Imagism
Encyclopedia
Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery
and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic
and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets
, who were by and large content to work within that tradition. Group publication of work under the Imagist name appearing between 1914 and 1917 featured writing by many of the most significant figures in Modernist poetry in English
, as well as a number of other Modernist figures prominent in fields other than poetry.
Based in London, the Imagists were drawn from Great Britain, Ireland and the United States. Somewhat unusually for the time, the Imagists featured a number of women writers among their major figures. Imagism is also significant historically as the first organised Modernist English language literary movement or group. In the words of T. S. Eliot
: "The point de repère usually and conveniently taken as the starting-point of modern poetry is the group denominated 'imagists' in London about 1910."
At the time Imagism emerged, Longfellow
and Tennyson
were considered the paragons of poetry, and the public valued the sometimes moralising tone of their writings. In contrast, Imagism called for a return to what were seen as more Classical
values, such as directness of presentation and economy of language, as well as a willingness to experiment with non-traditional verse forms. The focus on the "thing" as "thing" (an attempt at isolating a single image to reveal its essence) also mirrors contemporary developments in avant-garde
art, especially Cubism
. Although Imagism isolates objects through the use of what Ezra Pound
called "luminous details", Pound's Ideogrammic Method
of juxtaposing concrete instances to express an abstraction is similar to Cubism's manner of synthesizing multiple perspectives into a single image.
, Stephen Phillips
, and William Watson
, had been working very much in the shadow of Tennyson, producing weak imitations of the poetry of the Victorian era. They continued to work in this vein into the early years of the 20th century. As the new century opened, Austin was still the serving British Poet Laureate
, a post which he held up to 1913. In the century's first decade, poetry still had a large audience; volumes of verse published in that time included Thomas Hardy's
The Dynasts, Christina Rossetti's
posthumous Poetical Works, Ernest Dowson's
Poems, George Meredith's
Last Poems, Robert Service's
Ballads of a Cheechako and John Masefield's
Ballads and Poems. Future Nobel Prize
winner William Butler Yeats
was devoting much of his energy to the Abbey Theatre
and writing for the stage, producing relatively little lyric poetry during this period. In 1907, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Rudyard Kipling
.
The origins of Imagism are to be found in two poems, Autumn and A City Sunset by T. E. Hulme
. These were published in January 1909 by the Poets' Club
in London in a booklet called For Christmas MDCCCCVIII. Hulme was a student of mathematics and philosophy; he had been involved in the setting up of the club in 1908 and was its first secretary. Around the end of 1908, he presented his paper A Lecture on Modern Poetry
at one of the club's meetings. Writing in A. R. Orage's magazine The New Age, the poet and critic F. S. Flint
(a champion of free verse and modern French poetry) was highly critical of the club and its publications. From the ensuing debate, Hulme and Flint became close friends. In 1909, Hulme left the Poets' Club and started meeting with Flint and other poets in a new group which Hulme referred to as the "Secession Club"; they met at the Eiffel Tower restaurant in London's Soho to discuss plans to reform contemporary poetry through free verse and the tanka and haiku and the removal of all unnecessary verbiage from poems. The interest in Japanese verse forms
can be placed in a context of the late Victorian
and Edwardian revival of interest in Chinoiserie
and Japonism
as witnessed in the 1890s vogue for William Anderson's
Japanese prints donated to the British Museum
, performances of Noh
plays in London, and the success of Gilbert and Sullivan
's operetta The Mikado
(1885). Direct literary models were available from a number of sources, including F. V. Dickins’s 1866 Hyak nin is’shiu, or, Stanzas by a Century of Poets, Being Japanese Lyrical Odes, the first English-language version of the Hyakunin isshu
, a 13th-century anthology of 100 tanka, the early 20th-century critical writings and poems of Sadakichi Hartmann
, and contemporary French-language translations.
The American poet Ezra Pound was introduced to the group in April 1909 and found that their ideas were close to his own. In particular, Pound's studies of Romantic literature had led him to an admiration of the condensed, direct expression that he detected in the writings of Arnaut Daniel
, Dante
, and Guido Cavalcanti
, amongst others. For example, in his 1911–12 series of essays I gather the limbs of Osiris, Pound writes of Daniel's line "pensar de lieis m'es repaus" ("it rests me to think of her") (from the canzone
En breu brizara'l temps braus): "You cannot get statement simpler than that, or clearer, or less rhetorical". These criteria of directness, clarity and lack of rhetoric
were to be amongst the defining qualities of Imagist poetry. Through his friendship with Laurence Binyon
, Pound had already developed an interest in Japanese art
by examining Nishiki-e
prints at the British Museum, and he quickly became absorbed in the study of related Japanese verse forms.
