Imagism

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IMAGISM

Imagism was the literary movement that most deeply influenced the development of modern American poetry and the one that contributed the most to the development of modernist techniques in all genres. In reacting to the late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century verse that employed images merely as decorations, it resembles the Romantic reaction against conventional eighteenth-century imagery as well as William Wordsworth's emphasis in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802) on the poet's fidelity to personal experience. In using the term Imagisme, the imagists also invoked the revolution in the modern French symbolisme of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. In its association with vers libre, or "free verse," it represented a revolt against conventional rhythm in which the sound bore little relationship to the sense.

EZRA POUND AND THE IMAGISTS

In 1914 D. H. Lawrence told Amy Lowell (1874–1925) that Ezra Pound's (1885–1972) imagism was "just an advertising scheme," and it indeed began that way (Gould, p. 137). Pound coined the term in 1912 to describe some poems of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961) that he, as foreign editor, was sending to Poetry magazine in Chicago. In End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound (1979), Doolittle recalled Pound editing her poem "Hermes of the Ways" in London's British Museum tearoom and then adding "H.D. Imagiste" at the bottom of the page (p. 18). As Pound told Poetry's editor Harriet Monroe in 1915, the movement was started "not very seriously," chiefly to get H.D.'s poems a hearing (Parisi and Young, p. 69). Pound described H.D.'s poems to Monroe in October 1912 as written "in the laconic speech of the Imagistes" (Parisi and Young, p. 47). He first used "Imagiste" in print in describing the five poems he appended as the "Complete Poetical Works" of T. E. Hulme (1883–1927) to his volume of poetry Ripostes (1912). In "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste" (Poetry, March 1913), written with contributors to Poetry in mind, Pound defined the image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant in time" and in so doing gives a "sense of freedom from time limits and space limits" (p. 200).

The March issue of Poetry also published an essay titled "Imagisme" written by Pound but signed (to suggest that the movement was more than a one-poet phenomenon) by F. S. Flint. Speaking of the Imagists in the past tense, the article says they were not revolutionaries but traditionalists who had only some informal rules: "1. Direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome" (p. 199). The article also referred to imagism's "Doctrine of the Image," which it said need not interest the public (p. 199). In Poetry's April 1913 issue, Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" provided a brilliant example of imagist style. In the Fortnightly Review of 1 September 1914, Pound's essay titled "Vorticism" explained that he first tried to express his vision of beautiful faces in a Paris metro station in a thirty-line poem, six months later in half that space, and a year later in the "hokku-like sentence" of the final poem (p. 89). In 1914 Pound published an anthology titled Des Imagistes that included poems by the poets H.D., Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams and the two novelists Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford) and James Joyce.

Despite imagism's origin as a publicity tactic for H.D.'s poems, its tenets had been developing since 1909, soon after Pound's arrival in England from the United States. In 1912 Pound wrote of the "forgotten school of images" that formed around T. E. Hulme, who was killed in World War I (Pratt, p. 14). That early school included F. S. Flint (1885–1960), and Pound had joined the group by April 1909. Discussion included vers libre, verse forms such as the Japanese tanka and haiku, French symbolism, and the precision of French novelists such as Stendhal and Gustave Flaubert. According to Flint, Hulme insisted on accurate presentation of the object and no wasted words. Hulme's conception of language, which was influenced by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, was a crucial influence on his conception of the image. One sees what Flint must have meant by a "Doctrine of the Image" as the idea has its counterpart in Hulme's statement in his 1913 essay "Romanticism and Classicism" that "images in verse are not mere decoration, but the very essence of an intuitive language" (p. 135).

"IN A STATION OF THE METRO"

Ezra Pound's imagist poem "In a Station of the Metro" with the spacing Pound insisted upon.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough .

Pound, "In a Station of the Metro," p. 12.

Imagism brought publicity and debate to Poetry magazine and soon spread to other journals connected with Pound, such as the Egoist (which published a special imagist issue in 1915) and the Little Review. But its very success led to a blurring of its program, particularly after the Boston poet Amy Lowell joined the movement. When she read H.D.'s poetry in the 1913 Poetry, Lowell decided that she too was an imagist. A member of a distinguished and wealthy family that included the poet James Russell Lowell and a brother who became the president of Harvard University, she became a patron as well as a contributor of imagist verse to Poetry. When she visited England in 1913 with the principal goal of meeting Pound and the imagists, she was at first welcomed by Pound. But Pound's interest in imagism was waning, and his anthology Des Imagistes was poorly received.

AMY LOWELL AND THE IMAGISTS

Lowell proposed to reinvigorate the movement through a series of anthologies titled Some Imagist Poets. The first anthology, in 1915, was a success thanks to Lowell's advertising and book tours, and it was followed by two more editions in 1916 and 1917. Pound claimed that Lowell ignored the tenets and lowered the standards of imagism by accepting any poem as imagist if it were in free verse, and he objected to her editorial policy of letting in too many poets who then chose their own poems. The publisher's blurb for the first anthology claimed that she was the leader of the imagist movement, and her critical book Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917) eliminated Pound from her discussion of imagism. Dismissing Lowell's movement as "Amygisme," Pound thought that her poets violated the imagist tenet that prohibited no word that does not contribute to the presentation. In Lowell's anthologies the poems became long and discursive (for example, John Gould Fletcher's "The Blue Symphony" in 1915) rather than concentrated and imagistic. Although Lowell's introduction to the first volume was a useful restatement of the imagist rules for good writing, she ignored imagist concentration by expanding the three original imagist rules to six, introducing elaborations such as using common speech, creating new rhythms, and asserting freedom in choosing subject matter.

