Couched in the distinctive rhyming trochaic tetrameters (verse lines of four feet, where a foot typically contains one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable) of ‘Under Ben Bulben’ (1939), W.B. Yeats’ denunciation hardly qualifies as an expression or embrace of modernist art. The Irish poet only chooses to deviates from the forbidding regularity of his chosen form when he allows an extra unstressed syllable to slip between the first and second stressed syllables of a line which, concluding with a deliberate half-rhyme (up-top), mimes the deficiencies of a modern verse that appears ‘Áll out of shápe from tóe to tóp’. And yet, staunch formal traditionalist though he was, Yeats is part of a trinity of writers who make up the canon of British modernist poetry. If Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot appear less traditional or rigorous than Yeats in their uses of established poetic forms, they too often preferred to experiment within the limits of pre-existing traditions instead of breaking radically with the use of rhyme and metre.

Compared with the radicalism of continental modernist movements, British modernism constitutes an exception in several respects. First of all, it is worth stressing that British modernism is a critical construct. London-based ‘modernists’ never referred to themselves as such; indeed, Yeats and Eliot often used the adjective ‘modern’ in a derogatory way. This terminological point is further related to a structural difference between the lasting impact of collective, self-consciously modern movements in early-20th-century continental art and literature (the various ‘-isms’ that make up an essential part of modernism as a European phenomenon) and the relatively modest place that England's short-lived ‘-isms’ occupy in the history of British literary modernism, which is largely defined by individual oeuvres. Peter Bürger's influential Theory of the Avant-Garde distinguishes between a radical, iconoclastic avant-garde whose aim was to question the very place and nature of art in Western societies, and a more conservative modernism whose programme consisted in a thorough renewal of forms from within artistic and literary traditions.Reference Bürger² Applied to the London literary scene, Bürger's distinction between avant-garde and modernism is certainly confirmed by the conservative or reactionary nature of British modernist poetry, in terms of both politics and aesthetics. The present essay will focus on the use of traditional poetic forms (and more particularly metres) in the works of Yeats, Pound and Eliot in order to chart the history of the shifts between avant-gardism and modernism in British literature of the first half of the twentieth century.

Yeats remains the oddest presence in the canon of British modernism. A self-styled ‘last romantic’ and an outspoken, if problematically complex Irish nationalist, Yeats was also an unabashed critic of all things modern, from free verse to electric lighting. When he started publishing in the fin-de-siècle atmosphere of 1890s London, his verse was certainly exotic enough: inspired by Irish folklore and legends, Yeats’ poems also issued a formal challenge to the English poetic modes that had dominated the Victorian period. Much of Victorian poetry had used established English poetic forms in order to pursue introspective explorations of individual moods. The iambic pentameter (consisting of five feet where a foot typically contains one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable) had been the most traditional metre in English poetry since the Renaissance; it allowed internal variations that could follow the modulations of individual thought, as it did in Shakespeare's verse monologues (‘To bé or nót to bé, thát is the quéstion’). The use of such forms by nineteenth-century English poets had often resulted in lyrical, plangent soliloquies that were recognisable as post-romantic effusions of selfhood. Yeats’ romanticism, on the other hand, went hand in hand with the promotion of a rediscovered Irish folk culture. In his work, the lyrical voice was shadowed by a bardic dimension, the metres and rhyme schemes were often borrowed from popular tradition. Yeats’ aim was indeed nothing less than a ‘revival of the bardic arts’.Reference Schuchard³ His fondness for chanted tetrameters was present from the start and went back to folk ballads, to the challenging simplicity of Blake's Songs and to the eerie chants of Shakespeare's witches and fairies (as in Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream). Rhyming couplets of tetrameters were one of the forms that helped Yeats get his own distinctive music recognised:

Yeats’ use of metre was essential to his version of national revival. ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’ (1892) goes on to claim that it was ‘the measure of […] flying feet’ that ‘made Ireland's heart begin to beat’:Reference Yeats¹ the measure, feet and beat are also self-referential allusions to the incantatory metre of the poem. Beyond the role they played in an Irish literary revival in Dublin, those metres also introduced the distinctive notes of the Celtic Twilight in late-Victorian literary London. There, Yeats’ poems resounded as an original innovative force, different in tone and content from both the morbidly refined aestheticism of English decadents and the Victorian orthodoxies that decadence was out to supersede.