In a 1928 letter to the French critic and translator René Taupin
, Pound was keen to emphasise another ancestry for Imagism, pointing out that Hulme was, in many ways, indebted to a Symbolist
tradition, linking back via William Butler Yeats, Arthur Symons
and the Rhymers' Club generation of British poets to Mallarmé
. In 1915, Pound edited the poetry of another 1890s poet, Lionel Johnson
for the publisher Elkin Mathews. In his introduction, he wrote
In 1911, Pound introduced two other poets to the Eiffel Tower group: his former fiancée Hilda Doolittle (who had started signing her work H.D.
) and her future husband Richard Aldington
. These two were interested in exploring Greek poetic models, especially Sappho
, an interest that Pound shared. The compression of expression that they achieved by following the Greek example complemented the proto-Imagist interest in Japanese poetry, and, in 1912, during a meeting with them in the British Museum tea room, Pound told H.D. and Aldington that they were Imagistes and even appended the signature H.D. Imagiste to some poems they were discussing.
When Harriet Monroe
started her Poetry
magazine in 1911, she had asked Pound to act as foreign editor. In October 1912, he submitted three poems each by H.D. and Aldington under the Imagiste rubric. That same month, Pound's book Ripostes was published with an appendix called The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme, which carried a note that saw the first appearance of the word Imagiste in print. Aldington's poems, Choricos, To a Greek Marble, and Au Vieux Jardin, were in the November issue of Poetry, and H.D.'s, Hermes of the Ways, Orchard, and Epigram, appeared in the January 1913 issue; Imagism as a movement was launched. Poetrys April issue published what came to be seen as "Imagism's enabling text", the haiku
-like poem of Ezra Pound
entitled "In a Station of the Metro":
The March issue of Poetry contained A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste and the essay entitled Imagisme both written by Pound, with the latter being attributed to Flint. The latter contained this succinct statement of the group's position:
Pound's note opened with a definition of an image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time". Pound goes on to state that "It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works". His list of "don'ts" reinforced his three statements in "Imagism", while warning that they should not be considered as dogma but as the "result of long contemplation". Taken together, these two texts comprised the Imagist programme for a return to what they saw as the best poetic practice of the past.
. It was first published in Alfred Kreymborg
's little magazine The Glebe
and was later published in 1914 by Alfred and Charles Boni in New York and by Harold Monro
at the Poetry Bookshop
in London. It became one of the most important and influential English-language collections of modernist verse. Included in the thirty-seven poems were ten poems by Aldington, seven by H.D., and six by Pound. The book also included work by F.S. Flint, Skipwith Cannell
, Amy Lowell
, William Carlos Williams
, James Joyce
, Ford Madox Ford
, Allen Upward
and John Cournos
.
Pound's editorial choices were based on what he saw as the degree of sympathy that these writers displayed with Imagist precepts, rather than active participation in a group as such. Williams, who was based in the United States, had not participated in any of the discussions of the Eiffel Tower group. However, he and Pound had long been corresponding on the question of the renewal of poetry along similar lines. Ford was included at least partly because of his strong influence on Pound, as the younger poet made the transition from his earlier, Pre-Raphaelite-influenced style towards a harder, more modern way of writing. The inclusion of a poem by Joyce, I Hear an Army, which was sent to Pound by W.B. Yeats, took on a wider importance in the history of literary modernism, as the subsequent correspondence between the two led to the serial publication, at Pound's behest, of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
in The Egoist
. Joyce's poem is not written in free verse, but in rhyming quatrain
s. However, it strongly reflects Pound's interest in poems written to be sung to music, such as those by the troubadour
s and Guido Cavalcanti
. The book met with little popular or critical success, at least partly because it had no introduction or commentary to explain what the poets were attempting to do, and a number of copies were returned to the publisher.
.
Around this time, the American Imagist Amy Lowell moved to London, determined to promote her own work and that of the other Imagist poets. Lowell was a wealthy heiress from Boston who loved Keats and cigars. She was also an enthusiastic champion of literary experiment who was willing to use her money to publish the group. Lowell was determined to change the method of selection from Pound's autocratic editorial attitude to a more democratic manner. This new editorial policy was stated in the Preface to the first anthology to appear under her leadership: "In this new book we have followed a slightly different arrangement to that of our former Anthology. Instead of an arbitrary selection by an editor, each poet has been permitted to represent himself by the work he considers his best, the only stipulation being that it should not yet have appeared in book form." The outcome was a series of Imagist anthologies under the title Some Imagist Poets. The first of these appeared in 1915, planned and assembled mainly by H.D. and Aldington. Two further issues, both edited by Lowell, were published in 1916 and 1917. These three volumes featured most of the original poets with the exception of Pound, who had tried to persuade her to drop the Imagist name from her publications and who sardonically dubbed this phase of Imagism "Amy-gism."
