ABSTRACT
There are many contradictory pulls in classical modernism; one of them is the tension between romanticism and classicism, personality and impersonality, individuality and tradition – or, as Eliot put it in After Strange Gods in 1934, heresy and orthodoxy. Classical modernists such as T.E. Hulme and T.S. Eliot sided firmly against heresy in their political writings, equating it with liberalism and religious modernism. Yet at the same time, they valorised individuality, personal expression, and transgression in their poetics – demands that only very awkwardly square with their political classicism. This chapter argues that in the sense used by Hulme and Eliot, the opposition between heresy and orthodoxy is best read as a border that classical modernists were happy to cross rather than an absolute boundary. Heresy is in turn revealed as endemic to classical modernism and as a crucial part of early twentieth-century ideas of inspiration and composition.
