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Imagism. “ The point de repère usually and conveniently taken as the starting-point of modern poetry is the group denominated ‘imagists’ in London about 1910. Their historical importance is clear.” T. S. Eliot, American Literature and the American Language. Imagism - In a Station of the Metro.
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Imagism • “The point de repère usually and conveniently taken as the starting-point of modern poetry is the group denominated ‘imagists’ in London about 1910. Their historical importance is clear.” T. S. Eliot, American Literature and the American Language
Imagism - In a Station of the Metro • The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/Petals on a wet, black bough, In a Station of the Metro, Ezra Pound
Imagism - Oread • Whirl up, sea –/Whirl your pointed pines,/Splash your great pines/On our rocks,/Hurl your green over us,/Cover us with your pools of fir. Oread,H.D.
Oread • There are no similes in the poem, no symbols, presentation rather than representation; no moralizing tone; no reflection on human experience; no striving for the spiritual; no fixed metre or rhyme – but a rhythm organic to the image itself; no narrative; no vagueness of abstractions – it would destroy the image. However, there is a strong sense of the abstract caught up within the concrete. Here we have an evocation by means of an analogy taken to the point of perfect fusion. The sea is the pine-wood; the pine-wood is the sea; and the mountain nymph of the title becomes fused with the two. The wind surrounds all three.
Imagism • Three distinct phases: • Hulme’s 1909 group of poets who discussed a new “dry and hard” poetic in their weekly meetings in a Soho restaurant, the Eiffel Tower • Pound’s ‘school of 1912’ • The post-Poundian Imagists whom Pound called Amygists after Amy Lowell’s takeover. Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, Williams, Frost, Stevens, M.Moore all come within the Imagist field of radiation
Imagism • Pound mentions the name ‘Les Imagistes’ in 1912 (in his collection of poems Ripostes), the name indicated the descendants of Hulme’s forgotten school; included in Pound’s anthology were five of Hulme’s poems • 1912-1913 Pound sends some ‘imagist poems’ to the Chicago Poetry magazine (editor: Harriet Monroe) and asks H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) to sign herself ‘Imagiste’
Imagism • March 1913: Poetry publishes the Manifesto of Imagism, presented as an interview to Pound by Flint, but mainly written by Pound himself. Flint’s note contained the three tenets of the school: • 1) Direct treatment of the ‘thing’, whether subjective or objective. • 2) To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. • 3) As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome
Imagism • The Manifesto was accompanied by “A Few Don’ts by an Imagist” by Pound • Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time • Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. • Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace’. It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. • Go in fear of abstraction. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already be done in good prose […] • Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at last as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music • […] • Use either no ornament or good ornament
Imagism • 1913: Harriet Monroe’s Poetry Magazine (first forum) • Late 1913: Pound persuades Harriet Shaw Weaver to turn the New Freewoman into The Egoist, which became the school’s stronghold • 1914: First anthology Des Imagistes (contributors: Joyce; Ford, Pound, Aldington, H.D., Flint, Skipwith Cannell, Allen Upward, John Cournos, W. Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell) • 1915, 1916, 1917: Three more anthologies, Some Imagist Poets (Amy Lowell)
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.
Objective correlative • The only way of expressing emotions in the form of art is by finding “an objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is directly evoked. • T.S. Eliot, Hamlet, 1919
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.
Poems • The dawn whiteness,/A bank of slate-gray 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 in the sense of standing in for anything distinct from its own delimited surface meaning
