Richard Aldington and Amy Lowell

[In the following essay, Aldington and Lowell outline the central tenets of Imagism.]

SOURCE: Preface to Some Imagist Poets, 1915: An Anthology, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915, pp. v-viii.

In March, 1914, a volume appeared entitled Des Imagistes. It was a collection of the work of various young poets, presented together as a school. This school has been widely discussed by those interested in new movements in the arts, and has already become a household word. Differences of taste and judgment, however, have arisen among the contributors to that book; growing tendencies are forcing them along different paths. Those of us whose work appears in this volume have therefore decided to publish our collection under a new title, and we have been joined by two or three poets who did not contribute to the first volume, our wider scope making this possible.

In this new book we have followed a slightly different arrangement to that of the former Anthology. Instead of an arbitrary selection by an editor, each poet has been permitted to represent himself by the work he considers his best, the only stipulation being that it should not yet have appeared in book form. A sort of informal committee—consisting of more than half the authors here represented—have arranged the book and decided what should be printed and what omitted, but, as a general rule, the poets have been allowed absolute freedom in this direction, limitations of space only being imposed upon them. Also, to avoid any appearance of precedence, they have been put in alphabetical order.

As it has been suggested that much of the misunderstanding of the former volume was due to the fact that we did not explain ourselves in a preface, we have thought it wise to tell the public what our aims are, and why we are banded together between one set of covers.

The poets in this volume do not represent a clique. Several of them are personally unknown to the others, but they are united by certain common principles, arrived at independently. These principles are not new; they have fallen into desuetude. They are the essentials of all great poetry, indeed of all great literature, and they are simply these:—

1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.
2. To create new rhythms—as the expression of new moods—and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. We do not insist upon "free-verse" as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.
3. To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject. It is not good art to write badly about aeroplanes and automobiles; nor is it necessarily bad art to write well about the past. We believe passionately in the artistic value of modern life, but we wish to point out that there is nothing so uninspiring nor so old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 1911.
4. To present an image ( e the name: "Imagist"). We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art.
5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.
6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.

The subject of free-verse is too complicated to be discussed here. We may say briefly, that we attach the term to all that increasing amount of writing whose cadence is more marked, more definite, and closer knit than that of prose, but which is not so violently nor so obviously accented as the so-called "regular verse." We refer those interested in the question to the Greek Melic poets, and to the many excellent French studies on the subject by such distinguished and well-equipped authors as Remy de Gourmont, Gustave Kahn, Georges Duhamel, Charles Vildrac, Henri Ghéon, Robert de Souza, André Spire, etc.

We wish it to be clearly understood that we do not represent an exclusive artistic sect; we publish our work together because of mutual artistic sympathy, and we propose to bring out our coóperative volume each year for a short term of years, until we have made a place for ourselves and our principles such as we desire.

Amy Lowell

[In the following essay, Lowell identifies Imagism as a descendant of French Symbolism and clarifies the aims of Imagist poetry.]

SOURCE: Preface to Some Imagist Poets, 1916: An Annual Anthology, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916, pp. v-xii.

In bringing the second volume of Some Imagist Poets before the public, the authors wish to express their gratitude for the interest which the 1915 volume aroused. The discussion of it was widespread, and even those critics out of sympathy with Imagist tenets accorded it much space. In the Preface to that book, we endeavoured to present those tenets in a succinct form. But the very brevity we employed has lead to a great deal of misunderstanding. We have decided, therefore, to explain the laws which govern us a little more fully. A few people may understand, and the rest can merely misunderstand again, a result to which we are quite accustomed.

In the first place "Imagism" does not mean merely the presentation of pictures. "Imagism" refers to the manner of representation, not to the subject. It means a clear presentation of whatever the author wishes to convey. Now he may wish to convey a mood of indecision, in which case the poem should be indecisive; he may wish to bring before his reader the constantly shifting and changing lights over a landscape, or the varying attitudes of mind of a person under strong emotion, then his poem must shift and change to present this clearly. The "exact" word does not mean the word which exactly describes the object in itself, it means the "exact" word which brings the effect of that object before the reader as it presented itself to the poet's mind at the time of writing the poem. Imagists deal but little with similes, although much of their poetry is metaphorical. The reason for this is that while acknowledging the figure to be an integral part of all poetry, they feel that the constant imposing of one figure upon another in the same poem blurs the central effect.

The great French critic, Remy de Gourmont, wrote last Summer in La France that the Imagists were the descendants of the French Symbolistes. In the Preface to his Livre des Masques, M. de Gourmont has thus described Symbolisme: "Individualism in literature, liberty of art, abandonment of existing forms … The sole excuse which a man can have for writing is to write down himself, to unveil for others the sort of world which mirrors itself in his individual glass … He should create his own aesthetics—and we should admit as many aesthetics as there are original minds, and judge them for what they are and not what they are not." In this sense the Imagists are descendants of the Symbolistes; they are Individualists.

The only reason that Imagism has seemed so anarchaic and strange to English and American reviewers is that their minds do not easily and quickly suggest the steps by which modern art has arrived at its present position. Its immediate prototype cannot be found in English or American literature, we must turn to Europe for it. With Debussy and Stravinsky in music, and Gauguin and Matisse in painting, it should have been evident to every one that art was entering upon an era of change. But music and painting are universal languages, so we have become accustomed to new idioms in them, while we still find it hard to recognize a changed idiom in literature.