To call the formal innovations of Yeats’ ‘Celtic Twilight’ period modernist would be an anachronism. Yeats’ enrolment into a modernist canon would only start with his encounter in 1911 with Ezra Pound, a young American expatriate who was intent on revolutionizing the London literary scene. The mutual interest that developed between Yeats and the putative father of England's short-lived ‘-isms’ looks like an incongruity of literary history, but it was made possible and even logical by the trajectories of their respective careers. The encounter came at a moment when Yeats was growing disillusioned with his attempts at creating an Irish literary scene; he was also looking for ways of renewing his aesthetics that would take him beyond the dreamy world of Celtic mythology. Pound, on the other hand, was involved in an iconoclastic crusade against all home-grown English pieties. Yeats’ Irish difference and his powers of poetic self-renewal were objective allies in this endeavour to overthrow the native English hold on the London literary scene. As Pound explained in a 1928 essay, ‘apart from Yeats, since the death of Hardy, poetry is being written by Americans. All the developments in English verse since 1910 are due almost wholly to Americans. In fact, there is no longer any reason to call it English verse, and there is no present reason to think of England at all’.Reference Pound⁴ Yeats’ contacts with Pound are sometimes used to demarcate the early, ‘romantic’ phase of Yeats’ career from a later ‘modernist’ phase. Pound certainly hailed and encouraged Yeats’ attempts to tighten his idiom, jettisoning much romantic diction in the process and striving for a more austere, occasionally acerbic voice. We will return to Yeats’ self-transformation into what others called a ‘modernist’ poet, but we should first note that Yeats maintained critical divergences with his new ally Pound. Crucially, one major area of disagreement had to do with the use of metre.

When Yeats became acquainted with Pound, the latter was at the centre of overlapping networks of expatriates and young Turks that would spawn the few London-based movements that can be considered as literary and artistic avant-gardes (in Bürger's sense of the word). Imagism and Vorticism, with their collective nature, their theoretical manifestoes, and their resolution to embrace the rhythms of modern life and modern consciousness, were out to cause a stir and duly did so. The eye-catching manifesto of Vorticism (1914) announced its intention to ‘BLAST England’ and all the superannuated traditions of English culture: the magazine Blast reprinted ‘poems’ whose fragmented typography made it impossible to read ‘lines’ that would have any kind of metre. The Vorticist manifesto of Blast was the radical continuation of a programme that had started with the principles of Imagism. The image was to be the presentation of ‘an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’. Insisting on conciseness, Imagist aesthetics forbade the use of words for mainly metrical reasons, and told the poet to ‘compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome’. Pound's typically more aggressive translation of the precept was ‘don't chop your stuff into separate iambs’.Reference Jones⁵ Taking the ideograms of Japanese poetry as a model was one way of writing outside any recognisable metrical patterns and of emphasizing the visuality of the ‘image’, as Pound does in ‘Fan-Piece, for her Imperial Lord’:

Natural ‘rhythm’ or music was opposed to conventional, codified ‘metre’. Literature, music and visual arts were to merge in an avant-garde synthesis of artistic forms, which the concept of the vortex was supposed to embody.

Beyond their structural features and their taste for hype and provocation, what also typifies Imagism and Vorticism as avant-garde phenomena is their vulnerability to internecine back-stabbing and highly publicized splits (Pound's notoriously difficult personality often facilitated the process, but was not its cause). The movements did however manage to leave at least one lasting legacy, which would actually become a cause for embarrassment and retraction: that legacy was free verse. Although avant-gardes like to represent themselves as embattled minority groups, their claims to function as heralds of things to come are sometimes verified beyond their expectations. In pre-1914 England, Imagism and Vorticism were vehemently denounced by the most conservative voices in the literary establishment, but there did exist a significant degree of openness to some of their ideas. The free, ‘musical’ verse of Imagist poetry quickly caught on among large sectors of the literate public, both in Britain and America. Liberated from the constraint of metre, countless would-be poets tried their hands at an ‘intellectual or emotional complex in an instant of time’. Within a few years, children were encouraged to write free verse in primary schools.Reference Finch⁷ This appropriation of an ‘avant-garde’ technique by mass culture constituted a clear threat in the eyes of those for whom the avant-garde's raison d’être lay precisely in its oppositional nature.Reference Huyssen⁸ For Pound in particular, free verse and the abandon of traditional forms were tactics whose validity was now questioned through their very success among the general, still unenlightened public. The popular success of free verse revealed at least one undeniable ideological continuity between the aesthetic precepts of the avant-garde and a central tenet of mainstream Anglo-Saxon ideology, i.e. individualism. For Pound in particular, this prompted second thoughts: he had come to Europe in order to escape from the individualist democracy of the United States of America, and yet his radical thinking had helped create an aesthetics that turned out to be perfectly congenial to that very ideology. Following the lead given by the main philosopher of the British avant-garde T.E. Hulme, Pound was to initiate an anti-individualist backlash that would also translate into a disavowal of free verse.Reference Levenson⁹