Lowell persuaded D. H. Lawrence
to contribute poems to the 1915 and 1916 volumes, making him the only writer to publish as both a Georgian poet and an Imagist. Marianne Moore
also became associated with the group during this period. However, with World War I as a backdrop, the times were not easy for avant-garde
literary movements (Aldington, for example, spent much of the war at the front), and the 1917 anthology effectively marked the end of the Imagists as a movement.
jokingly suggested that Aldington should produce a new Imagist anthology. Aldington, by now a successful novelist, took up the suggestion and enlisted the help of Ford and H.D. The result was the Imagist Anthology 1930, edited by Aldington and including all the contributors to the four earlier anthologies with the exception of Lowell, who had died, Cannell, who had disappeared, and Pound, who declined. The appearance of this anthology initiated a critical discussion of the place of the Imagists in the history of 20th-century poetry.
Of the poets who were published in the various Imagist anthologies, Joyce, Lawrence and Aldington are now primarily remembered and read as novelists. Marianne Moore, who was at most a fringe member of the group, carved out a unique poetic style of her own that retained an Imagist concern with compression of language. William Carlos Williams
developed his poetic along distinctly American lines with his variable foot and a diction he claimed was taken "from the mouths of Polish mothers". Both Pound and H.D. turned to writing long poems, but retained much of the hard edge to their language as an Imagist legacy. Most of the other members of the group are largely forgotten outside the context of the history of Imagism.
. Aldington, in his 1941 memoir, writes: "I think the poems of Ezra Pound, H.D., Lawrence, and Ford Madox Ford will continue to be read. And to a considerable extent T. S. Eliot and his followers have carried on their operations from positions won by the Imagists." On the other hand, Wallace Stevens
found shortcomings in the Imagist approach: "Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this."
The influence of Imagism can be seen clearly in the work of the Objectivist poets
, who came to prominence in the 1930s under the auspices of Pound and Williams. The Objectivists worked mainly in free verse. Clearly linking Objectivism's principles with Imagism's, Louis Zukofsky
insisted, in his introduction to the 1931 Objectivist issue of Poetry, on writing "which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody." Zukofsky was a major influence on the Language poets
, who carried the Imagist focus on formal concerns to a high level of development. Basil Bunting
, another Objectivist poet, was a key figure in the early development of the British Poetry Revival
, a loose movement that also absorbed the influence of the San Francisco Renaissance
poets.
Imagism influenced a number of poetry circles and movements in the 1950s, especially the Beat generation
, the Black Mountain poets
, and others associated with the San Francisco Renaissance
. In his seminal 1950 essay Projective Verse, Charles Olson
, the theorist of the Black Mountain group, wrote "ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION"; his credo derived from and supplemented the Imagists.
Among the Beats, Gary Snyder
and Allen Ginsberg
in particular were influenced by the Imagist emphasis on Chinese and Japanese poetry
. William Carlos Williams
was another who had a strong impact on the Beat poets, encouraging poets like Lew Welch
and writing an introduction for the book publication of Ginsberg's Howl
(1955).
Imagery
Imagery is used in literature to refer to descriptive language that evokes emotional responses. It is useful as it allows an author to add depth and understanding to his work, like a sculptor adding layer and layer to his statue, building it up into a beautiful work of art.-Forms of imagery :Visual...
and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic
Romantic poetry
Romanticism, a philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural era which began in the mid/late-1700s as a reaction against the prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the day , also influenced poetry...
and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets
Georgian poets
The Georgian poets were, by the strictest definition, those whose works appeared in a series of five anthologies named Georgian Poetry, published by Harold Monro and edited by Edward Marsh. The first volume contained poems written in 1911 and 1912. The poets included Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke,...
, who were by and large content to work within that tradition. Group publication of work under the Imagist name appearing between 1914 and 1917 featured writing by many of the most significant figures in Modernist poetry in English
Modernist poetry in English
Modernist poetry in English is generally considered to have emerged in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional...
, as well as a number of other Modernist figures prominent in fields other than poetry.
Based in London, the Imagists were drawn from Great Britain, Ireland and the United States. Somewhat unusually for the time, the Imagists featured a number of women writers among their major figures. Imagism is also significant historically as the first organised Modernist English language literary movement or group. In the words of T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
: "The point de repère usually and conveniently taken as the starting-point of modern poetry is the group denominated 'imagists' in London about 1910."
At the time Imagism emerged, Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline...
and Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular poets in the English language....
were considered the paragons of poetry, and the public valued the sometimes moralising tone of their writings. In contrast, Imagism called for a return to what were seen as more Classical
Classicism
Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...
values, such as directness of presentation and economy of language, as well as a willingness to experiment with non-traditional verse forms. The focus on the "thing" as "thing" (an attempt at isolating a single image to reveal its essence) also mirrors contemporary developments in avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
art, especially Cubism
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
. Although Imagism isolates objects through the use of what Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
called "luminous details", Pound's Ideogrammic Method
Pound's Ideogrammic Method
The Ideogrammic Method was a technique expounded by Ezra Pound which allowed poetry to deal with abstract content through concrete images. The idea was based on Pound's reading of the work of Ernest Fenollosa....
of juxtaposing concrete instances to express an abstraction is similar to Cubism's manner of synthesizing multiple perspectives into a single image.