The crux of the situation is just here. It is in the idiom employed. Imagism asks to be judged by different standards from those employed in Nineteenth-Century art. It is small wonder that Imagist poetry should be incomprehensible to men whose sole touchstone for art is the literature of one country for a period of four centuries. And it is an illuminating fact that among poets and men conversant with many poetic idioms, Imagism is rarely misconceived. They may not agree with us, but they do not misunderstand us.

This must not be misconstrued into the desire to belittle our forerunners. On the contrary, the Imagists have the greatest admiration for the past, and humility towards it. But they have been caught in the throes of a new birth. The exterior world is changing, and with it men's feelings, and every age must express its feelings in its own individual way. No art is any more "egoistic" than another; all art is an attempt to express the feelings of the artist, whether it be couched in narrative form or employ a more personal expression.

It is not what Imagists write about which makes them hard of comprehension; it is the way they write it. All nations have laws of prosody, which undergo changes from time to time. The laws of English metrical prosody are well known to every one concerned with the subject. But that is only one form of prosody. Other nations have had different ones: Anglo-Saxon poetry was founded upon alliteration, Greek and Roman was built upon quantity, the Oriental was formed out of repetition, and the Japanese Hokku got its effects by an exact and never-to-be-added-to series of single syllables. So it is evident that poetry can be written in many modes. That the Imagists base much of their poetry upon cadence and not upon metre makes them neither good nor bad. And no one realizes more than they that no theories nor rules make poetry. They claim for their work only that it is sincere.

It is this very fact of "cadence" which has misled so many reviewers, until some have been betrayed into saying that the Imagists discard rhythm, when rhythm is the most important quality in their technique. The definition of vers libre is—a verse-form based upon cadence. Now cadence in music is one thing, cadence in poetry quite another, since we are not dealing with tone but with rhythm. It is the sense of perfect balance of flow and rhythm. Not only must the syllables so fall as to increase and continue the movement, but the whole poem must be as rounded and recurring as the circular swing of a balanced pendulum. It can be fast or slow, it may even jerk, but this perfect swing it must have, even its jerks must follow the central movement. To illustrate: Suppose a person were given the task of walking, or running, round a large circle, with two minutes given to do it in. Two minutes which he would just consume if he walked round the circle quietly. But in order to make the task easier for him, or harder, as the case might be, he was required to complete each half of the circle in exactly a minute. No other restrictions were placed upon him. He might dawdle in the beginning, and run madly to reach the half-circle mark on time, and then complete his task by walking steadily round the second half to goal. Or he might leap, and run, and skip, and linger in all sorts of ways, making up for slow going by fast, and for extra haste by pauses, and varying these movements on either lap of the circle as the humour seized him, only so that he were just one minute in traversing the first half-circle, and just one minute in traversing the second. Another illustration which may be employed is that of a Japanese wood-carving where a toad in one corner is balanced by a spray of blown flowers in the opposite upper one. The flowers are not the same shape as the toad, neither are they the same size, but the balance is preserved.

The unit in vers libre is not the foot, the number of the syllables, the quantity, or the line. The unit is the strophe, which may be the whole poem, or may be only a part. Each strophe is a complete circle: in fact, the meaning of the Greek word "strophe" is simply that part of the poem which was recited while the chorus were making a turn round the altar set up in the centre of the theatre. The simile of the circle is more than a simile, therefore; it is a fact. Of course the circle need not always be the same size, nor need the times allowed to negotiate it be always the same. There is room here for an infinite number of variations. Also, circles can be added to circles, movement upon movement, to the poem, provided each movement completes itself, and ramifies naturally into the next. But one thing must be borne in mind: a cadenced poem is written to be read aloud, in this way only will its rhythm be felt. Poetry is a spoken and not a written art.

The vers libristes are often accused of declaring that they have discovered a new thing. Where such an idea started, it is impossible to say, certainly none of the better vers libristes was ever guilty of so ridiculous a statement. The name vers libre is new, the thing, most emphatically, is not. Not new in English poetry, at any rate. You will find something very much like it in Dryden's Threnodia Augustalis; a great deal of Milton's Samson Agonistes is written in it; and Matthew Arnold's Philomela is a shining example of it. Practically all of Henley's London Voluntaries are written in it, and (so potent are names) until it was christened vers libre, no one thought of objecting to it. But the oldest reference to vers libre is to be found in Chaucer's House of Fame, where the Eagle addresses the Poet in these words:

And nevertheless hast set thy wyt
Although that in thy heed full lyte is
To make bookes, songes, or dytees
In rhyme or elles in cadence.

Commentators have wasted reams of paper in an endeavour to determine what Chaucer meant by this. But is it not possible that he meant a verse based upon rhythm, but which did not follow the strict metrical prosody of his usual practice?

One of the charges frequently brought against the Imagists is that they write, not poetry, but "shredded prose." This misconception springs from the almost complete ignorance of the public in regard to the laws of cadenced verse. But, in fact, what is prose and what is poetry? Is it merely a matter of typographical arrangement? Must everything which is printed in equal lines, with rhymes at the ends, be called poetry, and everything which is printed in a block be called prose? Aristotle, who certainly knew more about this subject than any one else, declares in his Rhetoric that prose is rhythmical without being metrical (that is to say, without insistence on any single rhythm), and then goes on to state the feet that are employed in prose, making, incidentally, the remark that the iambic prevailed in ordinary conversation. The fact is, that there is no hard and fast dividing line between prose and poetry. As a French poet of distinction, Paul Fort, has said: "Prose and poetry are but one instrument, graduated." It is not a question of typography; it is not even a question of rules and forms. Poetry is the vision in a man's soul which he translates as best he can with the means at his disposal.

