Literature
Imagism
Imagism was a modernist movement in poetry that emerged in the early 20th century, emphasizing precise and clear language to create vivid and concrete images. It sought to break away from the flowery and abstract language of the Romantic and Victorian poets, focusing on direct expression and the use of everyday language. Prominent imagist poets include Ezra Pound, H.D., and Amy Lowell.
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8 Key excerpts on "Imagism"
- Joseph Black, Leonard Conolly, Kate Flint, Isobel Grundy, Wendy Lee, Don LePan, Roy Liuzza, Jerome McGann, Anne Lake Prescott, Barry Qualls, Jason Rudy, Claire Waters(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Broadview Press(Publisher)
1030 Reading Poetry Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by: War’s annals will cloud into night Ere their story die. (Thomas Hardy, “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’”) Here, the objects of everyday life are re-created with sensory details designed to evoke in us the sensations or responses felt by the speaker viewing the scene. At the same time, the writer invests the objects with such significance that the poem’s meaning extends beyond the literal to the symbolic: that is, the images come to stand for something much larger than the objects they represent. Hardy’s poem moves from the presentation of stark images of rural life to a sense of their timelessness. By the last stanza we see the ploughman, the burning grass, and the maid and her companion as symbols of recurring human actions and motives that defy the struggles and conflicts of history. Imagism The juxtaposition of clear, forceful images is associated particularly with the Imagist movement that flourished at the beginning of the twentieth century. Its chief representatives (in their early work) were the American poets H.D. and Ezra Pound, who defined an image as “that which represents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” Pound’s two-line poem “In a Station of the Metro” provides a good example of the Imagists’ goal of representing emotions or impressions through the use of concentrated images: The apparition of these faces in the crowd, Petals on a wet, black bough. As in a Japanese haiku , a form that strongly influenced the Imagists, the poem uses sharp, clear, concrete details to evoke both a sensory impression and the emotion or the atmosphere of the scene. Though the Imagist movement itself lasted only a short time (from about 1912 to 1917), it had a far-reaching influence on modern poets such as T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams. FIGURES OF SPEECH Imagery often works together with figurative expression to extend and deepen the meaning or impact of a poem.
eBook - PDFNovel Ideas
Writing Innovative Fiction
- Paul Williams(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
61 MINIMALISM: LESS IS MORE Imagist poem, ‘In a Station of the Metro’ or fellow Imagist William Carlos Williams’s ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ (1923). In March 1913, the Imagist manifesto, which included the following aims, was published: 1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word […]. 2. To present an image. We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real dif-ficulties of his art. 3. To produce a poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite. 4. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry (Lowell, 1917 , n.p.). Le mot juste Imagism has roots in 19th-century French realism in prose writers like Gustav Flaubert, who argued that ‘the exact word’ or le mot juste was nec-essary to give writing its power: ‘All talent for writing consists, after all, of nothing more than choosing words. It’s precision that gives writing power’ (Flaubert, 1856 cited in Hamrick, 2017 , n.p.). We need only to read an excerpt from Flaubert’s celebrated novel Madame Bovary (1856) to see this power at work: Seen from close, her eyes appeared larger than life, espe -cially when she opened and shut her eyelids several times on awakening: black when looked at in the shadow, dark blue in bright light, they seemed to contain layer upon layer ‘SO MUCH DEPENDS’ EXERCISE Write an Imagist poem. Present one simple image in words, simply, using the language of common speech, the exact word, rendering details particularly, concentrated, like a red wheelbarrow or a metro crowd scene. 62 NOVEL IDEAS of color, thicker and cloudier beneath, lighter and more transparent toward the lustrous surface (Flaubert, 1994 (1856), p.