Pre-Imagism
Well-known poets of the Edwardian era of the 1890s, such as Alfred AustinAlfred Austin
Alfred Austin was an English poet who was appointed Poet Laureate in 1896 upon the death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.-Life:...
, Stephen Phillips
Stephen Phillips
Stephen Phillips was a highly famed English poet and dramatist, who enjoyed considerable popularity in his lifetime....
, and William Watson
William Watson (poet)
Sir William Watson , was an English poet, popular in his time for the political content of his verse. He was born in Burley, in West Yorkshire....
, had been working very much in the shadow of Tennyson, producing weak imitations of the poetry of the Victorian era. They continued to work in this vein into the early years of the 20th century. As the new century opened, Austin was still the serving British Poet Laureate
Poet Laureate
A poet laureate is a poet officially appointed by a government and is often expected to compose poems for state occasions and other government events...
, a post which he held up to 1913. In the century's first decade, poetry still had a large audience; volumes of verse published in that time included Thomas Hardy's
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...
The Dynasts, Christina Rossetti's
Christina Rossetti
Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems...
posthumous Poetical Works, Ernest Dowson's
Ernest Dowson
Ernest Christopher Dowson , born in Lee, London, was an English poet, novelist and writer of short stories, associated with the Decadent movement.- Biography :...
Poems, George Meredith's
George Meredith
George Meredith, OM was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era.- Life :Meredith was born in Portsmouth, England, a son and grandson of naval outfitters. His mother died when he was five. At the age of 14 he was sent to a Moravian School in Neuwied, Germany, where he remained for two...
Last Poems, Robert Service's
Robert W. Service
Robert William Service was a poet and writer who has often been called "the Bard of the Yukon".Service is best known for his poems "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee", from his first book, Songs of a Sourdough...
Ballads of a Cheechako and John Masefield's
John Masefield
John Edward Masefield, OM, was an English poet and writer, and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1930 until his death in 1967...
Ballads and Poems. Future Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
winner William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
was devoting much of his energy to the Abbey Theatre
Abbey Theatre
The Abbey Theatre , also known as the National Theatre of Ireland , is a theatre located in Dublin, Ireland. The Abbey first opened its doors to the public on 27 December 1904. Despite losing its original building to a fire in 1951, it has remained active to the present day...
and writing for the stage, producing relatively little lyric poetry during this period. In 1907, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...
.
The origins of Imagism are to be found in two poems, Autumn and A City Sunset by T. E. Hulme
T. E. Hulme
Thomas Ernest Hulme was an English critic and poet who, through his writings on art, literature and politics, had a notable influence upon modernism.-Early life:...
. These were published in January 1909 by the Poets' Club
Poets' Club
The Poets' Club was a group devoted to the discussion of poetry. It met in London in the early years of the twentieth century. It was founded by Henry Simpson, a banker. T. E. Hulme helped set up the group in 1908, and was its first secretary....
in London in a booklet called For Christmas MDCCCCVIII. Hulme was a student of mathematics and philosophy; he had been involved in the setting up of the club in 1908 and was its first secretary. Around the end of 1908, he presented his paper A Lecture on Modern Poetry
A Lecture on Modern Poetry
A Lecture on Modern Poetry was a paper by T. E. Hulme which was read to the Poets' Club around the end of 1908. It is a concise statement of Hulme's influential advocacy of free verse. The lecture was not published during Hulme's lifetime....
at one of the club's meetings. Writing in A. R. Orage's magazine The New Age, the poet and critic F. S. Flint
F. S. Flint
Frank Stuart Flint was an English poet and translator who was a prominent member of the Imagist group. Ford Madox Ford called him "one of the greatest men and one of the beautiful spirits of the country"....
(a champion of free verse and modern French poetry) was highly critical of the club and its publications. From the ensuing debate, Hulme and Flint became close friends. In 1909, Hulme left the Poets' Club and started meeting with Flint and other poets in a new group which Hulme referred to as the "Secession Club"; they met at the Eiffel Tower restaurant in London's Soho to discuss plans to reform contemporary poetry through free verse and the tanka and haiku and the removal of all unnecessary verbiage from poems. The interest in Japanese verse forms
Japanese poetry
Japanese poets first encountered Chinese poetry during the Tang Dynasty. It took them several hundred years to digest the foreign impact, make it a part of their culture and merge it with their literary tradition in their mother tongue, and begin to develop the diversity of their native poetry. For...
can be placed in a context of the late Victorian
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
and Edwardian revival of interest in Chinoiserie
Chinoiserie
Chinoiserie, a French term, signifying "Chinese-esque", and pronounced ) refers to a recurring theme in European artistic styles since the seventeenth century, which reflect Chinese artistic influences...
and Japonism
Japonism
Japonism, or Japonisme, the original French term, was first used in 1872 by Jules Claretie in his book L'Art Francais en 1872 and by Philippe Burty in Japanisme III. La Renaissance Literaire et Artistique in the same year...
as witnessed in the 1890s vogue for William Anderson's
William Anderson (collector)
William Anderson FRCS was an Engish surgeon born in Shoreditch, London. He was Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy in London, and an important collector and scholar of Japanese art. He was the first chairman of the Japan Society...