If free verse caught on with undesirable quickness among the general public, the aesthetics of the London avant-garde also came up against a very different (if equally unexpected) obstacle when the First World War broke out in 1914. The Vorticists had declared their intention to ‘BLAST England’ a few months before this became the Kaiser's declared goal. As an assorted bunch of expatriates and vocally disaffected home-grown radicals, the London-based avant-garde became highly suspect in a country now gripped by patriotic frenzy. The Times, an establishment organ, lumped the various kinds of avant-garde together under the moniker ‘Junkerism’, while others insisted that the roots of avant-garde art were to be found in German philosophy. The English critic A.R. Orage, disowning his earlier sympathy for the avant-garde, wrote of the ‘Imagists and suchlike triflers’: ‘can they produce a poem to match a rifle, or even parallel in their verse the discipline of the goose step? They are simply idlers, hiding from one reality in the pretence of another […] Once more I express the wish that they may all perish in the war.’Reference Hynes¹⁰ In the war effort, ‘discipline’ was clearly needed on all fronts, and poets were also expected to let their lines march to strict metrical orders. The iambic pentameter reasserted its supremacy in patriotic war poems like Rupert Brooke's sonnet ‘The Soldier’; free verse was reserved for idlers, deserters or potential traitors.

By 1915, free verse had become damaged goods for Ezra Pound: trivialised through its popularity with the masses, philosophically dubious for a critic of Anglo-Saxon democracy, and ideologically suspect in wartime England, the technique (or lack of it) had to be abandoned. It was then that Pound turned decisively away from his avant-garde dreams and cultivated the personal links that would create the canonical trinity of British modernist poetry. Yeats and Eliot offered Pound ideological alternatives to the avant-garde as well as metrical alternatives to free verse.

At the same time that he was touting the avant-garde, Pound was turning himself into an apologist for Yeats’ protean poetic talent. In 1914, Yeats published Responsibilities, a collection where the starker, more ‘modernist’ Yeats was beginning to emerge. Pound duly praised its ‘greater hardness of outline’ and argued that Yeats, though best characterized as a symbolist, had also been an Imagist of sorts – after all Yeats had ‘nothing against them [les Imagistes] at least so far as I know – except what he calls “their devil's metres” ’.Reference Pound⁴ For Yeats, though, this was no minor quibble. His own dedication to poetic form was absolute, as he made clear in his ‘General Introduction to my Work’: ‘Because I need a passionate syntax for passionate subject matter I compel myself to accept those traditional metres that have developed with the language’.Reference Yeats¹¹ Pound would always insist that Yeats created musical ‘rhythms’ while mediocre poets churned out ‘metres’, but the distinction between a mechanical metre and a live, organic rhythm can hardly be absolute. In Yeats’ case, rhythm does not supplant metre, but animates it: ‘Rhythm is the ligament of poetry, connecting the outward tap of the metre with a pulse which follows the two imponderables of sense and voice’.Reference Leighton¹² A careful student of poetry, Yeats constantly adopted and adapted metres to find the rhythms that made him an undisputed master of poetic form. As recent studies of his technique have shown in fascinating detail, Yeats’ work runs the gamut of virtually all traditional forms attempted in English poetry.Reference Vendler¹³