We are young, we are experimentalists, but we ask to be judged by our own standards, not by those which have governed other men at other times.

P. E. Firchow

[In the following essay, Firchow locates the poetics of Imagism as advanced by Ezra Pound within the classical tradition in poetry.]

SOURCE: "Ezra Pound's Imagism and the Tradition," in Comparative Literature Studies, XVIII, September, 1981, pp. 379-85.

Only from about the year 1926 did the features of the post-war world begin clearly to emerge—and not only in the sphere of politics. From about that date one began slowly to realize that the intellectual and artistic output of the previous seven years had been rather the last efforts of an old world, than the struggles of a new."

—T. S. Eliot, "Last Words" (1939)

In some ways, I ca n think of no one whom he resembled more than Irving Babbitt—a comparison neither man would have relished. Perhaps the backgrounds were not unlike; perhaps if Pound had stopped at home, and become, as he might have become, a professor of comparative literature, the resemblance might have been closer still.

—T. S. Eliot, "Ezra Pound" (1946)

Of all major English or American poets of the early decades of this century, Ezra Pound is the one who most closely approximates the conventional model of the "revolutionary" avant-garde poet—a poet like Apollinaire, for instance, or Marinetti or Vicente Huidobro. Pound's urgent appeal to his contemporaries to "make it new" has a definite and by no means accidentally futurist ring about it, as does his continual denigration of those who fail to keep up with the times, especially Americans. Of his alterego, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, he writes that "he had been born/In a half-savage country, out of date;" and in the same poem he denounces as "an old bitch gone in the teeth" the civilization which has sent a myriad of its best citizens to their deaths in Flanders fields "for two gross of broken statues,/For a few thousand battered books."¹ As the literary histories never tire of telling us, it was Ezra Pound who transformed Yeats into a modern poet and who assisted substantially (despite his own dis-avowal) in a similar transformation of T. S. Eliot. He made them, as it were, "new."

It would seem reasonable to conclude from all this that Pound had little sympathy for the preservation of honored traditions or for the veneration of great literary monuments of the past. This is reasonable certainly, but it is also dead wrong. For with Pound the making of the new always consists of a remaking of the old. He remakes or modernizes, for instance, not merely Yeats the poet of the nineties—or describes the remaking of himself in "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley"—but he also remakes Sextus Propertius, along with a "myriad" of Provençal, Greek, Italian, Chinese and Anglo-Saxon poets. History for Pound is never bunk, though some of his remakings of history, both literary and political, have struck academic commentators as bunk. The individual collections of Pound's poetry are often deliberately marked with "old" elements: A Lume Spento (1908), his first book; or Personae (1909), his second; or later ones like Ripostes (1912), Lustra (1915), or even A Draft of XVI Cantos (1925). Hence it should not be surprising that in late 1912 Pound was asked by Edward March to join the Georgians, a group he later affected to despise; or that in the same year Arthur Quiller-Couch approached him with the request to include two of his poems in the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. Pound agreed, observing that "this is no small honour—at least I count it a recognition."² As J. B. Harmer writes in his study of the Imagist movement, "when 1912 opened Pound was a more reactionary poet than H.D. or even Aldington; a less accurate scholar than Flint, and a man curiously unaware of much that was happening in European literature."³ He read Flaubert, for instance, for the first time in 1912—that very same author who was later to become Mauberley's "true Penelope."⁴

Both before and after 1912, the virtual signature of a Pound poem was the transformation/translation of old and traditional materials (European or Oriental) into a new work of art. This is true even of poems like "Les Millwin" or "The Temperaments" (both from Lustra) which are full of contemporary colloquialism, a trick that originates in Pound's compounding Juvenal with Whitman. It is true of the sort of Romantic braggadoccio with which "Tenzone" (also from Lustra) concludes:

I mate with my free kind upon the crags;
the hidden recesses
Have heard the echo of my heels,
in the cool light,
in the darkness (91).

It is especially true of the Cantos, from which the broken statues and the few thousand battered books are never far distant.

It is also true of the literary movement with which Pound is most often and identified: Imagism.⁵ Imagism, despite its revolutionary trappings and publicity and trappings despite as a movement of the Anglo-British avant-garde, is old-fashioned in a number of basic respects. H.D., the poet who was seen by Pound as most characteristic of Imagism, writes lyrical poems on conventional themes like flowers and Greek mythology. Indeed, her first appearance in print—in Poetry (Chicago)—was under the rubric of "Verses, Translations and Reflections from 'The Anthology'" (that is, the classical Greek Anthology). There is very little new about her poems except for their medium: free verse.⁶ And even in this respect, as Pound was well aware, it was not revolutionary. The Psalms had used free verse long before the Imagists, as had Milton, Whitman, and Rimbaud.

