading that combines the methodologies of modernity and its designated representatives in modernism, which are routinely represented as forward-oriented in outlook and value, with its backward-tracking opposite, which, as it is imagined and conceived, exerts a reverse fascination: in a word, with decadence.

This term claims its use as a reference for the fundamental other of the modern, which is taken mainly as a synonym for advancement narratives, liberation fables, and progress mythologies. “Decadence” expresses not just a condition of being fallen from this increasingly mainstream value, as are the more unwitting representatives of the degeneration disclaimed in moralistic discourses of the later nineteenth century. “Decadence,” instead, represents an enriching debility of loss. It bespeaks an empowering economy of exhaustion, which preoccupies the most developed intelligences as a sometimes unexpected and so troubling but usually emboldening and powerfully attractive discovery. This is a motive interest sufficiently compelling to generate not only the conversation I am recapturing, but the coherence of an intellectual history that is also a cultural memory. It is, ultimately, the form of an artistic consciousness I will present as the sensibility of a profounder modernism. This lost conversation may be reconstituted from a broad resource, and its wider ground might be surveyed at first from above, as it were, in writings by three of its loftiest personages: Nietzsche, Freud, and Poe, who stand respectively in the middle and end and beginning of the history I am following.

On the first of January 1914, for the first number of The Egoist, which is arguably the first journal of a nascent literary modernism in England, Ezra Pound takes up the theme of firstness in introducing his group to London literary society. He is presenting these modernists of the 1910s, however, to a readership that still holds the memory of a preceding generation, the so-called decade of decadence, the 1890s. The rhetorical energy of the piece goes to differences. The oppositions are forcefully drawn:

The difference Pound is claiming is a truism of literary history now. He is emphasizing the poetics of vital voice in his own decade against the artifice of written literature among Nineties poets. Those were writers, following the conceit that Max Beerbohm used to describe the style of Walter Pater, who are supposed to have wrapped their every sentence in a shroud; they interred their words in the stylized ritual of their written English. That was a manner characterized by Latinate syntax and vocabulary, not by idiomatic directness. Pound’s assertion of his poets’ difference from the writerly Nineties, however, comes through a fragment of syntactical parallelism – “a generation came down to London,” “there came to London a generation” – that adapts the grammar of the generation who “spoke with the balanced sentence.” Is this a heckling echo? Or involuntary homage? Or both?

When T. S. Eliot sailed to Europe in July 1914, he was resuming a journey he had begun in November 1910 – on several levels. As a student, he had spent that earlier academic year in Paris, where he attended lectures at the Sorbonne and officially, if somewhat diffidently, furthered his work toward a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard. As a poet, however, he drew deeply from the Parisian scene. One of the primary sites in the poetics of urban modernity, the city offered him the spirits of Baudelaire and Laforgue and the legacy of a heady French décadence. The atmosphere went straight to his head as the muse of youth and crested into a period of poetic productivity as intense in its energy as it was promising in quality. Now, in 1914, the doctoral student was using a fellowship to bring his dissertation to completion, beginning with summer study at the University of Marburg in Germany and continuing at Merton College, Oxford. The mood was professional, dutiful, resigned. And the maturing poet … well, this poet was, in his own view, not maturing at all: the correspondence from that summer shows him already thinking of himself, in the conceit of a witticism for another stalled career, as a young poet “with a great future behind him.”