Chapter 3 discusses the verse and criticism of Ford Madox Ford and the poets later styled as ‘the forgotten school of 1909’. It explores how Ford, along with other Edwardian writers like Edward Storer, T. E. Hulme and F. S. Flint, began to use ideas about impressionism to conceive of what ‘Modern Poetry’ (to use the title of Ford’s important essay of 1909) might look like. Specifically, it examines the forgotten school’s shared use of the language of impressionism as a vehicle for accommodating new subjects and metrics within English poetry, with a particular focus on how this language shaped their arguments about vers libre. The chapter ties the metrical experimentation of the pre-imagist avant-garde to their broader conceptions of modernity and selfhood. It suggests that, if impressionism was the gravitational term which attracted several quite different poets, it also enabled them to pull together an interest in modern urban subject matter, a metaphysics associated with Pater and Bergson, and a range of ‘free’ poetic forms which anticipate some of the major achievements of modernist verse.

E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, T. E. Hulme, and T. S. Eliot all engaged in their critical and creative works with Edwardian liberalism: with the reformist policies of the Liberal Party in England (which came to power in 1905), with the New Liberal ideas on which these policies were based, but also and more broadly with the much older philosophical and political outlook of liberalism. The works and theories of these early modernists were written in direct response to liberal ideas old and new, with even anti-liberal ‘classical’ modernists such as Hulme and Eliot embracing fundamental liberal values (while of course rejecting many others). A consideration of Forster’s short story ‘The Other Side of the Hedge’ (1904), Ford’s 1912 poem ‘Süssmund’s Address to an Unknown God’, Hulme’s essays in The Commentator (1911–12), and Eliot’s programmatic essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) shows how, much as with many other contradictory facets of literary modernism, the relationship of modernism to liberalism was close, uneasy, and foundational.