Wordsworth is often considered a prophet of modernist poetics. That honour usually goes to Coleridge, with his experiments in irregular syllable counts in Christabel in name of matching metre to passion, and his insistence on this principle more generally in notion of form. As Donald Wesling and others have pointed out, principles of form demand that metre be derived within poetic content, or poet's interior intention, which sponsors most of modernist arguments for free verse (The New Poetries 64). Since Dryden, declared Coleridge, the of our poets leads to sense; in our older and more genuine poets, sense, including passion, leads to meter (Shakespearian Criticism I 197). In eighteenth chapter of Biographia Literaria, he accordingly remarks that discrepancy between pathetic events of poems like Simon Lee and Mice Fell and implied by their metre means that they fail to be poems. Wordsworth, after all, had unpardonably argued that metre might suggest a feeling not strictly and necessarily connected with passion in his 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Prose Works I 147). With Coleridge, criteria for poetic form is its interiority, so that formal pattern becomes equated with exterior, artificial and disunified: form is about ethics of subjectivity as well as poetics. Hence when Ezra Pound began to proselytise for free verse a century later, his terms are exactly Coleridge's:Poetry is a composition or organisation of sounds set to music. By 'music' here we can scarcely mean more than and timbre. The form is false unless it belongs to particular emotion or energy which it purports to represent (New Age 349-50). Pound began his Imagist revolution in 1912, with a rousing call to poetic accuracy and a disparaging of all nineteenth-century deviation from it as rhetoric, a criterion that like organic combines poetics with an ethical principle: rhetoric is borrowed form and thus insincere expression. But in pages of The Egoist, semi-official house organ of Modernist poets, this dislike of rhetoric became correlative of an aggressive reworking of interiorization into individualism. As Richard Aldington, magazine's sub-editor, declared: The old accented verse forced poet to abandon some of his individuality, most of his accuracy and all his style in order to wedge his emotions into some preconceived and childish formality; free verse permits poet all this individuality because he creates his cadence instead of copying other people's, all his accuracy because with his cadence flowing naturally he tends to write naturally and therefore with precision, all his style because style consists in concentration, and exactness which could only be obtained rarely in old forms. (Free Verse in England The Egoist 351) Despite inordinate length of Aldington's sentence being determined entirely by rhetorical device of ternary parallelism, his point is clear: to be accurate is to be hindered by external considerations, which means to be an individual. Or, as Pound had put it: I believe in an a rhythm, that is, in poetry, which corresponds exactly to emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed. A man's must be interpretative, it will be, therefore, in end, uncounterfeiting, uncounterfeitable ... I think there is a fluid as well as a solid content, that some poems may have a form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical forms have certain uses. That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore properly rendered in symmetrical forms. (Literal, Essays 9) An absolute rhythm is a that could be measured against anything else but emotional content, and which could be copied or reproduced. …