Des Imagistes: An Anthology

by Ezra Pound

Des Imagistes, edited by Ezra Pound and published in 1914, was the first anthology of the Imagism movement. It was published in The Glebe in February 1914, and later that year as a book by Charles and Albert Boni in New York, and Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop in London.

The eleven authors featured were: Richard Aldington, Skipwith Cannell, John Cournos, H. D., F. S. Flint, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Allen Upward, William Carlos Williams

Genres: Poetry

84 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1914

About the author

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early-to-mid 20th century poetry.

Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."

In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin]

I was looking forward to writing about the influence of this brief anthology on the development of 20th century verse, but then I made the mistake of actually reading its history, and I discovered that—at least when it was first published—it wasn’t that significant at all.

It certainly should have been significant. After all, “Imagism” was one of the key concepts of Modernism. Its concentration on the presentation of “the thing in itself”, simple and unadorned, pointed the new generation of poets away from the pomposity of Miltonic diction, the crabbed concentration of Browning, the diffuseness of Tennysonian rhapsody. And this 1914 anthology brought together in one place its first theorists and practitioners (T.E. Hulme and F.S. Flint, inspired by Cubism and Japanese verse), their early ally and Imagism’s first genius (Ezra Pound, inspired by the Troubadour poets and the Chinese ideogram), Pound’s early recruits (Richard Aldington and Hilda Doolittle, inspired by the simplicity of the classical Greek lyric), a few obscure modernists destined for fame (Ford Madox Ford, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce), and the poet and patroness who would come to be most closely identified with the movement (Amy Lowell).

For whatever reason, this little book achieved neither critical attention nor popular acclaim. Perhaps it would have sold better if it had begun with a manifesto; after all, cultural movements should begin with a manifesto. Perhaps it should have included the first celebrated Imagist poem (Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”) which had been published in Poetry the year before. Perhaps it should not have been published in the spring of the year whose summer brought the horrors of The Great War.

What we know for sure is that it was only later, when Amy Lowell began to produce her series of anthologies Some Imagist Poets, that “Imagism” became a widely recognized movement. Ms. Lowell, who grew up on a ten acre estate in Brookline, Massachusetts, was a corpulent, cigar-smoking poet, a take-charge kind of a gal, and—as a member of a wealthy Boston Brahmin family—had the money to bankroll anthologies.

During the period that the individual volumes of Some Imagist Poets were being published, Ezra Pound began to refer to Lowell as “the hippopoetess” and the movement—which he felt she had hijacked—as “Amygism”. But by this time he had cut all ties with "Imagism," declared it to be “soft,” and had begun to champion a vigorous new thing called “Vorticism.”

Here follow a few examples:

ARGYRIA

O you,

O you most fair,

Swayer of reeds, whisperer

Among the flowering rushes,

You hâve hidden your hands

Beneath the poplar leaves,

You hâve given them to the white waters.

Swallow-fleet,

Sea-child cold from waves,

Slight reed that sang so blithely in the wind,

White cloud the white sun kissed into the air;

Pan mourns for you.

White limbs, white song,
Pan mourns for you.

Richard Aldington


EPIGRAM

(After the Greek)

The golden one is gone from the banquets;
She, beloved of Atimetus,
The swallow, the bright Homonoea:
Gone the dear chatterer.

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)



IN A GARDEN

Gushing from the mouths of stone men

To spread at ease under the sky

In granite-lipped basins,

Where iris dabble their feet

And rustle to a passing wind,

The water fills the garden with its rushing,

In the midst of the quiet of close-clipped lawns.

Damp smell the ferns in tunnels of stone,
Where trickle and plash the fountains,
Marble fountains, yellowed with much water.

Splashing down moss-tarnished steps

It falls, the water;

And the air is throbbing with it;

With its gurgling and running;

With its leaping, and deep, cool murmur.

And I wished for night and you.

I wanted to see you in the swimming-pool,

White and shining in the silver-flecked water.

While the moon rode over the garden,

High in the arch of night,

And the scent of the lilacs was heavy with stillness.

Night and the water, and you in your whiteness,
bathing !

Amy Lowell


THE RETURN

See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering !

See, they return, one, and by one,
With fear, as half-awakened ;
As if the snow should hesitate
And murmur in the wind

and half turn back;
Thèse were the "Wing'd-with-Awe,"
Inviolable.

Gods of the winged shoe!
With them the silver hounds

sniffing the trace of air!
Haie! Haie!

Thèse were the swift to harry;
Thèse the keen-scented ;
Thèse were the soûls of blood.


Slow on the leash,
pallid the leash-men!



EZRA POUND

[Sarah]

First finished book of 2020! I started reading this poetry collection about a week ago for one of my research papers. Enjoyable poetry for sure, although Pound's elitist selection sometimes interfered with a neutral reading.

[Izzy]

Ezra pound is not my father of the imagists #AmyLowellFanClub

[L.]

spodziewałam się więcej, mocniej i bardziej, ale i tak kilka wierszy znam już prawie na pamięć. wspaniała odtrutka na pseudopoezję rupi kaur (to na marginesie).

[George Dibble]

3.5/5

"In'N'Out has unlimited refills on their coffee."

"Top off your cup and have it in the morning."

"Nah."

The In'N'Out was almost empty and we were in a booth and someone else was sitting in the one next to us and he was whispering into her ear and she was smiling. The only thing that matters is time and we will all die.

"Let's go."

And we left.

--

Some really strong poems in here and then some that aren't. H.D. is a genius. Ezra Pound knows how to write a poem even if I don't like it. I like looking at Imagism after it's been so formed and seeing this first anthology and how they were experimenting with thoughts and playing with what this movement Is.

[Aubree Chavez-Gregory]

A collection of poetry that invokes imagism. I liked some poems over the others. Standard three stars because probs wouldn't have read this if not for class.

[Huascar Medina]

Sure, we can mark this as a milestone of imagist poetry. It's definitely a point of reference to expand on in those growing years of modernists. I wouldn't call this anthology "Pound's greatest finds." I reserve that designation for "Prufrock". I may have read the words "poplar" and "reed" too many times, but that's how it goes. We have our words. I get why it was used. Bukowski might have liked the use of the word "cicada" in this anthology though. Or, at least, knowing even Editor Ezra Pound could be conned.
Favourite verses are as follows

"POSTLUDE" by William Carlos Williams
Stanza 2 Line 3-6
"And our words arrows/To shoot the stars,/Who from Misty sea/Swarm to destroy us"

"LESBIA" by Richard Aldington
Stanza 1 Line 4-5
"You had the ivory of my life to carve./Use no more speech."

"HALLUCINATION" by F.S. Flint
Section II Stanza 1 Line 1-3
"I know this room,/and there are corridors:/the pictures, I have seen before;"

Section III Stanza 1 Line 1-3
"Imortal?...No,/they cannot be, these people,/nor I."

[Hannah]

To be perfectly honest, I don't tend to like poetry a lot on the whole, but if I'm going to read it, the less experimental, the better. Imagist poems have far too much going on in them for me to get enormously interested in what the poet had to actually say. There were certainly some stand-out and interesting poems, but on the whole, this was a collection that I would skip in favor of something written by Keats any day.