Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing - eBooks | Read eBooks online

Imagist Poets

The Pilgrimage (by Noguchi, Yone)
Des Imagistes, An Anthology
Interviews with William Carlos Williams ... (by Williams, William Carlos, 1883-1963)
A Book of Poems : Al Que Quiere! (by William Carlos Williams)
Ezra Pound & Japan : Letters & Essays (by Pound, Ezra)
Provenca: Poems Selected from Personae, ... (by Ezra Pound)
A Dome of Many Coloured Glass (by Amy Lowell)
Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (by Amy Lowell)
Speculations : Essays On Humanism And Th... (by Hulme, T. E)

You gotta love reactionary poetry. A movement or style develops on one side of the spectrum, and then another group of poets come along and create an aesthetic that aims to free itself of the other. The opposing side isn’t inspired just to complain; instead they are forced to action through creation.

Imagism, the first and perhaps most influential modernist literary movement, came along as a reaction to Romanticism and Victorian poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While those forms dealt with individuality, spiritualism, mysticism, religions, fables, Imagism dealt in the concrete. The imagist poets (although some claim there was never any real imagist movement, but rather those who wrote with sympathy for the ideals of imagism), who included the likes of Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, T. E. Hulme, Hilda Doolittle, and even James Joyce for a short time, focused on clarity, brevity, and most of all, imagery. Hulme wrote that their poetry was a “visual concrete one.… Images in verse are not mere decoration, but the very essence.”

Imagism wasn’t built only to counter the sentimental and meandering poetry of the previous century, it was equally callback to classical forms of directness and economy of language, and the progression of free verse and experimental forms (see vorticism and concrete poetry). In its purpose to rein in the abstracts of previous forms, it offered a new and sharper dialogue through images rather than ideas, feelings, or plot.

“In the Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound, a standard imagist poem, exhibits everything the movement stood for in but two lines:

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

No words are wasted. It juxtaposes the first image with the second by use of semicolon and line of succession. With this technique, the poem shows the equity between humans and nature, as well as the transience of each. The simplicity, the imagery, and the descriptions of nature resemble Japanese haiku. Indeed, Ezra Pound was heavily influenced by Japanese modernist poet Yone Noguchi and his haiku-styled poems in The Pilgrimage.

Pound put a twist on the imagist style and dubbed the technique the “Ideogrammic Method.” This method strung together a series of images that added texture to each other through layered juxtaposition. Each image expanded on the other, creating a mosaic-like lyric.

For more imagism, check out the imagist anthology Des Imagist, Speaking Straight Ahead and A Book of Poems by William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and Japan: Letters and Essays by Sanehide Kodama, Provenca by Ezra Pound, A Dome of Many Coloured Glass and Sword Blades and Poppy Seed by Amy Lowell, and Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art by T. E. Hulme.

By Thad Higa