To dissociate himself from Lowell and lesser poets like Lowell's close colleague Fletcher, Pound joined with Wyndham Lewis, a painter, in founding another even shorter-lived movement, vorticism. In restating imagist principles as vortices, he clarified the original imagist tenets. Vorticism believed in using the "primary pigment" of an art: in painting, color and form (often nearly abstract); in poetry, the image. As the vorticist artist juxtaposes geometric forms, the poet juxtaposes images. Pound considered "Amygisme" scenic, static, and imitative. In his 1914 "Vorticism" essay he defined the vorticist image as a "radiant node or cluster . . . from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing" (p. 92). His earlier description of the image as a "complex" (using the word in the psychological sense of the phrase "Oedipus complex") also implied its intellectual and emotional complexity. In the vorticist magazine Blast (1914), Pound quotes from H.D.'s "Oread" to exemplify the proper use of the image. In what seems a reference to "Oread" in the "Vorticism" essay, he writes that its juxtaposed images are "not an equation of mathematics . . . having something to do with form but about sea, cliffs, night, having something to do with mood" (p. 92). The poem does not literally describe a seacoast or explicitly state that a crashing wave resembles a pine tree. Images are abstracted from the scene, acting as equations or formulas for the emotions the artist finds within it.

THE HERITAGE OF IMAGISM

One of poems in the second issue of Blast (1915) showed a further development in imagist technique. T. S. Eliot's (1888–1965) "Preludes" revealed city dwellers who reflect the "sordid images" of "grimy scraps of withered leaves," "newspapers from vacant lots," and "broken blinds and chimney-pots" (Lewis, Blast no. 2, pp. 4–49). Yet the poem's reflections on the "infinitely suffering thing" that the images suggest goes beyond the confines of the imagist poem. In poems like "Preludes," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), and The Waste Land (1922), Eliot showed how an imagistic poem could expand beyond the confines of the short lyric poem without losing what Eliot called "first intensity." Although The Waste Land communicates through what it refers to as a "heap of broken images" without discursive commentary or narrative, Eliot's poem has clearly gone beyond the conciseness of imagism. Yet it has kept its intensity. The Waste Land may be considered one highly developed image (a "radiant node or cluster") of spiritual dryness in the way that Pound claimed in his "Vorticism" essay that Dante's Divine Comedy (discounting the poem's expository passages) was a single image: "The form of sphere above sphere, the varying reaches of light, the minutiae of pearls upon foreheads, all these are parts of the Image" (p. 96).

H.D.'S "OREAD"

H.D.'s imagist poem "Oread" as cited by Ezra Pound in Blast.

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In T. S. Eliot's definition of the "objective correlative" in "Hamlet and His Problems" (1919), we see the imagist principle when he states that a work of art must communicate "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 immediately evoked" (p. 125). In Eliot's definition, one finds Hulme's praise of the image because it attempts to communicate sensations directly and Pound's description of H.D.'s poem as an "equation" for an emotion. Pound also faced the challenge of writing a long poem on imagist principles in his epic poem The Cantos (1925–1969). To explain a poem composed of broken images and fragmented narratives, he introduced his conception of the "ideogrammic method." According to Pound, the unit of meaning in the Chinese language, the ideogram, is composed of a cluster of details; for example, to denote "red" the ideogram combines characters for the rose, iron rust, the cherry, and the flamingo. In ideogrammic poetry, images, concepts, and quotations are juxtaposed and, theoretically, communicate their meaning as they come together in the reader's mind. As in the earlier definitions of the image, the ideogram is an intellectual and emotional "complex" or a "radiant note or cluster."

The genius of imagism was to formulate the principles of modernist writing that continued to inform twentieth-century writing long after the movement died out. In addition to the influence of the Romantics and symbolistes, the precision of Flaubert's prose, Henry James's emphasis on showing rather than telling, and the turn-of-the-century popularity of the haiku inspired imagism's principle of directness and concision. Eliot's "objective correlative," William Carlos Williams's slogan "no ideas but in things," and Archibald MacLeish's belief (expressed in the 1926 poem "Ars Poetica") that a poem "should not mean / But be" bear the mark of imagism. Imagism's emphasis on poetic form anticipated the formalist criticism of Eliot, Ivor Armstrong Richards, and Richard P. Blackmur. What Pound calls the imagist "freedom from time limits and space limits" anticipates the modernist conception of "spatial form," in which temporal narratives are unified through recurring motifs and scenes composed of vivid images. In prose the images that conclude Lawrence's novel The Rainbow (1915) or make up the interchapters of Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time (1925) demonstrate the importance of imagistic technique to modern prose. The technical and philosophical principles of imagism revolutionized modern literature.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Eliot, T. S. "Hamlet and His Problems." In Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1964.

H. D. [Hilda Doolittle]. End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1979.

H. D. "Oread," Blast no. 1 (20 June 1914): 154.

Flint, F. S. "Imagisme." Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 1 (March 1913): 198–200.

Hulme, T. E. "Romanticism and Classicism." In Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, edited by Herbert Read. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961.

Lewis, Wyndham, ed. Blast no. 1 (20 June 1914); no. 2 (July 1915). Reprinted, Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1981.

Lowell, Amy. Tendencies in Modern American Poetry. New York: Macmillan, 1917. New York: Octagon Books, 1971.

Pound, Ezra. "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste." Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 1 (March 1913): 200–206.

Pound, Ezra. "In a Station of the Metro." Poetry 2, no. 1 (April 1913): 12. Also available at http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/orient/mod2.htm.

Pound, Ezra. "Vorticism." Fortnightly Review, 1 September 1914. Reprinted in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. New York: New Directions, 1970.