Imagists
Imagism was a poetic movement that emerged in the early 20th century, primarily in Britain and the United States, as a response to the perceived limitations of Romantic and Victorian poetry. Poets sought to create a new, modern form of verse characterized by clarity, precision, and a focus on direct imagery. Key figures in the movement included American poet Ezra Pound, who played a pivotal role in articulating its principles, and Amy Lowell, who significantly promoted Imagism through anthologies and public engagement.
Imagists emphasized the importance of presenting vivid, almost photographic images and advocated for eliminating unnecessary words from poems. Their approach often involved free verse, allowing for a more fluid expression of thought and emotion without the constraints of traditional rhyme and meter. Notable Imagist poets included Richard Aldington, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), John Gould Fletcher, and F. S. Flint, each bringing their unique styles while adhering to the movement’s core principles.
Despite initial challenges in gaining widespread recognition, Imagism's influence can be seen as a vital precursor to modern poetry, merging personal experience with objective observation to create a powerful and immersive reading experience. The movement eventually evolved, with its poets expanding beyond strict Imagism to explore broader themes and forms in contemporary literature.
Imagists
Introduction
By the end of the nineteenth century, poets in Great Britain and the United States were seeking a new, modern way to write verse. In Britain, the reigning movements in poetry and the arts—Romanticism and Victorianism—seemed to have run their course. Romantic lyric poetry, as exemplified by Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, for example, had degenerated (many poets believed) into self-indulgence so that poets seemed so preoccupied with their own subjectivity that the greater world was largely ignored. The result was poetry that was precious and clichéd. In other words, poets relied on stock words and phrases such as “thee,” “thou,” and “the orb of heaven” which tended to remove poetry from reality, from the day-to-day experience of most people. Poets were, in effect, just repeating what other poets had to say. Victorian poets had made matters worse by writing with sentimentality and decorum, thus eschewing the raw, robust radicalism that poets of Lord Byron’s generation had cultivated.
In the United States, poetry as an art was in a kind of limbo. The two greatest American poets of the nineteenth century—Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson—had largely been ignored by their contemporaries, and the full extent of their contributions to American poetry was discounted in the 1880s and 1890s by what came to be termed the “genteel tradition,” one that like the Victorians used poetry to express acceptable sentiments and avoided outspoken experiments. Dickinson and Whitman would not receive their due until the 1920s, after a new generation of writers and critics rediscovered them, seeing in their work the seeds of bold, new, modern poetry.
Of course, these broad generalizations should not obscure the significant works of poets such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Robert Browning or of the nascent poetry of writers such as Stephen Crane, who died while still quite young and just as he was experimenting with the verse that anticipated Imagism. However, the state of Anglo-American poetry at the end of the nineteenth century seemed moribund to a new generation that would begin to be published in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
The key figure involved in developing new experimental forms of poetry, including Imagism, was the American poet and critic Ezra Pound (1885-1972). Finding few sources of encouragement in his native land, Pound settled in London, quickly befriending older, established poets like William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), who seemed eager to write a sharper, grittier kind of verse that would distinguish them from their nineteenth-century predecessors and contemporaries.
The influence of Pound
Pound used London as his poetry laboratory. He quickly made friends with promising young writers such as Richard Aldington (1892-1962), H. D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961), John Gould Fletcher (1886-1950), and F. S. Flint (1885-1960)—all of whom would become part of the Imagist movement. Pound also met a British philosopher, T. E. Hulme, (1883-1917), who believed in the revival of classicism, which emphasized not the personality of the writer but the form of the work. The structure of works of art ought to be the poet’s concern in an age of science, Hulme argued, and not the poet’s feelings per se.
From his talks with Hulme, Pound formulated the cardinal principles of Imagism: direct treatment of subject matter (in practice, this would mean an almost photographic portrayal of objects and scenes) and elimination of any word or phrase that did not absolutely contribute to the presentation of the poem. Another tenet of Imagism was mainly technical advice to poets: Write in musical phrases rather than in rigid meter. Pound was certainly not opposed to traditional forms of poetry such as the sonnet, but the emphasis of his program led to experiments with free verse—lines that did not have end rhymes and that could be of varying lengths and numbers of syllables.
Pound was also one of the first Anglo-American poets to experiment with translations of Japanese poetry and to introduce into Western verse the terse, image-dominated lines of hokku: “As cool as the pale wet leaves/ of lily-of-the-valley/ She lay beside me in the dawn.” The epigrammatic style served as an antidote to the elaborate and turgid excesses of Romantic and Victorian poetry. Built around a single simile, this short poem, entitled “Alba,” functioned as an astringent, ridding the poet’s style of any unnecessary word or expression.