The ‘hardness of outline’ that Pound praised in Yeats actually went hand in hand with a greater awareness of poetic form as the equivalent of architecture: a masterly use of traditional form would, in a time-honoured trope among European poets from Pindar and Horace to Shakespeare, achieve an architectural solidity that would guarantee the lasting nature of Yeats’ works. The increasing attention to houses, palaces, towers, mosaics and statues in Yeats’ work testifies to this identification between formal solidity and poetic endurance. This Yeatsian lesson was also one that Pound started teaching himself in the aftermath of the First World War and the demise of the London avant-gardes. Backing away from the rejection of metre implied by Imagism and Vorticism, as well as from their ideological contamination by popular culture and philosophical individualism, Pound retreated into a formal aestheticism where metre and rhyme stood for a traditional European orderReference Levenson⁹ – an order which he had already admired in his early studies of classical and late-mediaeval poetry, and which now seemed to have become a casualty of the war that had ravaged Europe. The account that Pound gave of the transformation runs as follows:

For one of the authors involved, namely Pound himself, the results were ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, an elegy for the author's youthful ambitions and for the avant-gardists who, like T.E. Hulme, had been killed at the front. The poem is mostly written in rhyming quatrains that Pound modelled on Théophile Gautier's Parnassian verse. Going back to Gautier's ‘Emaux et Camées’ allowed Pound to practise formally orthodox poetry without rejoining the fold of the English iambic pentameter: much of the poemReference Pound⁶ is written in quatrains that use and sometimes mix metres of various lengths:

In that poem, formal regularity also breaks down most noticeably in the sections where Pound writes about the outbreak of war and its devastating consequences, both for Europe and for the London avant-garde

Ironically granting the point made by some of the avant-garde's fiercest wartime critics, ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ associates the formlessness of free verse with the destruction wreaked by the war.

The other writer who sat down with Pound to devise a ‘counter-current’ to the formal excesses and unintended consequences of various ‘-isms’ was not W.B. Yeats, though he would clearly have been sympathetic to any reaction against ‘floppiness’. Pound's latest and most precious associate was T.S. Eliot, and it is with Eliot's help that Pound would retreat from avant-garde poetry and invent a modernist poetic idiom that experimented with, but did not jettison, traditional form. It was also Eliot who would be largely responsible for the identification of that modernist idiom with a political and cultural conversatism that most fully justifies the application of the ‘modernist’ (as opposed to ‘avant-garde’) label.

Another fellow American expatriate in London, Eliot combined several advantages for Pound. Not only did he instinctively share Pound's dislike of American democracy, but he had not been associated with the progeny of ‘-isms’ of which Pound now repented: Eliot had, as Pound explained admiringly in a 1914 letter, ‘modernised himself on his own’.Reference Pound¹⁵ Even more than Yeats’ poems, Eliot's work shows evidence of a symbolist aesthetics, which Eliot has chiefly learned from French poetry. Through his study of French poets, Eliot was also familiar with free verse – which he significantly called vers libre – but he himself often retained a complex use of English metres in his own poetry. The title poem of his first collection thus moves in and out of the pentameter with utmost sophistication: in her reading of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1917), Annie Finch relates Prufrock's inability to express himself (‘It is impossible to say just what I mean’) with the constant temptation to lapse into the soothing, orthodox regularity of the iambic pentameter. The metre is indeed used in its most regular form in moments that suggest inertia (as in the image of a cat-like fog that ‘Curled ónce abóut the hóuse, and féll asléep’) or resignation and routine (‘I have meásured oút my lífe with cóffee spoóns’). Soporific though the most traditional English metre is made to sound in this ‘Love Song’, its use is also crucial to the success of the poem. The metre is both discredited as a means of self-expression, but also inevitable even in efforts to transgress its limitations.Reference Finch⁷

Eliot's most metrically regular poems came in a collection that Pound mentions together with ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ as an example of the turn to ‘Emaux et Camées’: ‘Mr. Eliot's second volume’, like Pound's disillusioned post-war elegy, was also largely written in acerbic, satirical quatrains. The alternately rhyming tetrameters of Eliot's Poems 1920 create a jaunty, mocking, repetitive rhythm that blends a sense of formal orthodoxy with an impersonal, satirical tone:

As Pound does in ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, Eliot here recaptures a formal order that is yet outside the English mainstream of lyrical verse in iambic pentameter.

