SOURCE: "The Growth of English Modernism," in Tradition and Experiment in English Poetry, Rowman and Littlefield, 1979, pp. 289-307.

In the following excerpt, Hobsbaum examines Modernism in English poetry.

A conventional account of the rise of modern poetry would, I suppose, run something like this. The Georgians of Sir Edward Marsh's anthologies represented the last lap of Victorianism; sheltered subjects and literary diction. English poetry was shocked out of such torpor by the Imagists; insistence on experiment, free verse. The resistance to 'modernism', so called, was overcome by the mature work of T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land and of Ezra Pound in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. But their work has never been satisfactorily implemented in English poetry. Hence the thin poetic haul of the last thirty years.

There is a lot in this that one can agree with. Yet it seems to me far from the whole truth...