More than any other feature of Pound's supposed revolution in modern poetry, it was the emphasis on free verse that attracted attention. It seemed as if Pound meant to break the chains with which the muse had always been bound. That is what may have happened, but if so, it was not a result of Pound's intention. Writing on "The Tradition" in 1913, Pound adduced the example of Euripedes as a great writer of free verse, and associated free verse with the Melic poets who "composed to the feel of the thing, to the cadence, as have all good poets since."⁷ And René Taupin, in his classic study of the influence of French symbolist poetry on modernist American poetry, maintains that all of Pound's experiments aimed at "unretour à la poésie soit quantitative, soit musicale, et le vers libre luimême n'est pour lui que 'the sense of quantity reasserting itself in poetry.'"⁸ Pound, in other words, was seeking not so much a revolution as a renewal, a revivification of an old tradition; or, to use his own word, he was seeking a rennaissance, an American renaissance. The constituent elements for such a renaissance, according to Pound's series, "America: Chances and Remedies" (May-June 1913), were the very traditional as well as non-literary ones of "an indiscriminate enthusiasm" and "a propaganda."⁹

Pound's Imagism was born in 1912 and was directly based on H.D.'s early poems, though the name Pound chose for his movement clearly indicates that he also had in mind T. E. Hulme's imagist cénacle, as well as French symbolism. Its principles, Pound wrote in a note accompanying Hulme's "Complete Poetical Works" in Ripostes, might not be as interesting as those of the "inherent dynamists," or Les Unanimistes, but they were sounder than those of the Impressionists or post-Impressionists. In another note—this one attached to Aldington's and Imagism's first appearance in Poetry—Pound described the group as consisting of ardent Hellenists who were also vers libristes and who were seeking to attain subtle cadences in their poetry similar to those of "Mallarmé and his followers."¹⁰

The French influence is made even more explicit in Pound's first relatively detailed account of the new school in Poetry (January 1913), where he pronounces that "the important work of the last twenty-five years has been done in Paris." In this essay he also makes clear that he is no rigid dogmatist or revolutionary: "To belong to a school does not in the least mean that one writes poetry to a theory. One writes poetry when, where, because, and as one feels like writing it. A school exists when two or three young men [sic] agree, more or less, to call certain things good; when they prefer such of their verses as have certain qualities to such of their verses as do not have them."¹¹ This pragmatic aspect of Pound's imagism makes it quite different from its more programmatic Hulmean predecessor, as Pound was quite aware when he wrote to F. S. Flint in 1915: ".… when on a certain evening in, I think 1912, I coined the word Imagisme, I certainly intended it to mean something which was the poetry of H.D. and most emphatically NOT the poetry of friend [Edward] Storer" who had been (along with Pound) a member of the Hulme circle.¹²

In the essay on Imagism that Flint "wrote"—he actually rewrote a draft by Pound—for the March 1913 issue of Poetry, the Imagistes are explicitly described as "not a revolutionary school" whose "only endeavour was to write in accordance with the best tradition, as they found it in the best writers of all time,—in Sappho, Catullus, Villon." Even this tradition, Pound was later to argue in another contribution to Poetry, was not sacred, but merely "a beauty which we preserve and not a set of fetters to bind us." The Imagists had rules, to be sure, but as Pound warned us in his follow-up essay ("A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste"), "consider the rules recorded by Mr. Flint, not as dogma—never consider anything dogma—but as the result of long contemplation, which … may be worth consideration." These rules were: "1 . Direct treatment of the 'thing', whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the of a metronome."¹³ Except possibly for the last rule enjoining free verse, this program contains nothing revolutionary and little that might be called new. It could have been subscribed to by almost any one of the Georgian poets, and in fact was by at least one—who was also to become a famous Imagist/Amygist—D. H. Lawrence. Not surprisingly, therefore, Harold Monro—the first nonimagist poet to discuss the new movement in detail—noted as early as 1915 that imagism was really not new. Coleridge, he said, "mentions the points emphasized in the Imagist principles." And if this was the case, then the rather puzzled Monro felt safe in concluding that "it has never become very clear in what particular respects they [the Imagists] may be considered innovators."¹⁴

It is clear then—or should be—that Pound and the first Imagists were not writing in conformity with, or in illustration of, a fixed program. They were writing the kind of poetry they liked to write; and they recognized that this poetry had certain affinities that might—more for practical reasons than anything else—be advertised as a kind of school. This is precisely why Pound objected to Amy Lowell's edging him out of the movement, as appears from a letter to her in August 1914: ".… that would deprive me of my machinery for gathering stray good poems and presenting them to the public in more or less permanent form and of discovering new talent … or poems which could not be presented to the public in other ways, poems that would be lost in the magazines."¹⁵ It was this machinery of Pound's that, for instance, had also gathered Joyce's poem, "I Hear an Army," into the Imagist fold, at a time (December 1913) when Pound knew nothing of Joyce except what little Yeats had told him.¹⁶ And this is how Allen Upward reacted poetically to the Poundean machine:

After many years I sent them [his poems] to
Chicago, and they were printed
by Harriet Monroe. (They also were printed in
The Egoist.)
Thereupon Ezra Pound the generous rose up and
called me an Imagist. (I had no idea what he

meant).
And he included me in an anthology of Imagists.

And thou unborn literary historian (if you ever
mention my name)
Write me down as an imitator of Po Li and
Shakespeare
As well as of Edward Storer and T. E. Hulme."71

The anthology to which Upward refers here was the oddly named Des Imagistes (1914), an inspired but highly eclectic collection of poems put together by Pound's machine. It was to become one of the most important and influential collections in the history of modern English and American poetry; but influential, I think, more for what it seemed to be—and for the poets it gathered under one cover—than for what it was. Of the thirty-seven poems in Des Imagistes, fully eighteen (or nearly half) were either translations or imitations of classical models, and often marked by archaic language or style: e.g., "Hermes/who awaiteth" (H.D., "Hermes of the Ways"); "πότια, πότια, / Thou hearest me not" (Aldington, "To a Greek Marble"); "O prayers in the dark! / O incense to Poseidon!" (Williams, "Postlude"); "The shadowy flowers of Orcus / Remember Thee" (Pound, "Δώρια").¹⁸ Here was a group of ardent Hellenists indeed; and not only ardent Hellenists, but also ardent Sinologists. At least five of the poems are recognizable translations or pastiches of classical Chinese poems. Echoes of the French symbolists are also frequent—as, for instance, in F. S. Flint's "The Swan"—though, surprisingly, only one poem (by Aldington) is written in direct imitation of them. Even the "English" poems are often marked either by non-modern subject matter—for instance, Ford Madox Hueffer's "In the Little Old Market-Place"—or by definitely ninety-ish tone and diction, as in Skipwith Cannell's fifth "Nocturne":