Pound inaugurated the Imagist movement with Des Imagistes: An Anthology, published in March 1914. As fiercely as Pound believed in the new poetry, he did little to advance his cause by introducing or campaigning for the work of the writers he had included in Des Imagistes. His fellow poets in Great Britain and America were galvanized by his efforts, but they made little headway in attracting readers or persuading reviewers and publishers that Imagism was a significant departure from past practices that deserved broader attention and approval.
Pound’s influence was exerted mainly through journals in England and the United States, especially in Poetry, a magazine established by Chicago poet and editor Harriet Monroe in 1912. In this magazine, Amy Lowell (1874-1925), just beginning her career as a poet, read Pound’s strictures about poetry and the requirements of Imagism. She regarded his work as a call to scrap her traditional verse and begin anew. Her enthusiasm over Pound’s pieces in Poetry was to fundamentally affect the history of poetry in the United States and abroad in ways Pound had not envisioned, especially in her ability to make poetry a public event that would produce a growing and avid audience not only for Imagism but also for the work of many other modern poets.
The beginnings
Lowell, the descendant of a prominent New England family famous for its business and arts achievements, published her first book of poetry, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, in 1912. She had been thinking about writing poetry for nearly a decade, although even as a child, she wrote poetry and, beginning in her twenties, lectured in Boston on literary subjects. The title of her first book, taken from Shelley’s famous poem, “Adonais,” mourning the death of John Keats, reflected Lowell’s love of Romantic literature and her adherence to traditional forms of poetry. However, her first volume excited little interest among reviewers and won her a tiny audience. The disappointed Lowell, perusing the pages of Poetry magazine, became excited by Pound’s extolling of Imagism. Virtually immediately, Lowell decided to jettison the writing of conventional poetry. In the spring of 1913, she set out for London, the site she later explained in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917) as one of the most exciting developments in modern verse.
In London, Lowell met with Pound, who introduced her to his Imagist colleagues: Aldington, H. D., Flint, and Fletcher. Lowell would also meet other remarkable writers in Pound’s circle, as well as D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), with whom she would correspond to the end of her life. Lowell quickly ascertained that many of these poets resented Pound’s high-handed methods. They were also dismayed that their new poetry had little impact on Anglo-American readers. To Pound’s outrage, Lowell set about corralling this disaffected group, promising to put them into print in the United States and, in general, furthering the Imagist cause. She had the promotional know-how and the financial resources to make her a creditable alternative to Pound.
Lowell lacked only bona fides as an Imagist poet herself. Industrious and an avid learner, she was producing Imagist poems before she returned to the United States in the fall of 1913. By 1915, Lowell had produced the first of three Imagist anthologies featuring her work and that of Aldington, H. D., Flint, Lawrence, and Fletcher. Pound excluded himself, deeply resenting Lowell’s takeover of a movement he believed belonged to him.
The work of these six poets in the Imagist anthologies broadly represents the modern poetry that Pound was promulgating. However, Lowell, a keen publicist, made sure that her three volumes contained prefaces that set out the Imagist program, thus linking the efforts of individual poets to a grand vision of how modern poetry, especially free verse, was making literary history. Unlike Pound, Lowell made no effort to dictate to her colleagues. Thus, each Imagist anthology was composed of poems that each poet deemed worthy of inclusion. Pound scorned this democratic, Imagist confederation, calling it “Amygism,” by which he meant not only to criticize Lowell’s outsize ego but also to express his disapproval of what he deemed her crass popularizing of poetry, which, in his view, diluted the power and ultimately the quality of the poems presented as examples of Imagism.
As the Imagist anthologies demonstrate, however, the poetry was exceptional. Not every poem met Pound’s highest standards, but to Lowell, that seemed less important than her efforts to make poetry a vital part of life. She wanted not only to energize contemporary poetry but also to increase the numbers of readers and institutions that could support the careers of poets and make poetry itself count for more in the lives of her fellow Americans. Consideration of the individual poets who published in the Imagist anthologies is the best way to comprehend the movement's experiments, achievements, and ambitions.