eBook - PDF- Y. Hakutani(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
“The painter,” Pound wrote, “should use his colour because he sees it or feels it. I don’t much care whether he is representative or non-representative. . . . It is the same in writing poems, the author must use his image . . . not because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed or some system of ethics or economics” (“Vorticism” 464). To demonstrate his poetic theory, Pound thought of an image not as a decorative emblem or symbol, but as a seed capable of germinat- ing and developing into another organism. As an illustration he pre- sented what he called “a hokku-like sentence” he had written: The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals, on a wet, black bough. “In a poem of this sort,” he explained, “one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective” (“Vorticism” 467). The Ezra Pound, Imagism, and Japanese Poetics 71 image of the faces in the crowd is based in immediate experience at a metro station in Paris; it was “a thing outward and objective.” Not only did Pound actually see the “thing,” but it generated such a sensa- tion that he could not shake it out of his mind. This image, he empha- sizes, “transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective,” that is, the image of the “Petals, on a wet, black bough.” Imagism is further contrasted to symbolism: “The symbolist’s symbols have a fixed value, like numbers in arithmetic, like 1, 2, and 7. The imagiste’s images have a variable significance, like the signs a, b, and x in alge- bra” (“Vorticism” 463). Although Pound’s definition is clear enough, the sources for his ideas are hard to determine. Most discussions about the genesis of the Imagist movement are speculative at best. Pound’s insistence that an image in poetry must be active rather than passive suggests that a poem is not a description of something, but, as Aristotle had said of tragedy, an action.
eBook - PDFRoots of Lyric
Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics
- Andrew Welsh(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
The visual emphasis of phanopoeia has been a part of I M A G E modern poetry from its beginnings. For the poetry that we are presently interested in those beginnings are in London in the period 1908-1914, in the new movement that soon came to be called Imagism. T. E. Hulme was an early member of that movement, and he thought it heralded a new form of classicism in poetry. He anticipated a dry, hard, severely finite form of verse in which the poet would be the counterpart of the new classical artist in painting and sculpture—an artist in language carefully working to get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind. Tlie great aim of such poetry, he said, is accurate, precise and definite description, and its visually precise language always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to pre-vent you gliding through an abstract process. 1 Ezra Pound set forth three principles for the new poet to follow, the first of which was: Direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective. Pound's famous demonstration of that new poetry was the short poem which, he has already told us, began with a vision of faces in a metro station and the sudden emotion he experienced on seeing them: In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. 2 Phrases such as direct treatment of the 'thing' and the exact curve of what he sees emphasize a poetic language based on clear, precise seeing, a power of phanopoeia; for if this power in the language of poetry is associated with the assumption that to know is to have seen, then clear knowing requires first of all that the eye see clearly. But just what is seen, and what is known, in a poem such as In a Station of the Metro? Although Hulme called for accurate, precise and definite description, the poem obviously does not give an accurate description of the scene in the metro station, and the image of petals on a wet,
eBook - PDF- Oliver Tearle(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
It would be of impressive weight for its size. The success of the word Imagism has been such that it is generally taken that the interest of the poems is simply as illustrating this dead movement. On the contrary, T. E. Hulme and Modernism 8 the verse has intellectual and rhythmic qualities not found elsewhere in English verse. (Sisson 1981, 67) To call for the publication of a single volume comprising just five short poems is to make an impassioned case for the value and achievement of the poet. We are still waiting for the standalone volume of Hulme’s poems, but this book is an attempt to show, as Sisson and others have started to do, why Hulme’s poetry is well-crafted, unique and significant for modernist literature. At each stage I will also endeavour to show why the poetry and the prose – namely, Hulme’s critical, theoretical and philosophical writings – are inseparable and complementary. Pound certainly maintained a strong belief in the striking quality and style of Hulme’s poems. He later said, ‘I came on six lines of Hulme’s the other day – no importance unless you think that it is important that a guy who left only a few pages of poetry should have a style so unmistakable that you come on it and know that it’s Hulme’s’ (quoted in Ferguson 2002, 60). Although the present study seeks to bring Hulme’s poetry closer to the centre of his thought – particularly the pre-1912 period of his ideas and writing – I will also touch upon his art criticism, not least because, as Ashley Dukes recalled, his and Hulme’s ‘general interest in “abstract” art led us especially to a revaluation of the images of poetry’ (Dukes 1942, 41): Imagism, then, has a link with modernist art, and Hulme’s art criticism is therefore worth discussing alongside his slightly earlier writings on poetry. Hulme’s poetry is important because it is, in one sense, an epicentre of modernist thought, certainly of his modernist thought.
