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His criticism of Eliot extends to what he sees as the negative influence on English poetry of Eliot’s use of the
American idiom: ‘Some damage was done to English verse by too close an imitation in the 1930s of the American
idiom as evidenced in such poets as Eliot and Pound’. 41 He also sees a disparity between Eliot’s American writingstyle
and traditional English poetic writing practice. Although Hobsbaum does not see this in itself as necessarily
negative, the implication is that American modernism is largely a geographical and cultural entity, unable to
successfully function within an English milieu:
Again, Eliot’s work exhibits the characteristic American qualities of free association or phanopoeia
and autobiographical content. English verse, however, has been at its best as fiction: an arrangement
of what is external to the poet to convey the tension or release within. 42
This poetic “nationalism” is also expressed more explicitly, and with some frustration in the following:
I would never deny that Eliot and Pound, who derive much from Whitman, are fine poets. But is it not
time to insist that they are fine American poets? And that therefore the influence they may be expected
to have on English poets is limited? 43
Hobsbaum makes further statements as to the unsuitability of “American” modernism for the English reader:
Whitman’s abstractions and random collocations have a raw life of their own, a form even through
their formlessness; and this has remained highly characteristic of American poetry ever since. The
Waste Land (1922) is, indeed, a heap of broken images: this is its meaning, and, to some extent, its
distinction. But that kind of writing has never worked well in England. 44
However, he saw a remedy to this state of affairs in the Movement:
The poems of the Movement were self-contained, formal, and sought to be unrhetorical. Like most
schools of poetry, the Movement proved too constricting for its more talented members. […] But the
Movement was a necessary spring-cleaning whose real achievement may have been to arouse interest
in a number of poets of the 1930s who had been unjustly neglected. 45
Hobsbaum voiced reservations concerning the use of ambiguous language in poetry, preferring narrative devices and
accurate description. He recognised in Edward Thomas that,
Thomas will often act out his feelings in terms of story, scene and character, rather than state it in his
own person. And this brings him close to the writings of the finest poetic realists-Wordsworth, for
example, whose best work is in narrative form, and is akin to the great nineteenth-century novelists,
themselves the heirs of Shakespeare. 46
He praises Wordsworth for his ‘unwavering gaze’ 47 and compares the 1805 and 1850 versions of The Preludefavouring
the 1805 version because it ‘exhibits a preternatural keenness of eye and ear’. 48 He cites the following
samples from this version:
The moon stood naked in the heavens at height
Immense above my head . . .
Far, far beyond, the vapours shot themselves
In headlands, tongues, and promontory shapes,
Into the sea, the real sea . . .
Meanwhile, the moon looked down upon this shew
In single glory, and we stood, the mist
Touching our very feet . . . 49
He looks favourably on these: ‘Here the concrete particulars of the summer night assume startling urgency as they
impinge upon the young traveller’s mind’. 50 Similarly, he comments on the emphasis of observation evident in the
Discharged Soldier passage in Book IV of the 1805 Prelude:
41