Japanese prints donated to the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
, performances of Noh
Noh
, or - derived from the Sino-Japanese word for "skill" or "talent" - is a major form of classical Japanese musical drama that has been performed since the 14th century. Many characters are masked, with men playing male and female roles. Traditionally, a Noh "performance day" lasts all day and...
plays in London, and the success of Gilbert and Sullivan
Gilbert and Sullivan
Gilbert and Sullivan refers to the Victorian-era theatrical partnership of the librettist W. S. Gilbert and the composer Arthur Sullivan . The two men collaborated on fourteen comic operas between 1871 and 1896, of which H.M.S...
's operetta The Mikado
The Mikado
The Mikado; or, The Town of Titipu is a comic opera in two acts, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert, their ninth of fourteen operatic collaborations...
(1885). Direct literary models were available from a number of sources, including F. V. Dickins’s 1866 Hyak nin is’shiu, or, Stanzas by a Century of Poets, Being Japanese Lyrical Odes, the first English-language version of the Hyakunin isshu
Hyakunin Isshu
is a traditional anthology style of compiling Japanese waka poetry where each contributor writes one poem for the anthology. Literally, it translates to "one hundred people, one poem [each]"...
, a 13th-century anthology of 100 tanka, the early 20th-century critical writings and poems of Sadakichi Hartmann
Sadakichi Hartmann
Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was a critic and poet of German and Japanese descent.Hartmann, born on the artificial island of Dejima, Nagasaki and raised in Germany, became an American citizen in 1894. An important early participant in modernism, Hartmann was a friend of such diverse figures as Walt...
, and contemporary French-language translations.
The American poet Ezra Pound was introduced to the group in April 1909 and found that their ideas were close to his own. In particular, Pound's studies of Romantic literature had led him to an admiration of the condensed, direct expression that he detected in the writings of Arnaut Daniel
Arnaut Daniel
Arnaut Daniel de Riberac was an Occitan troubadour of the 12th century, praised by Dante as "il miglior fabbro" and called "Grand Master of Love" by Petrarch...
, Dante
DANTE
Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...
, and Guido Cavalcanti
Guido Cavalcanti
Guido Cavalcanti was a Florentine poet, as well as an intellectual influence on his best friend, Dante. His poems in their original Italian are available on Wikisource .-Historical background:...
, amongst others. For example, in his 1911–12 series of essays I gather the limbs of Osiris, Pound writes of Daniel's line "pensar de lieis m'es repaus" ("it rests me to think of her") (from the canzone
Canzone
Literally "song" in Italian, a canzone is an Italian or Provençal song or ballad. It is also used to describe a type of lyric which resembles a madrigal...
En breu brizara'l temps braus): "You cannot get statement simpler than that, or clearer, or less rhetorical". These criteria of directness, clarity and lack of rhetoric
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
were to be amongst the defining qualities of Imagist poetry. Through his friendship with Laurence Binyon
Laurence Binyon
Robert Laurence Binyon was an English poet, dramatist and art scholar. His most famous work, For the Fallen, is well known for being used in Remembrance Sunday services....
, Pound had already developed an interest in Japanese art
Japanese art
Japanese art covers a wide range of art styles and media, including ancient pottery, sculpture in wood and bronze, ink painting on silk and paper and more recently manga, cartoon, along with a myriad of other types of works of art...
by examining Nishiki-e
Nishiki-e
refers to Japanese multi-colored woodblock printing; this technique is used primarily in ukiyo-e. It was invented in the 1760s, and perfected and popularized by the printmaker Suzuki Harunobu, who produced a great many nishiki-e prints between 1765 and his death five years later.Previously, most...
prints at the British Museum, and he quickly became absorbed in the study of related Japanese verse forms.
In a 1928 letter to the French critic and translator René Taupin
René Taupin
René Taupin was a French translator, critic, and academic. He moved to the United States in the 1920s. In 1954, he was appointed chairman of the Department of Romance Languages at Hunter College...
, Pound was keen to emphasise another ancestry for Imagism, pointing out that Hulme was, in many ways, indebted to a Symbolist
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
tradition, linking back via William Butler Yeats, Arthur Symons
Arthur Symons
Arthur William Symons , was a British poet, critic and magazine editor.-Life:Born in Milford Haven, Wales, of Cornish parents, Symons was educated privately, spending much of his time in France and Italy...
and the Rhymers' Club generation of British poets to Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
. In 1915, Pound edited the poetry of another 1890s poet, Lionel Johnson
Lionel Johnson
Lionel Pigot Johnson was an English poet, essayist and critic. He was born at Broadstairs, and educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, graduating in 1890. He became a Catholic convert in 1891. He lived a solitary life in London, struggling with alcoholism and his repressed...
for the publisher Elkin Mathews. In his introduction, he wrote
Early publications and statements of intent
H.D.
