‘Emancipation from emancipation.’ The authors of The New Age on the aesthetic principles of new poetry

The article offers a systematized overview of the aesthetic principles of new poetry, described as neoclassical by the London-based contributors of the magazine The New Age in their articles and books in the early 1910s. As key points for the systematization, the critic chooses the authors’ determination to contrast new poetry with 19th-c. aesthetic dogmas (Romanticism) and their fascination with political conservatism under the influence of L’Action Française, whose Bergson-inspired ideas of the purpose of creative work and the term for the new poetic phenomenon The New Age authors borrowed. The article studies the following sources to glean ideas about new Classicism: T. E. Hulme’s magazine publications and lectures, E. Pound’s articles and The Spirit of Romance (1910), J. M. Kennedy’s English Literature, 1880–1905 (1912), and comments by A. R. Orage and F. S. Flint. Rather than a distinct ideological or artistic phenomenon, ‘new Classicism’ is perceived as a ‘new classical spirit,’ the zeitgeist that stimulated modernist poetry in the 1910s.