I am weary with love, and thy lips
Are night-born poppies.
Give me therefore thy lips
That I may know sleep.19

Virtually the only really "new" poems in the collection are the three so-called "Documents" at the end of the volume. But these are highly personal, in-groupish and discursive—hardly Imagist, in other words. Hueffer's "Fragments," for example, is an English poem transliterated into Greek, which refers, among other things, to Ezra's whiskers and which anticipates The Waste Land with its ironically scholarly footnotes. This is just the sort of thing the young Auden was to pick up a decade and a half later.

What then is the specifically Imagist significance of Des Imagistes? Undoubtedly, in the first place, its commitment to free verse. Secondly, the attention it gave and attracted to H.D.'s work. Thirdly, as a piece of propaganda, which led readers to other, more genuinely Imagist poems, such as Pound's "In a Station of the Metro." And finally as a work which prepared the ground for understanding poets like T. S. Eliot—or the later Pound himself—who would incorporate Imagist principles and techniques into poems that went beyond those principles.

To make larger claims for Imagism, as Graham Hough does in Reflections on a Literary Revolution, in which he argues that Imagism is to be equated with modernism generally, is to claim too much.²⁰ Imagism is an un-doubted and essential part of the modernist movement in Britain and America, but it is only a part. And a part, moreover, with strong links to the past. The Imagist image, Frank Kermode is surely right in saying, is merely a subspecies of the Romantic Image.²¹ Or as Pound was to remark in "A Retrospect" (1918), Imagism and vers libre had been forces for the good but not overwhelming forces: "Perhaps a few good poems have come from the new method, and if so it is justified."²² T. S. Eliot summed it up some thirty years later: "Imagism produced a few good poems—notably those of H.D.—but it was quickly absorbed into more comprehensive influences, including Pound's."²³

NOTES

¹ Ezra Pound, Collected Shorter Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), p. 108. All further references to this collection will be contained in the text, by page number enclosed in parentheses.

² Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Pantheon, 1970), pp. 123-24.

³ J. B. Harmer, Victory in Limbo: Imagism, 1908-1917 (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1975), p. 76.

⁴ Stock, Life, p. 119.

⁵ Aside from works cited elsewhere in this essay, useful discussions of the Imagist movement include: Luigi Berti, Imagismo (Padua: Cedam, 1944); Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937); Stanley K. Coffman, Imagism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951); Glenn Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1931); Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

⁶ For a more extended treatment of H.D. as an imagist poet, see my essay on her in American Writers, Supplement I, ed. Leonard Unger (New York: Scribner's, 1979).

⁷ Ezra Pound, "The Tradition," in Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954), pp. 92-93.

⁸ René Taupin, L'Influence du symbolisme francais sur la poésie américaine de 1910 à 1920 (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1929), p. 135.

⁹ Quoted in Stock, Life, p. 115.

¹⁰Poetry (Chicago), I (November 1912), 65.

¹¹Ibid., I (Jan. 1913), 123-25.

¹² Quoted in Harmer, Victory, p. 45.

¹³ F. S. Flint, "Imagisme," Poetry (Chicago), I (March 1913), 199; and Ezra Pound, "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste," Poetry (Chicago), I (March 1913), 201.

¹⁴ Harold Monro, "The Imagists Discussed," The Egoist, V (May 1, 1915), 77-78.

¹⁵ Ezra Pound, Letters, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), p. 77.

¹⁶ A little later, when Pound entered on his "vorticist" phase, he even claimed Dante for imagism. Writing in the Fortnightly Review in 1914, Pound asserted that "Dante's Paradiso is the most wonderful image. By that I do not mean that it is a perseveringly imagistic performance. The permanent part is Imagisme, the rest, the discourses with the calendar of saints and the discussions about the nature of the moon, are philology." Reprinted in Ezra Pound, A Critical Anthology, edited by J. P. Sullivan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 51.

¹⁷ Allen Upward, "The Discarded Imagist," Poetry (Chicago), VI (September 1915), 318.

¹⁸Des Imagistes, An Anthology (New York: Boni, 1914), p. 21; p. 10; p. 39; p. 41.

¹⁹Ibid., p. 37.

²⁰ Graham Hough, Reflections on a Literary Revolution (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1960), p. 10.

²¹ Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 136.

²² Ezra Pound, "A Retrospect," in Literary Essays, p. 3.

²³ T. S. Eliot, "Ezra Pound," in Ezra Pound, A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 20. This essay was originally published in Poetry (Chicago) in 1946.

David Perkins

[In the following essay, Perkins discusses the development of the Imagist movement, offers examples of poetry embodying Imagist principles, and discusses the works of Richard Aldington, H.D., John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell, and Herbert Read in relation to Imagism.]

SOURCE: "Imagism," in A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode, The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1976, pp. 329-47.