H.D. was an American poet, novelist and memoirist known for her association with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington...
) and her future husband Richard Aldington
Richard Aldington
Richard Aldington , born Edward Godfree Aldington, was an English writer and poet.Aldington was best known for his World War I poetry, the 1929 novel, Death of a Hero, and the controversy arising from his 1955 Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry...
. These two were interested in exploring Greek poetic models, especially Sappho
Sappho
Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...
, an interest that Pound shared. The compression of expression that they achieved by following the Greek example complemented the proto-Imagist interest in Japanese poetry, and, in 1912, during a meeting with them in the British Museum tea room, Pound told H.D. and Aldington that they were Imagistes and even appended the signature H.D. Imagiste to some poems they were discussing.
Harriet Monroe
Harriet Monroe was an American editor, scholar, literary critic, poet and patron of the arts. She is best known as the founding publisher and long-time editor of Poetry Magazine, which made its debut in 1912. As a supporter of the poets Ezra Pound, H. D., T. S...
started her Poetry
Poetry (magazine)
Poetry , published in Chicago, Illinois since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. Published by the Poetry Foundation and currently edited by Christian Wiman, the magazine has a circulation of 30,000 and prints 300 poems per year out of approximately...
magazine in 1911, she had asked Pound to act as foreign editor. In October 1912, he submitted three poems each by H.D. and Aldington under the Imagiste rubric. That same month, Pound's book Ripostes was published with an appendix called The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme, which carried a note that saw the first appearance of the word Imagiste in print. Aldington's poems, Choricos, To a Greek Marble, and Au Vieux Jardin, were in the November issue of Poetry, and H.D.'s, Hermes of the Ways, Orchard, and Epigram, appeared in the January 1913 issue; Imagism as a movement was launched. Poetrys April issue published what came to be seen as "Imagism's enabling text", the haiku
Haiku
' , plural haiku, is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:* The essence of haiku is "cutting"...
-like poem of Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
entitled "In a Station of the Metro":
- The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
- Petals on a wet, black bough.
The March issue of Poetry contained A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste and the essay entitled Imagisme both written by Pound, with the latter being attributed to Flint. The latter contained this succinct statement of the group's position:
- Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective.
- To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
- As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronomeMetronomeA metronome is any device that produces regular, metrical ticks — settable in beats per minute. These ticks represent a fixed, regular aural pulse; some metronomes also include synchronized visual motion...
.
Pound's note opened with a definition of an image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time". Pound goes on to state that "It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works". His list of "don'ts" reinforced his three statements in "Imagism", while warning that they should not be considered as dogma but as the "result of long contemplation". Taken together, these two texts comprised the Imagist programme for a return to what they saw as the best poetic practice of the past.
Des Imagistes
Determined to promote the work of the Imagists, and particularly of Aldington and H.D., Pound decided to publish an anthology under the title Des ImagistesDes Imagistes
Des Imagistes, edited by Ezra Pound and published in 1914, was the first anthology of the Imagism movement. It was published in The Glebe in February 1914, and later that year as a book by Charles and Albert Boni in New York, and Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop in London.The eleven authors featured...
. It was first published in Alfred Kreymborg
Alfred Kreymborg
Alfred Francis Kreymborg was an American poet, novelist, playwright, literary editor and anthologist.-Early life and associations:...
's little magazine The Glebe
The Glebe (literary magazine)
The Glebe was a literary magazine edited by Alfred Kreymborg and Man Ray from 1913 to 1914. The first issue was published from Ridgefield, New Jersey, while the rest of the run was published in New York by Alfred & Charles Boni. Ten issues were produced, with a circulation of 300. Issue number 5...
and was later published in 1914 by Alfred and Charles Boni in New York and by Harold Monro
Harold Monro
Harold Edward Monro was a British poet, the proprietor of the Poetry Bookshop in London which helped many famous poets bring their work before the public....
at the Poetry Bookshop
Poetry Bookshop
The Poetry Bookshop operated at 35 Devonshire Street in the Bloomsbury district of central London, from 1913 to 1926. It was the brainchild of Harold Monro, and was supported by his moderate income....
in London. It became one of the most important and influential English-language collections of modernist verse. Included in the thirty-seven poems were ten poems by Aldington, seven by H.D., and six by Pound. The book also included work by F.S. Flint, Skipwith Cannell
Skipwith Cannell
Skipwith Cannell was an American poet associated with the Imagist group. His surname is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable. He was a friend of William Carlos Williams, and like Ezra Pound he came from Philadelphia...
, Amy Lowell
Amy Lowell
Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.- Personal life:...
, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
, James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...
, Allen Upward
Allen Upward
Allen Upward was a poet, lawyer, politician and teacher. His work was included in the first anthology of Imagist poetry, Des Imagistes, which was edited by Ezra Pound and published in 1914....
and John Cournos
John Cournos
John Cournos , a writer of Russian-Jewish background, was born in the Ukraine, whence his family emigrated when he was aged 10. During the 1910s and 1920s, he lived in Britain, where his literary career started...
