Imagism (literary movement)

Imagism describes a style of poetry that emerged in the early twentieth century when a demand to break away from traditional forms of verse practice, particularly romantic poetry, was sought in Europe and the United States. Calling themselves "Imagistes," and associated with Ezra Pound (1885–1972), the group includes Amy Lowell (1874–1925), William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), F. S. Flint (1885–1960), D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), H. D. (Hilda Doolittle; 1886–1961) and Richard Aldington (1892–1962). The anthology Des Imagistes (1914) collects works by eleven poets.

Brief History

Ezra Pound first used the French version of the word imagistes to give a name to H.D.’s and Richard Aldington’s poems in the America-based magazine Poetry (edited by Harriet Monroe) in the November 1912 issue. Pound must have been encouraged by what the French symbolists achieved during 1880–1900, that is, to free French poetry from the traditional form. The symbolist movement was founded by such poets as Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), Paul Verlaine (1844–1896), and Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891). Baudelaire coined the word "modernité" (modernity), and the symbolists are regarded as the creative sources of such artistic styles as cubism, futurism, dadaism, and surrealism. Pound looked up to the French symbolists, whose aim was to create a new form of poetry to respond to changes encountered at the end of the nineteenth century in the aftermath of the European revolutions of 1848 and the subsequent changes driven by the Industrial Revolution. The changes included political, religious, and economic dimensions.

Pound’s "In a Station of the Metro" is only two lines: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/ Petals on a wet, black bough." Deviating from the romantics and Victorians, this poem offers no individual emotion, no moral teaching, and is not rhymed. The title, which may be read as an additional line, sets the scene in the modern city (in this case, Paris). Pound’s interest in Japanese haiku is evident in the poem’s brevity and its two juxtaposed images. His poem works by putting two images, "faces" and "petals," alongside each other, asking for an instantaneous comparison.

A key figure in the imagist movement is T. E. Hulme (1883–1917), who was influenced by Henri Bergson’s (1859–1941) discussion of "the image." Taking ideas from Bergson, Hulme maintained that prose is the vehicle for "intellect," which only analyzes, whereas poetry is a conduit for "intuition," which puts the artist back to the object and breaks down the space between the poet and "the thing." Hulme asserted that language is always in danger of extinction and, therefore, needs new images, which could only be created by poetry, not prose. He insisted that "intuition" will only be revealed when poetry works with precise language, "impersonal emotion," and concrete images.

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) is never regarded as an imagist, but his long-term friendship with Pound, his poetry and essays are keys to understanding imagism and its place in the modernist movement. Poetry aims to reach what Eliot calls the "impersonality" in art, instead of expressing the poet’s emotions or to create new ones. As a prominent poet and critic in the English modernist movement, Eliot argues in "Tradition and Individual Talent" (1919) that the art of poetry can be achieved only when the poet surrenders himself to the poem and acts as a medium for the combination of emotions and words to give a "new art emotion," which is "emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet." Eliot’s metaphysics implies a process of "depersonalization," which is anti-romantic. The stress is turned to the search of images instead of expressing individual emotions.

Searching for poetic innovations, Pound left the group about a year after its establishment. He soon joined vorticism, which he defined as a kind of "accelerated impressionism … a spreading or surface art," an obsession with speed and technology.

Impact

A new concept of perception and unconventional poetic language is characteristic of this short-lived but prominent literary movement. The imagist style is unrhymed and irregularly versed, lacks individual emotion, and features the extensive use of concrete visual images as its sole means of poetic creation. Imagism rejects the traditional sense of beauty and demands literary restrictions, while embracing revolutionary literary devices such as depersonalizing poetic voice and reviving vers libre (free verse), as inspired by Jules Laforgue (1860–1887). Imagism responds to and, in turn, shapes the modernist literary and cultural scenes, including the idea of discussing the imagery of literary and later filmic texts starting from imagist poetry.

John Gould Fletcher argues that the fault of imagism is that its aesthetic form limits the authors’ expression of their view of life, and thus prevents human judgment and evaluation, which is essential for art. F. R. Leavis criticizes the lack of responsibility shouldered by the poet due to imagism’s emphasis on impersonality. Pound’s imagist period has been considered by some to have contributed to his demand for a form of beauty that coincides with fascist aesthetics. The danger of representing cold and impersonal emotion and losing the subjectivity of the poet in "the thing" may be a sign of repudiation of the bodily. Pound himself was briefly associated with fascism during the World War II, and the tension between fascist culture as a reactionary force and modernist revolutionary demands is never reconciled.

In the aftermath of the imagist movement, Hugh Kenner argued that although imagist poems may not be too fruitful as literary works, the imagist movement nonetheless served as a platform for subsequent masterpieces such as Pound’s Cantos (1922) and T. S. Eliot’s modernist poetry. While Pound had a brief but intensive relationship with imagism, Eliot’s tangential association with the movement produced a subtler effect on understanding modernist art forms. Furthermore, prominent modernist figures such as James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence would be reevaluated differently if their novels were read as imagist works—assuming that the contradiction of "imagist prose" is suspended.

Pound’s poetry opened up the literary mode of writing, freeing the language used (from iambic pentameter to everyday language) and topics for poetry. In addition, Pound’s interest in Chinese classical poetry and fascination with Japanese haiku may be regarded as forms of twentieth-century chinoiserie. As Asia, especially China, grew in importance in the globalized market, Pound and the imagists contributed to the West’s evolving understanding of Asian culture and literature.

Bibliography

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Duncan, Robert. The H. D. Book, edited by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman, U of California P, 2012.

"Ezra Pound." Academy of American Poets, poets.org/poet/ezra-pound. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

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Gage, T. John. In the Arresting Eye: The Rhetoric of Imagism. Louisiana State UP, 1981.

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Jones, Peter, editor. Imagist Poetry. Penguin, 1972.

Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Pimlico, 1971.

Mamedova, Javida A. “Thomas Ernest Hulme and Literary Movement Imagism.” Alfred Nobel University Journal of Philology, vol. 2, no. 20, 2020, pp. 105–12, doi.org/10.32342/2523-4463-2020-2-20-10. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

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