Imagism has been described as the grammar school of modern poetry, the instruction and drill in basic principles. The metaphor greatly exaggerates—neither Yeats nor Eliot were ever Imagists, for example, though both were occasionally claimed for the group—but among the several modern movements in English and American poetry just before World War I, the Imagists probably had a more distinct impact than any other group on the style of American poets. The reasons for this were partly the shrewdness with which first Pound and then Amy Lowell promoted the movement, partly the clear doctrine and practical tips offered by the Imagist manifestos and other bulletins, and partly because the Imagist program merged with other, already influential tendencies: Impressionist exact notation; interest in Chinese and Japanese poetry, in which poets now remarked a spare, suggestive, visual imagery in terse forms such as haiku; the orientation of poetry in the 1890s to painting, sculpture, and other "spatial" arts; the special attention symbolist poetry directed to imagery; Hulme's plea that poetry must be precisely phrased and that the essential means to precision is metaphor; the development of free verse; the rejection of poetic diction and "rhetoric"; the cultivation of the idiomatic and the colloquial. Imagist poems were not difficult to read, and after 1914, when Pound could no longer impose his standards on the movement, they were not very difficult to write. Like Georgian poetry in England or the "realism" of Masters and Sandburg in America, Imagism became a relatively accessible way to be in on the "new" and the "modern."

THE IMAGIST MOVEMENT

Imagism was conceived in the spring of 1912 in a tea shop in Kensington, where, over buns, Pound informed two young poets, H.D. and Richard Aldington, that they were Imagistes. What the term then meant to him can only be guessed, but by October he was spreading the news—half-seriously and half as a publicity stunt—of a school of Imagisme. "Isms" were in the air. The August 1912 Poetry Review included an article by F. S. Flint on "Contemporary French Poetry," in which one could read up on Unanisme, Impulsionnisme, Paroxysme, and so forth. Marinetti had long since caused a stir with Futurism, and before Marinetti there had been the "symbolist movement" of Yeats and Symons. England had its home-grown movement in the Georgian poets.

In October, Pound's Ripostes appeared, including as an appendix "The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme," five short poems. There was also a prefatory note by Pound. "Les Imagistes," he said (typically he used French for literary movements), have the future "in their keeping." They descended from the forgotten "School of Images" of 1909. (He was thinking of the small group of poets who used to meet with T. E. Hulme at The Eiffel Tower restaurant in Soho.) At about the same time Pound used the new term in letters to Harriet Monroe, who mentioned the new school in her November 1912 issue of Poetry. The January 1913 issue printed five poems by H.D., which were signed (at Pound's insistence) "H.D. Imagiste." There was also a note by Pound: "The youngest school" in London "is that of the Imagistes … one of their watchwords is Precision." In March 1913 Poetry printed the famous brief statement of Imagiste principles and the list of tips Pound had originally composed as a rejection slip for Poetry. With these statements, and with Imagiste poems by H.D. and Aldington to serve as examples, the "movement" was successfully planted in America.

Pound decided to put together an Imagiste anthology. By the summer of 1913 he had selected poems by Aldington, H.D., Flint, and himself to make up the bulk of the book and had also accepted for it one poem each from Skipwith Cannell, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Joyce, Hueffer, Allen Upward, and John Cournos. This collection was sent to Alfred Kreymborg in New York and published as Des Imagistes: An Anthology (1914).

Meanwhile, in Boston, Amy Lowell was intrigued. As Harriet Monroe tells it, Miss Lowell read in the January 1913 issue of Poetry, "some poems signed 'H.D. Imagiste' ; and suddenly it came over her: 'Why, I too am an Imagiste!'" She sailed for London that June armed with a letter of introduction from Miss Monroe. Pound corrected her poetry ("He could make you write," she later conceded), and found her "ALL RIGHT." The next summer she returned to London, but her state of mind was less docile and more self-confident. For the April issue of Poetry had started off with eight of her poems (mostly in free verse) and her second volume, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, was in proof. She thought the success of the Georgian anthologies might be emulated and proposed to the Imagistes that iheir anthology be brought out annually for five years. She promised to pay for publication if that proved necessary. But she was miffed that the first anthology bad included only one of her poems. Subsequent anthologies, she said, should be "democratic": they should allow each contributor approximately the same amount of space. To Pound the notion was absurd. The arts were not a "democratic beer-garden." Miss Lowell's suggestion was very welcome to the other Imagistes, however, and in 1915 Some Imagist Poets (the term now Anglicized—or Americanized) appeared, containing poems of Aldington, H.D., Flint, Amy Lowell, John Gould Fletcher, and D. H. Lawrence. (Pound had formally seceded from the movement.)

Even though Miss Lowell had gone ahead with her "democratic" anthology, she and Pound had managed to part cordially at the end of the summer. But poisons were working. She knew Pound thought her lacking in standards and she was critical of him. During the fall Macmillan's advertised her Sword Blades and Poppy Seed by explaining that, "Of the poets who to-day are doing the interesting and original work, there is no more striking and unique figure than Amy Lowell. The foremost member of the 'Imagists'—a group of poets that includes William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Hueffer.… " Such "charlatanism" was too much for Pound. His letter of protest was firm; he advised her to "cease referring to yourself as an Imagiste." Miss Lowell made light of the advertisement: "The names," she replied, "were simply put in to boom the book, a thing that is constantly done over here." ("Your knowledge of how to 'get yourself over,'" she later wrote him, "is nil.") As time passed, Pound felt that the poetry of the Imagists (he now called them "Amygists") was becoming undisciplined, sloppy, and diluted. In Miss Lowell's opinion there were now "bitterest enmities" between herself and Pound. As for Pound, he thought her verse "putrid" but liked her personally—at least until 1922, when she refused to contribute to his scheme of financial support for Eliot. "Aw shucks! dearie," he then wrote her, "ain't you the hell-roarer, ain't you the kuss." In 1928, in a letter to Taupin, he summed up the Imagists as a "bunch of goups."

