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.

We live in a post-translation world in which we are learning to extend our perception of what constitutes translational activity and its consequences. This chapter explores two aspects of the translational practice of poets of the 1890s: its suffusive nature and its prosodic experimentalism. By suffusive translation is meant a translation sourced in a roundabout way, relying on different kinds of formal and multi-sensory bricolage and filtering, such that the poems translated are re-metabolized, infused with new expressive colourings, as much as they are simply assimilated. At the same time, these translations explore a new prosodic range in their sensitivity to phrasal rhythms or cadence, to tonal shaping and to vocal inhabitation. Verlaine is the principal but by no means only French presence in this loosening and developing range of expression, and the examples discussed are drawn from the work of, among others, Lord Alfred Douglas, Arthur Symons, John Gray and Theodore Wratislaw. The chapter argues that the translations these poets undertook made a significant difference to the ways in which verse might be envisaged by the following generation of English-speaking poets.