eBook - PDF- Sean Latham, Gayle Rogers(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
The text, instead, was a luminous object, its form and texture unique to the subject or emotion described. Emphasizing the religious sense of transcendence underlying this kind of thought, W. K. Wimsatt called the poem a “verbal icon”—something made of language that nevertheless pointed beyond its mere expressive or representational capacities (see Verbal ). When these linguistic qualities were exhibited in poetry that was “tortured, . . . not facile, [that] does not worry so much about success in communication, . . . [and that eschewed the] predictable and easy,” it was essentially “modernist” poetry (Ransom, “Making” 864, 868). THE EMERGENCE OF “MODERNISM” 47 Ransom, himself a poet, was the de facto editor of the Fugitive and a major figure in the movement; he actually coined its name, the “New Criticism,” in 1941. His essay “The Future of Poetry” (1924) argues that “the arts generally have had to recognize Modernism,” but that this has created a predicament: “How should poetry escape? And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined. . . . In poetry the Imagists, in our time and place, made a valiant effort to formulate their program. Their modernist manifestoes were exciting, their practice was crude, as was becoming to pioneers, and instructive in more ways than they had intended” (2). Ransom sees that Imagism— which he takes to be the clearest articulation of modernism—had demanded “accuracy of expression” and “newness of matter,” but that had led to a “free verse [which had] no form at all, yet it made history” (2). Herein lies the problem for Ransom, who mixed respect and reservation when regarding modernism: critics demand form so that poetry can be analyzed thoroughly, yet the greatest poetic movement of the day had no respect for the traditions of form.
eBook - PDF- C. Warden(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
So, while the form is defined by syntactical innovation, it is also defined by the image. Dukes clearly connected this to the act of painting and, as we have seen, this connec- tion made a substantial difference to the ver y structure of these plays. Yet Dukes was conscious of another influence, that of Imagism. Spender described the Imagists’ project in his 1963 text, The Struggle of the Moder n. He suggested that they , ‘stripped poetr y back to the primitive situation in which the outer experience produced a poetic reaction on the sensibility. This is when it strikes off an image, like a spark. The image is the basic unit of poetr y’ (Spender 1963, p. 110). Understanding the Imagists’ project as committed to a ‘hard- ness of outline, clarity of image, brevity , suggestiveness, freedom from metrical laws’ (Hughes 1972, p. 4), a similar attitude can be seen in a broad range of examples from the British theatrical avant-garde. Given the well-documented connections between the originator of the movement, Ezra Pound, and Eliot and Lewis, one might expect such influences in their work. However , the parallels (if not direct connections) can be seen in a number of performance pieces. The image as an incisive, condensed trope is a recurring motif. The images created in the British avant-garde were, in keeping with the Imagist movement, often vibrant. But they were also infused with intention: poetic pictures with political design. T ake, for example, the dialogue between light and darkness. This is a well-established trope, as in Macbeth’s, ‘Stars, hide your fires,/ Let not light see my black and deep desires’ (Shakespeare 1967, p. 64). While this dualist image remained in the British avant-garde, it was now imbued with political fervour and a growing complexity. ‘Light’ and ‘dark’ as political motifs unexpectedly recurred time and again.
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Musico-Poetic Intermediality in Amy Lowell´s Poetry and Poetics
- Regina Schober(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Universitätsverlag Winter(Publisher)
Lowell’s free verse experiments, which are central to her understanding of Imagism, are to a great extent inspired by similar trends in Modernist music to liberate rhythm from metrical con-straints. Lowell does not (yet), however, reproduce music, as she later does in her intermedial ‘translations’. Rather, in order to find a new poetic language that can create “hard and clear” images, she explores the very foundation of (musical) spatiality and temporality as manifest in auditory images and movements and applies them to the poetic medium. One of Lowell’s most remarkable examples of Imagist writing is a five part poem called “Spring Day” ( Men, Women and Ghosts ). The poem portrays various sensory impressions of an individual person on an ordinary day from morning to night. The speaker neither contem-plates nor interprets the impressions that act upon him/her. Rather, like a The Music of Imagism 189 sponge, s/he absorbs all the sounds, colors, scents, and images, representing them unfiltered in their diverse complexity. The poem starts with the image of a morning bath: Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my fin-ger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot, and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day. (145) 118 The speaker experiences joy and pleasure, 119 but also an overwhelming exhaustion from the manifold sensory impressions that fill the space around him/her and which appear in constant modifications. They are at once minutely concrete and ultimately ephemeral.
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