Richard Aldington
The youngest of the Imagist poets, Richard Aldington sought a way back to the Greeks. He admired the austerity of Greek art, and as an Imagist, he sought to write unadorned verse, the opposite of the opulent, flowing lines associated with Victorian poets such as Tennyson. Similarly, Aldington wanted to avoid the self-referential qualities of Romantic poetry, in which the poet becomes the hero of his own work.
Some of Aldington’s best poetry resulted from his service in World War I. He brought to his description of that war a stark, brutal, and precise power of observation. Although Imagists eschewed the open expression of their feelings, their poetry could still be intense and the product of personal emotion and experience. For example, in “Soliloquy-I,” Aldington describes the horrors of war: “Dead men should be so still, austere,/ And beautiful,/ Not wobbling carrion roped upon a cart….” Aldington’s avidity for Greek art is suggested by his desire to see the dead in repose like figures in classical sculpture. The full shock of war is reflected in choosing the word “carrion,” the word for the rotting flesh of animals, including humans. Although the poet is disgusted with this horror scene, he does not make his aversion explicit, allowing, in true Imagist fashion, the wording of the understated line to carry the weight of his emotions. The poet wishes to aestheticize the world, to make it beautiful, Aldington implies. However, the reality of war thwarts the aesthete’s purposes. A true Imagist, the poet presents the indelible image of a body tied to a moving vehicle. This is no refined tableau of war but war in all its immediacy and grim fatality.
Like other Imagists, Aldington wrote in free verse; that is, he did not use end rhymes or lines of equal length. Thus, “And beautiful” is given its own line in “Soliloquy-I,” with no attempt to provide an even, balanced rhythm. On the contrary, the poem stops and starts in lines of uneven length—in this case, it does so to emphasize the abruptness of war and the staccato nature of his thoughts in this horrid, shifting panorama of gore. The poet’s tone is clipped, and he is, so to speak, short with himself and upset that war so overturns his aestheticism, his desire for what dead men “should” look like. War, in other words, is presented as an affront to the poet, a breakup in the pattern of life and art as he would wish to experience it. A reluctant witness to war, the Imagist poet must nevertheless record what he sees, and in recording what he sees, he must allow his emotions and perceptions to inhere in his choice of words without forcing the scene to conform to the sentiments he wishes to express.
H. D.
Born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, H. D. befriended Pound while attending the University of Pennsylvania. Later, they renewed their acquaintance in 1911 when she arrived in London. Pound persuaded her to sign herself “H. D. Imagiste,” and when she married Aldington, the circle of Imagists became all that tighter. H. D., like Aldington, however, was willing to break with Pound over the promotion of Imagism, lending her genius to all three of Lowell’s Imagist anthologies.
Glenn Hughes has called H. D. the perfect Imagist—a judgment many critics have ratified. She exemplified the movement in short, terse poems such as “Oread,” a densely metaphorical six-line poem that begins, “Whirl up, sea—/ whirl your pointed pines.” Repetition, or what Lowell liked to call “return,” is evident in the poet’s use of whirl to evoke the jagged swirls of the sea, seen in the poem as a kind of pine forest swaying—an exact, quite literal picture. Pines do often come to a point and they create a sort of wave effect in heavy winds. In other words, the metaphorical and literal tend to merge in H. D.’s spare, austere verse, which derives, in part, from her sharing Aldington’s admiration for the unadorned style of classical poetry.
Critics have sometimes expressed reservations about H. D.’s poetry of isolated images, finding it cold, if vivid, and they are hard put to find a meaning in her literal/metaphorical poems. Like Lowell, who was also accused of writing without passion, H. D. believed that her Imagism was full of emotion brought to bear on a world that readers ought to be able to observe objectively in her poems. In “Oread,” the poet does exhibit her own feelings in lines such as “hurl your green over us.” This address to the sea, in other words, is about not only the poet’s but also humanity’s intense attraction to the immensity and power of nature, to the basic elements (water and land) of life. This is hardly, in other words, a poem that is simply devoted to description.
John Gould Fletcher
Of all the Imagists at work in London, John Gould Fletcher had the most profound and immediate impact on Lowell. Her conversations with him led not only to a major change in her style but also to her conviction that Fletcher and his colleagues deserved a larger audience than Pound was capable of attracting.