Pound would go on to re-experiment with free verse and equivalents of the ‘image’ in his later poetry (most notably the Cantos), which made him an influential figure among various experimental schools in the USA, like the Black Mountain poets and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Eliot, on the other hand, generally maintained his distance from free verse, and was also to remain a bête noire among American experimentalists. Characteristically, he had started a 1917 article on the subject of vers libre with a derisive reference to a ‘lady, renowned in her small circle for the accuracy of her stop-press information of literature’ who can ‘no longer read any verse but vers libre’. Eliot proceeds to expose vers libre as an illusion, and to insist that the ‘ghost of some metre should lurk behind the arras in even the freest verse’.Reference Eliot¹⁷ Another 1917 article on Ezra Pound was significantly titled ‘Ezra Pound: his Metric and his Poetry’: Eliot used the occasion to insist that Pound's reputation for vers libre was chiefly the result of readers’ unfamiliarity with traditional forms that Pound borrowed from sources that remained obscure among the English public.Reference Eliot¹⁷ The essay was so condemnatory of free verse that it even drew a polite rejoinder in an essay by Pound on Eliot, where Pound corrected Eliot's contention that ‘good vers libre was little more than a skilful evasion of the better known English metres’.Reference Pound⁴

Eliot's best-known poem The Waste Land (1922) is formally extremely diverse; thematically speaking, it can be read as a dejected post-war elegy on a par with Pound's ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’. The Waste Land takes the sense of European fragmentation to an extreme, mixing languages as well as styles in a jumble of disfigured quotations from the European literary tradition. Yet the poem also has its hallucinatory moments of metrical regularity, as in the ‘Unreal City’ passage:

The tentative five-beat lines progressively settle into a regular iambic pentameter with the line ‘And eách man fíxed his éyes befóre his feét’. This self-conscious use of all too regular iambic ‘feet’ has been related to the monotony expressed in the passage.Reference Finch⁷ Yet the very use of that traditionally lyrical metre also allows a reader to intone the passage with a poignancy at once mournful and urgent, as Eliot himself does in recordings of the poem. If The Waste Land drew such a sense of recognition among many English readers, to the extent of becoming the defining poem of post-war depression, it was also because Eliot could make a strategic use of familiar metres at critical moments. Another notably regular iambic pentameter occurs towards the close of the poem: ‘these frágments Í have shóred agaínst my rúins’. The line, according to Finch, ‘is a clear expression of hope in the persistent power of the pentameter to order poetic experience’: ‘the fragmentation of The Waste Land is also, metrically speaking, not as complete as it looks’.Reference Finch⁷

Eliot was not the only modernist who tried to shore up the fragments of modern experience against the still potentially solid ruins of traditional forms. Willing poetic form to digest and order the most chaotic experience, Yeats deployed the architectonics of his formally elaborate eight-line stanzas in order to create imaginary orders in a world of flux. The chaotic reality that his later poems try to master is the physical world of the senses as well as the fragmenting world of contemporary history; both are often conveyed by images of seething, unruly seas: the ‘mackerel-crowded seas’ of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1927), the ‘dolphin-torn, gong-tormented sea’ of ‘Byzantium’ (1930), or the ‘filthy modern tide’ and ‘its formless spawning fury’ in ‘The Statues’ (1939).Reference Yeats¹ In each case, Yeats attempts to create an alternative through evocations of order on thematic as well as formal levels. The mosaics and golden artefacts of the Byzantium poems, the statues in the eponymous poem have their linguistic equivalents in the verbal architecture of Yeats’ stanzas – ottava rimas (eight-line stanzas with the rhyme scheme abababcc) and iambic pentameters in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and ‘The Statues’, a more irregular rhyme scheme and more varied metres in ‘Byzantium’, which unlike the other two poems concludes on a vision of disorder. Some critics have argued that ‘the kind of architecture Yeats creates […] is one which comprehends its own destruction’,Reference McDonald¹⁸ as the metaphorical buildings of his poems also reflect on their own transience and artificiality. If Yeats thought he could turn back the rising ‘filthy tide’ of modernity, it was chiefly through his personal faith in poetic form. His calls to the ‘ancient sect’ that constituted his ideal Ireland (in ‘The Statues’) and to ‘Irish poets’ who would ‘learn [their] trade’, on the other hand, left him increasingly isolated in the real Ireland of the 1930s. The architectonics of the late poems, instead of going back to the Irish legends, ballads and songs that had fed his early poems, derive from Yeats’ emulation of the most ambitious forms attempted in English poetry by such masters as Spenser, Shelley or Keats,Reference Vendler¹³ whom Yeats summons in his struggle against modern formlessness.

