Imagist poetry;

by Peter Austin Jones

This anthology traces the complicated evolution of imagism through its poetry from "the pre-imagists" and the "period of the anthologies (1914-17)" to "the imagists after imagism".

Genres: Poetry, 20th Century, Classics, Anthologies, Writing, Poetry Plays, Nonfiction

188 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 1972

Reviews

[Sean Barrs · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Imagists were a group of modernist poets that, well, liked images. It’s sort of a given, but the way they explored it was unique and intelligent, at least, as far as the narrative tradition of western poetry went.

Great imagists like Pound and Williams drew upon the traditions of eastern poetry. The looked at the haiku form and adapted it into the English language. Pound was very familiar with the orient; having travelled to China and Japan, studying art and literature for numerous years. Even Edward Said would say in Orientalismthat Pound, amongst other modernists, was “not entirely ignorant of the East” Within the poetry a sense of cultural appropriation can be seen in regards to the east, one free of any sense of cultural misrepresentation or degradation.

This form of modernism was a break from western narrative tradition, an assertion of something new, and this is exactly what Pound’s poetry became: a hybrid of eastern and western forms of representation. His poetry is a product of racial encounter, of west meeting east; it is poetry written in English, but is, nevertheless, adapted from traditional eastern forms as well as depicting the east within its content.

The strongest two examples are “Fan-piece, for her Imperial Lord” and “Ts’ai Chi’h.” Pound has experimented with the haiku form here:

Fan-piece, for her Imperial Lord
“O fan of white silk,
clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You also are laid aside.”



The first two lines follow the form of the traditional 5-7-5 syllabic pattern. The final line breaks this with seven syllables, no doubt, the result of experimentation on Pound’s behalf. Although a seemingly simple style, such deviation were distinctive and individual. Ts’ai Chi’h is very much the same:

Ts’ai Chi’h.
“The petals fall in the fountain,
the orange-coloured rose-leaves,
Their ochre clings to the stone”



Both poems depict thematic references to the east, as each new line creates an authentic new image as per the imagist tradition. Pound’s appropriation of eastern technique becomes a new form of representation as traditional eastern techniques are written in English, creating a piece of art that is, in itself, a product of racial and cultural encounter.

Not all the imagist focus on the orient, but the poems I enjoyed the most in here depicted it so they are the ones I have discuss. There are all manner of images in here, city life to people to other variation of the natural world, but, again, it was Pound’s work that I enjoyed the most. I think I need to read a full volume of his work.

[Kwan-Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

scary thought of the week: rupi kaur and lang leav are actually carrying on a barbarous and twisted version of the imagist poets and the principles they stood for but which is 100% more simplified and doesn't aim to deliver an image in concise language but a feeling in minimalist style which i kinda get but it doesn't make their poetry any Good because where's the literary value in it?

[Osore Misanthrope · Rating 2 out of 5]

Теорија ми је пречесто пријемчивија од праксе, не изузимајући ни тешку науку. Али за разлику од лабораторијског рада, овде је лако замислити и предвидети, унапред осликати књижевно-уметнички текст само на основу манифеста и поетике, протокола. Дајте ми гомилетину есеја, добро изоштрених микроскопа, и ужитак у таквом тексту надићи ће изворник.

Гиљермо де Торе ми је дао и довољно примера како бих са савршеном сигурношћу предвидео да са имажизмом никада нећу имати романсу, али све је боље од буљења кроз прозор воза, па хајде… Обичан говорни језик (читај: бљутав); каденца-антикаденца ритмови (као израз духовних стања, “као кружни замах уравнотеженог клатна”, где је строфа описана кружница, а π је писац); слободан стих (као “исцепкана проза” јер “поезија и проза су различити степени истог средства”); безлично-оригинално, објективно – не реално, већ саобразно пишчевом афекту; прецизно, јасно, концентрисано; никако клише, само сведено, без вишкова, доследно слици што се дрма са тремором пера – па није ли ово само метаморфоза импресионизма, питам ја.

Т. Е. Хјум: “Морамо судити о свету из положаја животиње, изостављајући Истину... Животиње се налазе у стању у коме је и човек био пре него што је симболички језик измишљен.”

Утицај хаикуа, суперпониране слике и честе компарације када човек израста из крајолика с почетка антологије – сварљиво. Античко референцирање касније – повраћам, а нарочито знајући да им је већ 1915. године авион из 1911. био демоде.

