Write a note on imagism in Ezra Pound’s poetry. Cite instances from his poems prescribed in your course

Introduction

The imagistes were soon Anglicised into ‘imagists’. The Imagists published four anthologies during the period 1914-1917, and the notion of Imagism soon became well known. Some see it as the starting point of modern poetry. The Imagist poets were turning their backs on the sentiment and romanticism of the nineteenth century, and avoiding poetic clichés like moonlight and birdsong, which Ezra Pound criticised as a “doughy mess”. Unusually for the time, women poets featured prominently within the group. The four Imagist anthologies included work by Pound and the two original imagistes H.D. and Aldington, and also poets such as Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. Some poets referred to themselves as Imagists, others didn’t use the phrase but were sympathetic to the Movement’s aims. The Imagists were interested in returning to what they saw as the best poetic practices of the past. They did not have strict rules about what to write, but rather general advice for approaching poetry. Their approach involved three aims: to write about the subject of your poem directly; to make sure absolutely every word is necessary to the poem; and to write more in the irregular style of musical rhythm than a completely regular beat.

Ezra Pound, in his 1913 Poetry magazine article ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, defines what he means by image: “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instance of time”. It isn’t a clear-cut definition, but it’s a useful and interesting way of looking at poetry. Pound’s poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’ is one of the most famous examples of this theory of the image, and we can use the poem to explore Pound’s definition. Imagism was born in England and America in the early twentieth century. A reactionary movement against romanticism and Victorian poetry, imagism emphasized simplicity, clarity of expression, and precision through the use of exacting visual images. Though Ezra Pound is noted as the founder of imagism, the movement was rooted in ideas first developed by English philosopher and poet T. E. Hulme, who, as early as 1908, spoke of poetry based on an absolutely accurate presentation of its subject, with no excess verbiage. In his essay “Romanticism and Classicism,” Hulme wrote that the language of poetry is a “visual concrete one….Images in verse are not mere decoration, but the very essence.”

Pound adapted Hulme’s ideas on poetry for his imagist movement, which began in earnest in 1912, when he first introduced the term into the literary lexicon during a meeting with Hilda Doolittle. After reading her poem “Hermes of the Ways,” Pound suggested some revisions and signed the poem “H. D., Imagiste” before sending it to Poetry magazine in October of that year. That November, Pound himself used the term “Imagiste” in print for the first time when he published Hulme’s Complete Poetical Works. A strand of modernism, imagism aimed to replace abstractions with concrete details that could be further expounded upon through the use of figuration. These typically short, free verse poems—which had clear precursors in the concise, image-focused poems of ancient Greek lyricists and Japanese haiku poets—moved away from fixed meters and moral reflections, subordinating everything to what Hulme once called the “hard, dry image.” Pound’s definition of the image was “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” He said, “It is the presentation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously which gives the sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.” In March 1913, Poetry published “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” In it, imagist poet F. S. Flint, quoting Pound, defined the tenets of imagist poetry:

Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective. II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. III. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome. By 1917, even Lowell began to distance herself from the movement, the tenets of which eventually became absorbed into the broader modernist movement and continued to influence poets throughout the twentieth century. One way of reading the poem would be this: the “instance of time” is the act of the speaker looking at something. This may be a crowd of people in a metro station, which reminds the speaker of a bough of petals; or it may be a bough of petals, which reminds the speaker of a crowd of people; or the speaker may be looking at both things at once in his/her imagination. Whether he writes directly about the subject of his poem is a bit more complicated. He certainly goes straight for the image – he doesn’t tell us anything about who the speaker is, why they are there, how they got to the station and which one it is, etc. But by rubbing the two images up against each other with no explanation, and by using words like “apparition”, Pound makes the poem very ambiguous. He is not simply reporting two separate images; he gives us a speaker whose intellect and emotions are subtly affecting the way the images are presented. Would you call this direct writing? You may well read the poem in a slightly different way – this is just one reading. It’s a very rich poem, and it shows the great potential in Pound’s own description of the image and the aims of the Imagist group. It also shows us that Pound, one of the founders of the Imagist group, is flexible with its guidelines. It may well be that writing directly about the subject of your poem is ultimately impossible. After all, you always have to choose what you include and what you leave out.

Poetry Society event

Ezra Pound’s ‘A Few Don’ts’ shaped modernist poetry and provided a handy toolkit for generations of poets. Don Share, the new editor of Poetry (Chicago) – where Pound’s injunctions first appeared in 1913 – joins the editor of Poetry Review, Maurice Riordan, to discuss whether poets need a new set of guiding principles. The event was held at beautiful Keats House (where John Keats lived, wrote and fell in love with Fanny Brawne) on 22 October 2013. It was a fascinating insight into Modernism, Imagism and contemporary creative writing practices. You can book tickets for future events on the Poetry Society website – we’d love to see you there!

Waiting for Write a critical note on the dramatic form in the 20th Century For More Answers Get Solved PDF WhatsApp – 8130208920

• Tweet
• Share
• Share
• Share