Letteratura inglese II

1. Letteratura inglese II Imagism and Vorticism 27 February 2009

2. Movements • The movement principle as an essential constituent of Modernism. • (Ezra Pound, surveying the scene in London in 1912, decided that what was need was a movement (Imagisme). • Naturalism (a movement but not essentially part of Modernism: from the interiors to interiority)

3. Movements (2) • They vary greatly in type and reach over a long range of historical experience • Decadence (distillation of broad generational moods); Imagism (relates to precise aesthetic programs); German Expressionism (belated name for already extant activities). Some find the name first and the programme afterwards (like Imagism). Some flourish in a variety of places and pass from nation to nation (Symbolism); others (Vorticism) for small groups.

4. Imagism • Three distinct phases • 1) T. E. Hulme’s 1909 group of obscure poets who met weekly for a year or so in a Soho restaurant, the Eiffel Tower (“dry and hard poetic”) • 2) Pound’s more ambitious school of 1912 • 3) Post-Poundian Imagists, called by Pound ‘Amygists’, after the name of Amy Lowell.

5. Imagism • Most of the prominent names of Anglo-American Modernism within the Imagist field of radiation (Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, Williams, Wallace Stevens, etc.) • Pound mentions the name ‘Les Imagistes’ in 1912 (in his collection of poems Ripostes): the descendants of Hulme’s forgotten school; Hulme’s poems appended to the volume. • He sends some ‘imagist poems’ to the Chicago Poetry magazine (Harriet Monroe) and asks H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) to sign herself ‘Imagiste’

6. Imagism • March 1913 (still in Poetry): Manifesto of Imagism by Pound, containing ‘A few Don’ts by an Imagiste’: • 1) Direct treatment of the ‘thing’, whether subjective or objective. • 2) To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

7. Imagism • The Don’ts: • 1) Use no superfluous word. • 2) Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace’. It dulls the image. The natural object is always the adequate symbol. • 3) Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music.

8. Imagism • 1913: Harriet Monroe’s Poetry Magazine (first forum) • Late 1913: Pound persuades Harriet Shaw Weaver to turn the New Freewoman into The Egoist. • 1914: First anthology Des Imagistes • 1915, 1916, 1917: Three more anthologies (Amy Lowell)

9. Poems • The dawn whitenessA bank of slate-gray [grigio ardesia] cloud lying heavily over it.The moon, like a hunted thing, dropping into the [cloud]. (Joseph Campbell) • Concentration on the image, essential, minimal involvement by the poet, not manifestly symbolic

10. T. E. Hulme

11. Hulme / Pound • Nature presses in on the poet to be used as metaphor • Irregular verse • Pound: the image is “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (fusion of spontaneity, intensity and critical discipline). It is an equation for an emotion. Relation between things.

12. Hulme and image • The poet “selects from a landscape certain images which, put into juxtaposition in separate lines, serve to evoke the state he feels. Two visual images form a visual chord. They unite to suggest an image which is different to both.” • Pound: symbolism turned into anti-symbolism. (The symbolist’s symbols have a fixed value, cross for trial, etc.; softness) • Brief points of maximum energy.

13. The apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough. (E. Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”)