• Остављени љубавници, / горите под чедним белим месецом, / на невиђеним ломачама самоће и жеђи.
• Изнад мирног дока у поноћ, умршен у високу ужад катарке / виси месец. Што је изгледало тако далеко / сада је само дечји балон, заборављен после игре.
• Седео сам срећан у баштама, / посматрао мирну бару и трске / и тамне облаке / које је ветар из висина / кидао као лиснате гране / разнобојног дрвећа прошлог лета; / али мада сам веома уживао / у њима и у воденим љиљанима / скоро сам заплакао / због румене и беле боје углачаног камења за заставе / и бледожуте траве / међу њима.
• Из миришљавог лишћа са кинеске вазе
Сирена
Бродски момак који се нагао са брода Џунка са много бисера, и чешљао зелене увојке мора својим прстима од слоноваче, верујући да је чуо глас сирене, бацио је своје тело доле, међу таласе.

Happy World Nature Conservation Day! 🍂

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

According to the introduction, which is in itself a good enough reason to pick up this slim volume, few Imagist poets were in fact Imagists and they wrote few poems seriously conforming to the Imagist manifesto, but what they did share in common was being refreshingly not-Victorian and the impact of their work was primarily that not many subsequent poets were Victorian either. This was a good thing and some great poets are represented in this collection but their poems, or to be more cautious, their selected material in this volume, are mostly thin stuff to my mind. It is in later work and other poets that the rewards of Imagism are to be found, in poets who not only discarded redundancy but also had plenty to say. Still, even here there are pearls to reward the patient reader, of which this [this poem, this reader] is one.

Intimates

D H Lawrence

Don't you care for my love? she said bitterly.

I handed her the mirror, and said:
Please address these questions to the proper person!
Please make all requests to head-quarters!
In all matters of emotional importance
please approach the supreme authority direct! -

So I handed her the mirror.
And she would have broken it over my head,
but she caught sight of her own reflection
and that held her spellbound for two seconds
while I fled.

[Kyo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slim volume with some beautiful poems!
The introduction and appendices gave some great context and explanation of the 'movement', their ideas and features, which was lovely.

[Zanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

A brief selection of works and a broadly sympathetic introduction to the Imagist movement, including some statements of purpose by Ezra Pound, F. S Flint and Amy Lowell. Hilda Doolittle (H.D) and Richard Aldingdon are key members of the group, and DH Lawrence contributed to some of the anthologies they produced.

I owe to this book my discovery of the magnificent HD, and richly enjoyed declaiming her poetry into the night. The hostility between Pound and Lowell comes across as the latter derailing the movement, but I am sympathetic to her principles even if I agree with Jones that her poems are insipid...

Mixed bag overall

Evening

The light passes
from ridge to ridge,
from flower to flower -
the hypaticas, wide-spread
under the light
grow faint -
the petals reach inward,
the blue tips bend
toward the bluer heart
and the flowers are lost

The cornel-buds are still white,
but shadows dart
from the cornel-roots -
black creeps from root to root,
each leaf
cuts another leaf on the grass,
shadow seeks shadow,
then both leaf
and leaf-shadow are lost.

[Amy Hawthorne · Rating 2 out of 5]

'The main problem is that the poems the imagists published as a group cannot honestly be called to stand among the great achievements of literature'.

The editor's words not mine.

This collection gets 2 stars because it is so repetitive and confused and dull. I don't think there is a poem that does not include references to birds, sunsets, the moon or the over use adjectives, particularly colour.

In the introduction too it was defined that Pound's ideas of Imagist poetry cut down the verbiage until the bare image is left yet I had to read about 150 brutally mediocre rustly thin pages of stretched metaphors, lowly laboured similies without the thought or ease of talent of rhythm or rhyme (despite it not being a device used in this kind of poetry, althought it still was in some cases, but badly).

Overall I am really not looking forward to studying this as my rant suggests because I have no idea what intelligent things there are to say about a movement of poetry that didn't last 50 years and was self acclaimed to be unoriginal.

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good collection and I think introduction to Imagisme. Founded by Ezra Pound in the early 20th century, it is a movement where the image takes priority, and the poem holds a 'concentration of meaning', as a revolt against the "doughy" poetry of the late 19th century which was apparently to flowerly for Pound.

It was really nice to finally read poems from H.D. whom I've been meaning to read for a while. Surprisingly loved Ford Maddox Ford's poems as well but this was probably just because they were First World War poems which is one of my interest areas. William Carlos Williams, however, takes centre stage. His language and influence is unparalleled.