.
Pound's editorial choices were based on what he saw as the degree of sympathy that these writers displayed with Imagist precepts, rather than active participation in a group as such. Williams, who was based in the United States, had not participated in any of the discussions of the Eiffel Tower group. However, he and Pound had long been corresponding on the question of the renewal of poetry along similar lines. Ford was included at least partly because of his strong influence on Pound, as the younger poet made the transition from his earlier, Pre-Raphaelite-influenced style towards a harder, more modern way of writing. The inclusion of a poem by Joyce, I Hear an Army, which was sent to Pound by W.B. Yeats, took on a wider importance in the history of literary modernism, as the subsequent correspondence between the two led to the serial publication, at Pound's behest, of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, first serialised in the magazine The Egoist from 1914 to 1915, and published first in book format in 1916 by B. W. Huebsch, New York. The first English edition was published by the Egoist Press in February 1917...
in The Egoist
The Egoist (periodical)
The Egoist was a London literary magazine published from 1914 to 1919, during which time it published important early modernist poetry and fiction. In its manifesto, it claimed to "recognise no taboos," and published a number of controversial works, such as parts of Ulysses...
. Joyce's poem is not written in free verse, but in rhyming quatrain
Quatrain
A quatrain is a stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four lines of verse. Existing in various forms, the quatrain appears in poems from the poetic traditions of various ancient civilizations including Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and China; and, continues into the 21st century, where it is...
s. However, it strongly reflects Pound's interest in poems written to be sung to music, such as those by the troubadour
Troubadour
A troubadour was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages . Since the word "troubadour" is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz....
s and Guido Cavalcanti
Guido Cavalcanti
Guido Cavalcanti was a Florentine poet, as well as an intellectual influence on his best friend, Dante. His poems in their original Italian are available on Wikisource .-Historical background:...
. The book met with little popular or critical success, at least partly because it had no introduction or commentary to explain what the poets were attempting to do, and a number of copies were returned to the publisher.
Some Imagist Poets
The following year, Pound and Flint fell out over their different interpretations of the history and goals of the group arising from an article on the history of Imagism written by Flint and published in The Egoist in May 1915. Flint was at pains to emphasise the contribution of the Eiffel Tower poets, especially Storer. Pound, who believed that the "Hellenic hardness" that he saw as the distinguishing quality of the poems of H.D. and Aldington was likely to be diluted by the "custard" of Storer, was to play no further direct role in the history of the Imagists. He went on to co-found the Vorticists with his friend, the painter and writer Wyndham LewisWyndham Lewis
Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...
.
Around this time, the American Imagist Amy Lowell moved to London, determined to promote her own work and that of the other Imagist poets. Lowell was a wealthy heiress from Boston who loved Keats and cigars. She was also an enthusiastic champion of literary experiment who was willing to use her money to publish the group. Lowell was determined to change the method of selection from Pound's autocratic editorial attitude to a more democratic manner. This new editorial policy was stated in the Preface to the first anthology to appear under her leadership: "In this new book we have followed a slightly different arrangement to that of our former Anthology. Instead of an arbitrary selection by an editor, each poet has been permitted to represent himself by the work he considers his best, the only stipulation being that it should not yet have appeared in book form." The outcome was a series of Imagist anthologies under the title Some Imagist Poets. The first of these appeared in 1915, planned and assembled mainly by H.D. and Aldington. Two further issues, both edited by Lowell, were published in 1916 and 1917. These three volumes featured most of the original poets with the exception of Pound, who had tried to persuade her to drop the Imagist name from her publications and who sardonically dubbed this phase of Imagism "Amy-gism."
Lowell persuaded D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
to contribute poems to the 1915 and 1916 volumes, making him the only writer to publish as both a Georgian poet and an Imagist. Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...
also became associated with the group during this period. However, with World War I as a backdrop, the times were not easy for avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
literary movements (Aldington, for example, spent much of the war at the front), and the 1917 anthology effectively marked the end of the Imagists as a movement.
The Imagists after Imagism
In 1929, Walter LowenfelsWalter Lowenfels
Walter Lowenfels was an American poet, journalist, and member of the Communist Party USA. He also edited the communist newspaper the Daily Worker.-Early career:...
jokingly suggested that Aldington should produce a new Imagist anthology. Aldington, by now a successful novelist, took up the suggestion and enlisted the help of Ford and H.D. The result was the Imagist Anthology 1930, edited by Aldington and including all the contributors to the four earlier anthologies with the exception of Lowell, who had died, Cannell, who had disappeared, and Pound, who declined. The appearance of this anthology initiated a critical discussion of the place of the Imagists in the history of 20th-century poetry.
