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1 results

  • Chapter 3 - On or about 1909

  • Rob Harris, Magdalen College, Oxford
  • Book:
    After Impressionism
    Published online:
    22 December 2025
    Print publication:
    18 December 2025, pp 124-161
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  • Summary

    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.