After 1914 the Imagist movement was captained by Miss Lowell. Richard Aldington, as editor of The Egoist, provided auxiliary aid in the form of an Imagist number (May 1, 1915). In the same year Miss Lowell praised the new school at a meeting of the conservative Poetry Society in New York, and was henceforth embattled. She held readings, gave lectures, and cultivated editors, reviewers, and anthologists. Hostile articles on Imagism in the New Republic, Chicago Evening Post, Nation, and Atlantic Monthly raised her blood pressure, but were not otherwise unwelcome. "Well?—Clap or hiss," Miss Lowell used to tell audiences at her readings, "I don't care which; but do something!" Critical attack provoked defense, and the Imagists were more widely heard of than any movement since. Imagist anthologies were issued in 1916 and 1917; thereafter there were no more. But whenever critics discussed modern poetry, the school continued to be noticed as an important phase or tendency. Poems of the Imagist kind continued to be written, though it became increasingly difficult to say precisely what this kind was.

THE IMAGIST DOCTRINE

The first public statement of Imagist principles was that printed by Poetry in March 1913. Written by Pound, the statement was signed by Flint, who said he had obtained the three-fold program by interviewing an Imagiste:

1. Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

The list illustrates that so far as doctrine was concerned, Imagisme, as Pound conceived it, was not so much a special type of poetry as a name for whatever he had learned (from Hulme, Hueffer, Yeats, and others…) about "HOW TO WRITE" since coming to London in 1908. He was in the habit of scribbling such recipes. In 1916, for example, "the whole art" of poetry was divided (with no reference to Imagisme) into:

1. concision, or style, or saying what you mean in the fewest and clearest words.
2. the actual necessity for creating or constructing something; of presenting an image, or enough images of concrete things arranged to stir the reader.

The historical importance of Imagism, in other words, does not lie in the formulation of a poetic doctrine, for Pound had developed his ideas with no reference to Imagism and continued to hold them after he disowned the movement. The importance was, rather, the extent to which the name, movement, and attendant controversies caused these values to be effectively disseminated.

So far as Pound endowed Imagism with a program distinct from his principles of effective writing in general, it must be sought in the special role assigned to the "image." Pound defined his key term only vaguely. An image is, he said in the same issue of Poetry, "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.… It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works." Whatever else the "doctrine of the image" might include was not to be published, readers were told, for "it does not concern the public and would provoke useless discussion."

The March 1913 issue contained further admonishments from Pound, "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste," which helped interpret the program: for example, "Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something"; "Go in fear of abstractions"; "Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement"; "Don't be 'viewy—leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays"; "Don't chop your stuff into separate iambs." Such tips were admirably practical, and the offhand phrasing enhanced their authority.

In June 1914 in The Egoist Aldington again explained what Imagism was, but the most influential single statement produced in the whole course of the movement was his Preface to the Imagist anthology for 1915. It listed six points, "the essentials of all great poetry, indeed of all great literature":

1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly exact, nor the merely decorative word.
2. To create new rhythms—as the expression of new moods—and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. We do not insist upon "free-verse" as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as a principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.
3. To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject. It is not good art to write badly about aeroplanes and automobiles; nor is it necessarily bad art to write about the past. We believe passionately in the artistic value of modern life, but we wish to point out that there is nothing so uninspiring nor so old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 1911.
4. To present an image (hence the name: "Imagist"). We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art.
5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.
6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.

The statement was directed against undemanding techniques and against conventional, though not necessarily conservative attitudes. Instead of many adjectives and statements, there would be an image rendered in concentrated, exact, idiomatic speech. Instead, for example, of the looseness of Masefield's "The West Wind"—

It's a warm wind, the west wind, full of bird's
cries;
I never hear the west wind but tears are in my
eyes.
For it comes from the west lands, the old brown
hills,
And April's in the west wind, and daffodils—

there would be Aldington's "New Love":

She has new leaves
After her dead flowers,
Like the little almond-tree
Which the frost hurt.

As opposed to frequent demands at this time for a specifically contemporary subject matter, Aldington implicitly defended the "Hellenism" of himself and H.D. by invoking the poet's right to "absolute freedom in the choice of subject," a principle to which all would-be Modernists subscribed. Against the expectation that poetry would be metrical, he adopted a point of view that legitimized free verse without decrying meters. Whether verse was traditional or free, there should be "new rhythms" as the expression of "new" and individual moods.

Against the poets and poetic habits Aldington implicitly criticized, his points were effectively made. On the other hand, though this Preface was so strongly influenced by Pound that it seemed mainly a restatement of his views, one finds, if one compares it with Pound's earlier statement, that a vulgarization has set in. "Concentration," the "exact word," and "hard and clear" style do not impose quite so severe a standard as Pound's second article, "To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation"Concentration," the "exact word," and "hard and clear" style do not impose quite so severe a standard as Pound's second article, "To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation" (and this was the essential article in Pound's opinion). Moreover, although Pound was probably not quite sure what he meant by an "Image," he thought of it as a "complex" concretely presented. In Aldington's Preface the concept of the Image is wavering toward a much simpler notion, that of a clear, quick rendering of particulars without commentary. Imagist poems of this kind would of course be much easier to write.

