ABSTRACT
In his classic essay, “Romanticism and Classicism,” T.E.Hulme (1924) described the poet’s challenge in capturing the essence of experience into expression as getting “the exact curve of the thing” (p. 137):
You know what I call architect’s curves-flat pieces of wood with all different kinds of curvature. By a suitable selection from these you can draw approximately any curve you like. The artist I take to be the man who simply can’t bear the idea of that “approximately.” He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind. I shall here have to change my metaphor a little to get the process in his mind. Suppose that instead of your curved pieces of wood you have a springy piece of steel of the same types of curvature as the wood. Now the state of tension or concentration of mind, if he is doing anything really good in this struggle against the ingrained habit of technique, may be represented by a man employing all his fingers to bend the steel out of its own curve and into the exact curve which you want. Something different to what it would assume naturally, (pp. 132-133)
Hulme’s metaphor invites the reader to see the process of writing fine poetry as hard physical work, as an embodied form of art, comparable to architecture, or painting, dance, or sculpture. Hulme was reacting with distaste to what he saw as the romantic “metaphysic which in defining beauty or the nature of art always drags in the infinite,” and defending the idea that the highest kind of poetry may “confine itself to the finite,” that “beauty may be in small, dry things” (p. 131). His words are telling in the care that the artist takes with details. Getting the exact curve of the thing in order to find the beauty in small, dry things may be at first glance, but at first glance only, a modest goal, one that rewards the poet, the artist, and, we argue here, the performer, in subtle yet powerful ways.