Coming to distrust an increasingly erratic Pound, Fletcher shared his poems with Lowell, who saw in them a rhythm, diction, and pattern that represented a decisive break with her nineteenth-century models. An excited Lowell would write about London and New York attempting to capture the urban rhythms of Fletcher’s book Irradiations, Sand and Spray (1915), for which she secured a publisher. Thus, his poem about a rainstorm in the city captures the movement and scenes of modern life in lines such as “Sudden scurry of umbrellas:/ Bending, recurved blossoms of the storm.” Here, Fletcher exemplifies an Imagism that is more fanciful than H. D.’s but still anchored in an actual moment. The literal becomes metaphorical swiftly and economically with the umbrellas taking the shape of a kind of flower show, fashioned out of the poet’s observation of people opening their umbrellas. The mass movements of people make it look as though the umbrellas have a life of their own, like flowers bowed and reshaped by rain.
F. S. Flint
The least well-known of the Imagists, poet and critic F. S. Flint, served the movement best in several highly regarded critical essays. Only a few of his poems survive as excellent examples of Imagism, for he tended too often toward padding his lines to suit certain rhythms to the detriment of the overall force and coherence of his work. His poetry seems too much like one of his favorites, Keats—for example, Flint favors the Romantic lyric far more than the hard-edged images of H. D. Thus, in his poem “London,” he rejects the daylight images of a pale green sky and birds hopping on a lawn and prefers to think of his beautiful city by moonlight: “among the stars,/ I think of her/ and the glow her passing/ sheds on men.” While the images seem pedestrian, the lines do reflect the Imagist concentration on the value of short lines that segregate images to enhance their maximum impact. His rhythms, too, are refreshing, far more relaxed than the intensity of Romantic lyrics, and without a rigid rhyme scheme, he achieves a natural cadence that suited the Imagists’ notion of what modern poetry should look like.
D. H. Lawrence
A fine poet and novelist, D. H. Lawrence never really considered himself an Imagist, but Lowell, realizing Lawrence was a great artist, persuaded him to join the movement, and he was grateful for her efforts in promoting his work. To Lowell, Lawrence deserved inclusion in her anthologies because certain of his poems did conform to the Imagist credo. Indeed, in a letter to him, she quoted an example of his Imagism: “The morning breaks like a pomegranate/ In a shining crack of red.” Lawrence brought incredible energy to Imagism, a dynamism Lowell saw reflected in these lines, which crackle with the kind of exuberance and explosiveness that was Imagism at its boldest and best.
Amy Lowell
Although Amy Lowell, like H. D., has been called an unemotional poet—Robert Frost’s verdict was that she was a writer content to simply report what she observed—she brought an erotic intensity to Imagism: “You are an almond flower unsheathed/ Leaping and flickering between budded branches,” she writes in “White and Green.” Fletcher’s influence is felt in her effort to capture the movement and shapes of nature as an index of her own passionate mood. The budded branches suggest the bursting and blossoming of love without Lowell’s ever making her feelings the focus of her lines.
Many of Lowell’s finest Imagist poems are set in gardens (she had a beautiful garden and estate in Brookline, Massachusetts) that become metaphors for her exploration of a remarkable range of subjects. Her masterpiece, “Patterns,” written in 1917, evokes in the setting of Flanders not only the wars of the seventeenth century and World War I but also the life of a woman caught in the pattern that a woman of her time is supposed to follow and the pattern of war that takes her beloved away from her.
The end
Lowell felt that by 1920, after the publication of three Imagist anthologies, the work of Imagism per se had been accomplished. In other words, the principles and practices of the Imagist poet had become a part of modern poetry, and the need for a separate movement no longer seemed urgent or even necessary. H. D. and the other Imagists would continue to write poems that exemplified the movement, but these poets ranged far from a strict adherence to the program Pound initially established—as did Pound himself. No account of modern poetry can ignore the pervasive influence of Imagism while at the same time acknowledging that the movement had limited aims and, in the end, had to supersede itself by having its poets engage in producing other examples of modern poetry.
Bibliography
Aldington, Richard. Life for Life’s Sake. New York: Viking, 1941.
Balbert, Peter. D. H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration. Cornell University Press, 2019.
Fletcher, John Gould. Life Is My Song. New York: Rinehart & Winston, 1937.
Hughes, Glenn. Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1924.
Gery, John, et al. Imagism: Essays on Its Initiation, Impact and Influence. UNO Press, 2013.
Jones, Peter, ed. Imagist Poetry. Penguin, 2002.
Lowell, Amy, et al. Some Imagist Poets: An Anthology. Good Press, 2023.
Pratt, William, ed. The Imagist Poem. UNO Press, 2010.
Stasi, Paul, and Josephine Nock-Hee Park. Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc., 2016.
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