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 5 out of 5]

The sparse, sublime beauty of concentration and precision! I think Imagism might be my favorite poetic movement, although the confessional poetry of Plath and Sexton is still so dear to me. These words cut me to the quick and only further encouraged my current H.D. obsession. I stayed up late last night reading and started the morning in tears over the beauty of "Rain" by William Carlos Williams, which concludes the array of selected poems:

"the rain
of her thoughts over

the ocean
every

where

walking with
invisible swift feet" (read the rest here: https://www.zverina.com/bestbooks/poem-online-rain.htm)

I love the innovation and freedom of the Imagists combined with their respect for the past (and admiration for Sappho because same). I think I've finally realized that my ideal era of study is c. 1830-1930: Emily Dickinson, Impressionism, Modernism, The Bloomsbury Group, Imagists, The Lost Generation! I'll continue thinking about the connection made here in an appendix letter about the Imagistes and Symbolistes because I personally see so much resemblance between the stressed "exactness of a thing" in the Imagist manifesto and the Impressionist vision, but Symbolism and Impressionism were rivals and starkly opposed movements in certain ways. Altogether very interesting, especially considering the significant influence of H.D. and Marianne Moore in Imagism when French Symbolism was hypermasculine.

A few of my favorite poems within:

"What is eternal of you / I saw / in both your eyes. / You were among the apple branches; / the sun shone, and it was November. / Sun and apples and laughter / and love / we gathered, you and I. / And the birds were singing." -F.S. Flint (November)

"There is nothing to save, now all is lost,
but a tiny core of stillness in the heart
like the eye of a violet." -D.H. Lawrence (Nothing to Save)

[Iulia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t know much about the imagists & imagism, and from the little I did know, I assumed it wouldn’t work for me. I was wrong, which is a delicious feeling in art & literature.

“Roses are not noted for endurance
And only thirty days are June.” (from Amy Lowell)

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 3 out of 5]

A re-read after several decades. The things you already know are good (HD, early Pound) are still very good, the rest is often all over the place, but the way the appendices let you see some of the lesser poets' processes of paring down and de-Victorianising is highly interesting and useful.

[Kurt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been intending to delve into this stuff for a while now, and finally got to reading this. I first became interested because I was impressed with how much better the Richard Aldington translation of Voltaire's Candide was than the Dover edition I read before. It turned out that Aldington was a writer himself and in researching some of his history, I found that as well as being a member of the Imagists, he was married to an Imagist poet, H.D., and so decided to read some. The introduction to this book is informative and gives an objective overview of the movement; its history, beginnings and influence. I have to say that this is really what I feel I should be reading right now. It's hitting a lot of the right notes for me and is giving me a better understanding of how The Imagists were the gateway to modern poetry, breaking away from the florid prose and overt romanticism of the Victorian era. I like that Imagisim is a reductive form that has stripped away and simplified poetry, getting to the purity of the image. I can understand the flaws and criticisms leveled at the movement, however. The moon is mentioned frequently and there are colors mentioned in almost every single poem in this collection, but that doesn't detract from my pleasure in reading them. The simplified form keeps the poems from feeling dated as they almost read like song lyrics, in some cases (for better or worse. At least it's a frame of reference.)Overall, The Imagists seem to have taken the necessary step of getting rid of a lot of the verbal ornamentation that makes much Romantic poetry seem overly florid and pretentious, or at least difficult, to modern readers (at least this one.)

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even the "Imagists" themselves - whoever they were...& they could never decide!- had an image problem with their hide-bound contemporaries in Edwardian Britain; a Britain suffocating in sentimental gush & poetastic flubber! "Imagists" proclaimed a new honesty in poetry, honing down the verbiage to its ascetic bare bones. Ezra Pound,a later 'force terrible' described the current poetry as "a doughty mess of third-hand Keats,Wordsworth...& half-melted,lumpy". His antidote to this mellifluous tilth was a formula which should "..use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something...it does not use images as ornaments.The image itself is the speech". This helped,eventually, to set poetry on a course which it has followed ever since.(T.S.Eliot was an admirer). Famous names like James Joyce, D.H.Lawrence,Richard Aldington,Hilda Doolittle(H.D.) & Amy Lowell all wrote under the influence of this philosophy, with varying degrees of unanimity,& without acknowledging their membership of a formal group. But my favourite "imagist" remains the inimitable William Carlos Williams,to whom I was introduced at Dulwich College by one, J.P.R.Bird,defined 'as nervous as a high-jumper' in my first attempt at poetic satire (he had told us he had been a university athlete!),my first English master in the autumn of 1967...'The Red Wheel-barrow'...which was an admonition to me to be concise. Alas,I never took the hint!
A brief but tantalising introduction to an apparently passing poetic fad that became one of the main stanchions of modern poetry.

[Cristhian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Los imaginistas, el movimiento poético que no sabía que existía y no sabía que me gustaría tanto.

Pensar que había un sub grupo para todos aquellos que describen poéticamente un instante, una escena, una imagen...

