IMAGIST POETRY

Even by twentieth-century standards, Imagism was soon over. In 1912 Ezra Pound published the Complete Poetical Works of its founder, T.E. Hulme (five short poems) and by 1917 the movement, then overseen by Amy Lowell, had run its course. {1} {2} {3} {4} {5} The output in all amounted to a few score poems, and none of these captured the public's heart. Why the importance?

First there are the personalities involved — notably Ezra Pound, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams {6} {7} {8} {9} — who became famous later. If ever the (continuing) importance to poets of networking, of being involved in movements from their inception, is attested, it is in these early days of post-Victorian revolt.

Then there are the manifestos of the movement, which became the cornerstones of Modernism, responsible for a much taught in universities until recently, and for the difficulties poets still find themselves in. The Imagists stressed clarity, exactness and concreteness of detail. Their aims, briefly set out, were that:

1. Content should be presented directly, through specific images where possible.
2. Every word should be functional, with nothing included that was not essential to the effect intended.
3. Rhythm should be composed by the musical phrase rather than the metronome.

Also understood — if not spelled out, or perhaps fully recognized at the time — was the hope that poems could intensify a sense of objective reality through the immediacy of images.

Imagism itself gave rise to fairly negligible lines like:

You crash over the trees,
You crack the live branch…  (Storm by H.D.)

Nonetheless, the reliance on images provided poets with these types of freedom:

1. Poems could dispense with classical rhetoric, emotion being generated much more directly through what Eliot called an objective correlate: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." {10}

2. By being shorn of context or supporting argument, images could appear with fresh interest and power.

3. Thoughts could be treated as images, i.e. as non-discursive elements that added emotional colouring without issues of truth or relevance intruding too much.

Difficulties

It is doubtful, first of all, whether specific emotion can be generated in the way Eliot envisaged. Emotive expression is a complex matter, as every novelist or playwright soon discovers.

There is also the difficulty of isolated images. Human beings look for sense wherever possible, and will generally supply any connecting links that the poet has removed, correctly or incorrectly. Poems are not self-sufficient artifacts, moreover, but belong to a community of codes, assumptions and expectations, which we must learn when reading literature of the past. Context is important.

Finally, there is happy assumption that poetry is largely an expression of emotion, and that the intellectual content is immaterial. The briefest course in aesthetics will show the difficulties. Is emotion conveyed or evoked? Is emotion a purely individual matter, or can we talk of emotion appropriate to the situation, when social codes are involved?  And what do we make of the general experience of artists who find that emotion emerges as the work develops?

Undeterred, however, the three streams continued as follows.

1. Snippets of mimicry, wide-ranging allusion and striking images gave beauty and power to lyrical passages in The Cantos and Briggflatts.

2. Disconnected images passed through stridency into gaudy irrationalism as Imagism developed into Dadaism and Surrealism.

3. Abstruse conjecture and name dropping became a necessary ingredient of contemporary poetry — which might have exposed the shaky scholarship of both poet and reviewer had the content been taken seriously. In general, it wasn't, however, and poetry in its more avant garde aspects developed into a rarefied and exclusive game.

Academics knew this well enough. "The imagination offered a type of knowledge superior to that of rational analysis, superior to the empirical discoveries of science. The image in a poem gave the reader a moment of illumination beyond normal apprehension, and so introduced him to a kind of sensibility not to be found in everyday living. Frank Kermode has described these influences in great detail in The Romantic Image ( 1957), and shown that this emphasis on the image has had a very considerable effect on techniques of literary analysis. The student has been taught to look mainly at the various effects of individual images, and then to consider the interrelationship of images throughout the poem. Many analyses of poems have paid no attention to rhyme, conventions of genre, or syntax, but have concentrated upon the complex pattern of imagery. The implication has been that a poem has an organisation of its own, based upon the image, and that ordinary grammatical structure is of comparatively small importance. Eliot's The Waste Land, of course, demonstrates this conception of linked images. Such analyses of imagery have been applied successfully to the poetry of the metaphysicals, or to Hopkins, for example, but they have had little to say about the typical Elizabethan sonnet or song, or about the structure of the long poems of Milton, Dryden or Pope." wrote C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson, {11} pointing out that Davie had argued that "language achieves its effects by a variety of means, and one of the most important is by the use of orthodox syntax. . . Language is thought of as an instrument of articulation, a way of establishing relationships like the harmonies of music or the equations of algebra. . . [In] the second attitude, popular among the poets of the 1920's, language is trustworthy only when it is broken down into units of isolated words, when it abandons any attempt at large-scale, rational articulation. . . 'systems of syntax are part of the heritable property of past civilisation, and to hold firm to them is to be traditional in the best and most important sense . . . the abandonment of syntax testifies to a failure of the poet's nerve, a loss of confidence in the intelligible structure of the conscious mind, and the validity of its activity'. . . Davie requires poets to mean what they say, and to relate their poems to common experience. . . His influence prevents a student from an endless search for new subtleties of interpretation, and sends him to study the nature of genres in particular periods. His emphasis on syntax, and the various types of syntax used by poets, offers new, exciting possibilities for analysis. He asserts the value of mind and rational order, and so offers tools with which a reader can assess the organisation of a long narrative poem. He tries to bring poetry back to traditional modes of communication, to make the poet, once again, a man speaking to men" {12}

Development: Pound's Cathay (1915)

Pound's approach was based on a misconception, that Chinese is a pictogram method of writing where the meaning is directly and vividly evoked by images in the script. Put the characters of sun and moon together and you get the character for bright. Unfortunately, very few Chinese words are of this type, and even in these the average Chinese no more reads the pictures than we respond to the etymology of our words. The Chinese script {13} {14} is essentially logographic, where signs represent morphemes, the minimal element of a word that carries meaning. Such elements also represented sound in the early history of the language, and elements called 'radicals' had to be added to clarify the meaning. {15} But Pound, working from notes supplied by Ernest Fenellosa, was too excited by the notion to take advice, and he combined this supposed directness with a free verse style to create translations that were sometimes excellent, even if establishing an unfortunate orthodoxy of free verse for Chinese translation.

In fact, Chinese poetry is anything but direct, but this misunderstanding allowed the Modernists to strike out in new directions. Where poetry before had been a high art form, with a long tradition and much to learn, the essence of poetry could now be honesty, freedom from encumbering technique, and a stress on surprise (foregrounding) and novelty (make it new). William Carlos Williams was among the first to throw off the constraints of tradition, but the trait appears in many American Modernists, particularly those who dislike western civilization, or what it has become — Bly, {16} Snyder, {17} Kinnell, {18} Wright, {19} Merwyn, {20} etc. {21}

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