Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as “addled mosses dank”), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing—nothing that you couldn’t, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.

Pound is laying down a modernist standard for poetic diction: the poem should be anchored in clear perception (“objectivity”) and in language that could plausibly be spoken under real emotional pressure. He rejects ornamental, second-hand “poetic” effects—what he calls “hindside-before-ness” (a contrived, backward-looking manner) and “straddled adjectives” (overloaded, decorative modifiers). The jab at “Tennysonianness” targets the lush, musical Victorian style that Pound felt encouraged vagueness and rhetorical padding. The ideal implied here is a disciplined, exacting expressiveness: intensity without falsifying flourish, and imagery or phrasing that earns its presence by necessity rather than tradition.