Más aún, teniendo gigantes como Joyce, Pound, WCW me reafirman que me gusta la poesía y me gusta más no saber mucho de ella...

...porque de esa forma aun me logra sorprender.

"If you are using a symmetrical form, don’t put in what you want to say and then fill up the remaining vacuums with slush. Don’t mess up the perception of one sense by trying to define it in terms of another. This is usually only the result of being too lazy to find the exact word. To this clause there are possibly exceptions. The first three simple prescriptions will throw out nine-tenths of all the bad poetry now accepted as standard and classic; and will prevent you from many a crime of production. ‘… Mais d’abord il faut être un poète ’, as MM. Duhamel and Vildrac have said at the end of their little book, ‘ Notes sur la Technique Poétique’.
Ezra Pound"

[Quentin Ferrari · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was going to give this three stars for the rocky selection of poems. Pound's "Jewel Stairs Grievance," many great sections from Fletcher's "Irradiations," and a ton of other great poems were left out. But there were some great poems here that were new to me, and tucked into the back of the book were some fascinating prose pieces. Of course Pound's famous "don't"s were put in, but a letter he wrote Harriet Munro struck my eye for its style and commentary on the other imagists. This is a good yet slightly incomplete primer to imagist poetry on the whole.

I have a great soft spot for the imagist style itself. They usually seem obtuse and allusive and cold until you crack them. Once you do, there's a lot of enjoyment, emotion, and intellectual fun to be had.

[Vanessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

To the passionate lover, whose sighs came back to him on every breeze, all the world is like a murmuring sea-shell.

Allen Upward

[Talon Shuffler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok so I had to read this for class and it was a welcome break from the long novel we were reading. I like the poetry but I only really like either 1/3 or 1/2 of all of the poems contained within. It was a fine enjoyable time

[Ade Bailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superb introduction by Peter Jones. The anthology itself is thin - largely, one realises, because the idea of Imagism is so vague. Many of the included poets were not involved with Imagisme groups, nor did they wish to be associated with imagism.

[Nivedita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Has the very best of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Just the right mix. Best collection of poetry I've ever read.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poetical movement, known as Imagism, was a response against Romanticism, particularly Georgian poetry. The Georgians lived in a world of the ‘fictional’ and rejected the disreputable realities of life. They lacked modernism. The Imagists reacted against the clichéd and fanciful approach of the Georgians.

It flourished in England and America at the beginning of the 20th century. Imagists aimed at presenting their subject with clarity, precision and economy of language, using metaphor, or more infrequently relying on the statement of the sharply perceived concrete detail to give the quality of emotion or atmosphere nere of a scene with greater accuracy. Accurate description is aimed to be achieved and an endeavour is made to prove that beauty might be found in small conventional things.

The introduction of this book summarizes the aims of Imagism:

(i) To use the langugae of common speech but to employ always the exact word, not the clearly exact, not the merely decorative word.
(ii) To produce poetry that is hard and clear.
(iii) To create new rhythms and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. They aimed at the clarity and concentration of the Classic Chinese lyric and the Greek epigram.

T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) who published only five short poems, entitled ‘The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme’, is the protagonist of Imagism in England. Reacting sharply against the loose and superficial texture of the Georgian poetry, Hulme advocated the importance of "hard, dry image" in poetry. He emphasised that "poetry should restrict itself to the world perceived by senses and to the presentation of its theme in a succession of concise, clearly visualised, concrete images accurate in detail and precise in significance." The aim of the Imagists was to create "hard, brilliant, clear effects instead of the soft, dreamy vagueness or the hollow Miltonic rhetoric of the English 19th century tradition."

The Imagist Movement flourished from 1910 to 1918. Its first anthology, Des Imagists was published in 1914 with Ezra Pound, the distinguished American poet, as editor. It had eleven contributors, who belonged to England and America. They were Richard Aldington, Hilda Doolittle, F. S. Flint, Amy Lowell, William Carols James, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ford Maxod Ford, Allen Upward, John Cournos and Cannell. The Imagists also published a magazine The Egoist. Amy Lowell's anthology Some Imagist Poets (1915) was the first great landmark in imagist poetry.

What was the contribution of the Imagists? They liberated poetry from the shackles of classical discipline and the waywardness of Romanticism. They experimented ‘Verse libre’ and believed in unlimited freedom of expression. They endeavoured to reveal the new consciousness in beautifully moulded images.