The modernity that Yeats opposed also included a rising number of modern English poets who, in his eyes, showed a regrettable disregard for form as well as a sacrilegious embrace of the contemporary world. The newer generations of poets he had in mind in his disdainful reference to ‘the sort now growing up’ chiefly included 1930s’ poets who were also known as ‘the pylon school’ of poetry. Not only were their themes positively and – for Yeats – offensively modern, but some of those poets showed a preference for very loose or even free verse. Among the lot, Yeats occasionally included T.S. Eliot, a slightly older poet for whom he had little more time than for the ‘pylon school’ and who had been guilty of including contemporary details in formally disturbing poems like The Waste Land. Eliot, for his part, gradually overcame his metropolitan, classical scepticism about the ‘last romantic’ and Celtic Yeats and eventually raised Yeats’ ghost in his own construct of poetic tradition in Four Quartets.

With Four Quartets (1935–1942),Reference Eliot¹⁶ Eliot completed his transformation into a voice of England's cultural and political establishment. Partly meant as a patriotic wartime poem and as a nerve-soothing philosophical meditation, the poem formally delivers what its encompassing musical title promises: a variety as well as a repetition of themes and forms. Sections in free verse where the ghosts of dactyls and iambs constantly make themselves feltReference Finch⁷ alternate with sections clearly divided into stanzas and sometimes written according to regular metres and rhyme schemes. Set in the eerie twilight atmosphere of a London street during the Blitz, section II of the last quartet stages a Dantean encounter between the poet and a predecessor who, although a ‘compound ghost’ of several figures, is most recognisable as the recently deceased W.B. Yeats.Reference Albright¹⁹ As befits a Dantean encounter, the ghost speaks in lines typographically arranged in units of three to suggest a terza rima (the rhyme scheme of Dante's Divine Comedy) which, though largely unrhymed, follows the rhythms of the English iambic pentameter. As he retrospectively surveys ‘things ill done and done to others’ harm’, Yeats’ ghost teaches a lesson about poetic redemption:

The dance in a refining fire directly echoes Dante's Purgatory (‘poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina’, XXVI 148), but it is also a Yeatsian motif: in Yeats’ ‘Byzantium’, the ‘dance’ amounts to ‘an agony of flame’. Modernist poets had always been fascinated by dance, an art that made form and content inseparable (‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’, Yeats asked in ‘Among Schoolchildren’); it was also an obsession that they shared with Romantics and symbolists and thus linked them with tradition.Reference Kermode²⁰ The lesson that Eliot derived from Yeats’ ghostly example was that poets can only achieve the condition of dance through measure, namely not just moderation and restraint, but also the use of metre. The last line of Yeats’ ghost achieves precisely this goal by settling into a perfectly measured iambic pentameter (Where yoú must móve in meásure, líke a dáncer).

The encounter with the Yeatsian ghost in the last of the Four Quartets is perhaps the best example of the paradoxical modernist embrace of tradition. Mixing references to various poetic predecessors and blending English metre with the suggestion of a Dantean rhyme scheme, Eliot allows the cadences of the European poetic tradition to resonate in the hallucinatory modern context of the ‘disfigured street[s]’ of war-torn London. As the Luftwaffe threatened to blast England's capital off the map, Eliot's poetic ventriloquism spoke in tones at once experimental through their juxtaposition of idioms, and also reassuring through their complex familiarity. The ‘easy commerce of the old and the new’ on which Four Quartets closes indicates the distance separating Eliot's conservative modernism from the avant-garde shock tactics that his friend Pound had once promoted. The compound ghost who regrets ‘things ill done’ is not speaking in ethical terms only; he is also regretting the avant-garde's dismissal of established forms, i.e. of everything that Yeats called ‘well-made’.