Of the poets who were published in the various Imagist anthologies, Joyce, Lawrence and Aldington are now primarily remembered and read as novelists. Marianne Moore, who was at most a fringe member of the group, carved out a unique poetic style of her own that retained an Imagist concern with compression of language. William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
developed his poetic along distinctly American lines with his variable foot and a diction he claimed was taken "from the mouths of Polish mothers". Both Pound and H.D. turned to writing long poems, but retained much of the hard edge to their language as an Imagist legacy. Most of the other members of the group are largely forgotten outside the context of the history of Imagism.
Legacy
Despite the movement's short life, Imagism would deeply influence the course of modernist poetry in EnglishModernist poetry in English
Modernist poetry in English is generally considered to have emerged in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional...
. Aldington, in his 1941 memoir, writes: "I think the poems of Ezra Pound, H.D., Lawrence, and Ford Madox Ford will continue to be read. And to a considerable extent T. S. Eliot and his followers have carried on their operations from positions won by the Imagists." On the other hand, Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...
found shortcomings in the Imagist approach: "Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this."
The influence of Imagism can be seen clearly in the work of the Objectivist poets
Objectivist poets
The Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American and were influenced by, amongst others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams...
, who came to prominence in the 1930s under the auspices of Pound and Williams. The Objectivists worked mainly in free verse. Clearly linking Objectivism's principles with Imagism's, Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...
insisted, in his introduction to the 1931 Objectivist issue of Poetry, on writing "which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody." Zukofsky was a major influence on the Language poets
Language poets
The Language poets are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s...
, who carried the Imagist focus on formal concerns to a high level of development. Basil Bunting
Basil Bunting
Basil Cheesman Bunting was a significant British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud...
, another Objectivist poet, was a key figure in the early development of the British Poetry Revival
British Poetry Revival
The British Poetry Revival is the general name given to a loose poetry movement in Britain that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The revival was a modernist-inspired reaction to the Movement's more conservative approach to British poetry.-Beginnings:...
, a loose movement that also absorbed the influence of the San Francisco Renaissance
San Francisco Renaissance
The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco and which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetic avant-garde. However, others The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range...
poets.
Imagism influenced a number of poetry circles and movements in the 1950s, especially the Beat generation
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
, the Black Mountain poets
Black Mountain poets
The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College.-Background:...
, and others associated with the San Francisco Renaissance
San Francisco Renaissance
The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco and which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetic avant-garde. However, others The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range...
. In his seminal 1950 essay Projective Verse, Charles Olson
Charles Olson
Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...
, the theorist of the Black Mountain group, wrote "ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION"; his credo derived from and supplemented the Imagists.
Among the Beats, Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...
and Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
in particular were influenced by the Imagist emphasis on Chinese and Japanese poetry
Japanese poetry
Japanese poets first encountered Chinese poetry during the Tang Dynasty. It took them several hundred years to digest the foreign impact, make it a part of their culture and merge it with their literary tradition in their mother tongue, and begin to develop the diversity of their native poetry. For...
. William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
was another who had a strong impact on the Beat poets, encouraging poets like Lew Welch
Lew Welch
Lewis Barrett Welch, Jr. was an American poet associated with the Beat generation of poets, artists, and iconoclasts.Welch published and performed widely during the 1960s...
and writing an introduction for the book publication of Ginsberg's Howl
Howl
"Howl" is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1955 and published as part of his 1956 collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems. The poem is considered to be one of the great works of the Beat Generation, along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch...
(1955).
Sources
- Aldington, Richard. Life For Life's Sake (The Viking Press, 1941). See Chapter IX.
- Blau Duplessis, Rachel. H.D. The Career of that Struggle (The Harvester Press, 1986). ISBN 0-7108-0548-9.
- Brooker, Jewel Spears (1996). Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism (University of Massachusetts Press). ISBN 1-55849-040-X.
- Guest, Barbara. Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World (Collins, 1985). ISBN 0-385-13129-1.
- Jones, Peter (ed.). Imagist Poetry (Penguin, 1972).
- Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era (Faber and Faber, 1975 edition). ISBN 0-571-10668-4.
- McGuinness, Patrick (editor), T. E. Hulme: Selected Writings (Fyfield Books, Carcanet Press, 1998). ISBN 1-85754-362-9 (pages xii-xiii).
- Sullivan, J. P. (ed). Ezra Pound (Penguin critical anthologies series, 1970). ISBN 0-14-080033-6.
Further reading
- Pratt, William. The Imagist Poem, Modern Poetry in Miniature (Story Line Press, 1963, expanded 2001). ISBN 1-58654-009-2.
- Symons, JulianJulian SymonsJulian Gustave Symons 1912 - 1994) was a British crime writer and poet. He also wrote social and military history, biography and studies of literature.-Life and work:...
. Makers of the New: The Revolution in Literature, 1912–1939 (Andre Deutsch, 1987). ISBN 0-233-98007-5. - Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1934). ISBN 0-8112-0151-1.
External links
- Imagists.org
- The 1915 issue of Some Imagist Poets
- Bibliography of Japan in English-Language Verse
- J.T. Barbarese et al.: "In a Station of the Metro" at Modern American Poetry
- Quiz: An Imagist Poem or a Ridiculous Parody?