The Imagists wished to produce poems "with the sharpness of outline and precision of form which belonged to a perfectly proportioned statuette or other carved image". "An image", said Pound, "is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." The following lines from one of the poems of H. D. illustrate how with clear definite images she builds a moment's monument:

The hard sand breaks
And the grains of it
And clear as wine
Far off over the leagues of it
The wind
Playing on the wide shore
Plies little ridges
And the great waves
Break over it.

To conclude, Imagism could not become a popular poctic movement. It soon died. The Imagists overemphasised the importance of technique and neglected the subject. The poets who stood for concise and concrete images fell into obscurity. Despite its limitations and weaknesses the Imagists exercised noticeable influence on English poetry. They rendered unique service to poetry by purging it of unnecessary ornamentation, empty verbiage and superfluous generalities. Hulme's conception of clearly visualised and concrete images left an indelible impact on T. S. Eliot, and many other poets of 1930s.

A very readable anthology.

[Fin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surely the definitive accessible book on Imagism: immensely valuable both as a scholarly survey/historical account of this movement (both the introduction and appendices are wonderfully detailed) and as a well-structured anthology of some very important and often very accomplished poets.

The works themselves, at least for me, did not disappoint. I was faintly amused by how often Jones stressed that a lot of these aren't great poems, but personally relatively few of them actually struck me as less than at least interesting/engaging (obviously their brevity helps though). While I can't confess to remembering or loving much of Aldington (is that sacrilegous?? he seems q important to their development lol) or Moore, I think T.S. Eliot was right on the money when he said Hulme was "responsible for two or three of the greatest short poems in the language" ('Autumn'), and many of Pound's Haiku-like verses were uniquely evocative ('In a Station of the Metro'). My favourite, though, had to be H.D. Take "Oread", which Jones compared to marble in its perfection and poise:

Whirl up, sea -
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.

Just one of the most perfect and beautiful images a poem has ever conjured up (though it is, as Langdon Hammer notes in his great Imagism lecture, a slightly veiled dramatic monologue - much more complex than I'm making it out to be above).

So a wonderful and very worthwhile book (and incredibly short - doesn't take more than a few hours to read every word here). Not every poem is essential or brilliant, but I think Jones should gas up what's here a bit more despite (or perhaps, more accurately, due to) their limitations - as the precursor to Modernism and modern poetry in general, and simply as a collection of wonderful verse, the movement, and by extension this book, is brilliant.

[Philippe · Rating 3 out of 5]

As other reviewers have noted, the standout feature of this anthology is Peter Austin Jones’s lengthy introduction, which offers a compelling dissection of Imagist logic. As far as I can detect, there are five key principles underpinning Imagist poetry:

Direct Treatment of the "Thing"
Precision and Economy
Free Verse and Cadence
Depersonalisation and Objectivity
Sentence or Phrase rather than Word as Unit of Meaning

This is especially interesting for someone, like myself, engaged in classical Japanese short-form poetry. Indeed, imagist aesthetics echo the discipline of haiku or tanka, where every syllable must earn its place, and the poem becomes an atmospheric and epistemic complex, evoking rather than describing.

The anthology itself adopts a documentary approach, curating works from publications the Imagists used to define their movement. While the overall poetic quality is uneven, the real discovery is H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), whose contributions shine. It’s a shame, however, that so little of her work remains in print. I was only able to procure her Helen in Egypt.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for Imagist poetry - the inner emotional response and memories elicited is delightful - both that of joy and sadness. It was also intriguing to read a little on the history of the movement. In fact, it reminded me a little of schoolyard dramas, with the exception that the students were educated poets arguing about who and what makes the best poetry...The letter included in the appendices from Ezra Pound to Harriet Monroe is the perfect example.

[Chahna · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book in the sense that it gives great context to the movement. The introduction was amazing. So much extra content in the appendix too. All of it is great if you want to deep dive into Imagism. But the poems themselves were scant. And I did not really enjoy all of them. It was still a joy reading it, though.

[James Rhodes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent selection

There are very few misses among the chosen poems. A good overview of a shortlived but widely eclectic movement, with some strikingly beautiful moments.

Around a third of the book is contextual information, old introductions to anthologies for instance, and biographies of poets.

[Ana Beatriz · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.25
overall not my favorite but there were a handful of poems that i really enjoyed (my favorites were the rose by john cournos, intimates by d.h. lawrence, the ww1 ones and some of william carlos williams)

[Fiona · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Introduction to Imagism and its importance to Modernism is interesting and worth reading. The poems themselves are as it is noted in the introduction “cannot honestly be called to stand among the great achievements of literature. Some are very fine, but many are weak by any standards.”

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice language heavy poems. Would recommend.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well chosen selection with additional notes to front and back.

[tayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loveeeeeee 💞💞💞💞 their minds 💓💓💓💓