The attacks on Imagism that followed in 1915 raised only two important issues. The controversy over free verse— is it poetry?—was discussed in Chapter 14. Secondly, it was immediately pointed out that Imagist successes could only be small-scale. As Conrad Aiken put it, the Imagists

give us frail pictures—whiffs of windy beaches, marshes, meadows, city streets, disheveled leaves; pictures pleasant and suggestive enough. But seldom is any of them more than a nice description, coolly sensuous, a rustle to the ear, a ripple to the eye. Of organic movement there is practically none.

One could not write a long Imagist poem. Quite apart from particular issues, however, controversy gradually caused the doctrine of Imagism to become less definite. For the battle on behalf of Imagism was fought by Amy Lowell. Since her temperament was not ideological but political, she compromised doctrine, like many another politician, in order to prevail in the field. In Tendencies in Modern American Poetry she characterized the Imagist principles as "Simplicity and directness of speech; subtlety and beauty of rhythms; individualistic freedom of idea; clearness and vividness of presentation; and concentration." With such generalities no one could quarrel, but neither could anyone be arrested by them, as poets had been by Pound's statement in Poetry four years before.

THE IMAGIST POEM

Once the Imagist poem was established as a type, it was written occasionally by many poets who were not members of the original Imagist group. Familiar instances are Sandburg's "Fog" and Williams' "El Hombre." Many other poets, such as Marianne Moore, e.e. cummings, and Archibald MacLeish, were strongly influenced by Imagist principles and style, even though they did not write specifically Imagist poems. Because the poems of T. E. Hulme were the first examples of Imagism offered to the world (by Pound in October 1912), his "Autumn" may be used to exemplify the mode:

A touch of cold in the Autumn night—
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

The poem was probably written in conscious contrast with Shelley's famous "To the Moon," for Shelley's poem also contrasts the moon to the stars and thinks about companionability or the lack of it:

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,—
And ever-changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

Whether or not Hulme recalled Shelley, his verses are anti-Romantic. Within the Romantic tradition to view the cold and starry heavens in autumn would predictably evoke feelings of melancholy, loneliness, and death. If such feelings are present here, it is only in a complex, indirect, and controlled way. Hulme's "red-faced farmer," unlike Shelley's pale moon, seems well fed, healthy, comfortable, and neighborly, and is humorously regarded. What is conveyed by the poem is not, as with Shelley, a comparison that projects the poet's "moan" (as Hulme would have put it) into the moon but a comparison in altogether unexpected terms. If we ask what is communicated in Shelley's poem, "the poet's feeling of loneliness" would be an inadequate, though not incorrect generalization. In the case of Hulme's poem, the "meaning" cannot be conveyed by a generalization.

Another modal poem, often cited, was H.D.'s "Oread":

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.

The perception of the sea as a pine and fir forest is fresh and apt; the cadenced lines enact an emotional transition; the effect is complex, immediate, and made wholly by concrete means; the poet avoids discursive or generalizing comment. As a final example we may turn to MacLeish's "Ars Poetica," which illustrates much that the Imagist movement taught other poets. A poem, MacLeish writes, should be "palpable and mute"; it should not tell a "history of grief at length but should evoke it through concrete particulars:

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the
sea—

A poem should not mean
But be.

SOME IMAGIST POETS

None of the poets published in the Imagist anthologies remained an Imagist in later life, and some from the outset were Imagists only occasionally. We may here touch on the careers of five poets—Aldington, H.D., Fletcher, Amy Lowell, and Herbert Read—who were closely identified with the Imagist movement. Pound was, of course, the most important of the Imagists, but his Imagist phase is described in Chapter 20. D. H. Lawrence was included in the anthologies mainly for reasons of good fellowship; he wrote no poems of the Imagist kind, and is discussed in Chapter 19. Of the poets to be taken up here, Aldington, H.D., Fletcher, and Lowell were prominent in the Imagist anthologies; Herbert Read came to the movement slightly later, was strongly influenced by it, and continued there-after to be a spokesman for the Imagist ideals. In fact, after the mid-1920s he was their most important contemporary spokesman.

Poems by Richard Aldington (1892-1962) were first published in 1909. Labeled "Imagiste" and trumpeted by Pound, the eighteen-year-old Aldington attended Yeats's Monday evenings, knew Hulme, Ford, Lawrence, Amy Lowell, married H.D., became literary editor of Egoist, and was in the thick of literary goings-on in avant-garde London. The poems he wrote at this time were often mythopoeic, evoking a Mediterranean landscape. They were composed in free verse and presented "images"—mostly sensuously appealing ones. Aldington's poems were often said to be "hellenic," though their attitudes and scenery descended more immediately from Swinburne and the Pre-Raphaelites. During and after World War I he departed steadily further from the Imagist style; in Exile and Other Poems (1923) he wrote the directly personal and talky type of poem that in the nineteenth century was often called an "effusion." "I abandon, cast off, utterly deny the virtue of 'extreme compression and essential significance of every word,'" he wrote Herbert Read in 1924. "I say that is the narrow path that leadeth to sterility.… Pound, Flint, both went down on mat; I saw them go; and I shall live to see you and Tom [Eliot] go the same way." After A Fool V the Forest (1925) he published mostly prose. His chief success was with his novel of the war, Death of a Hero (1929).

According to his occasional private explanations, Pound invented the Imagist movement to obtain attention for the work of Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), who published under her initials "H.D." She grew up in Philadelphia, where she was acquainted with Pound and William Carlos Williams. She went to Europe in 1911 and spent the rest of her life there. She and Richard Aldington were married in 1912; they separated after the war. Pound, Amy Lowell, Louis Untermeyer, and others frequently mentioned her poems as the purest examples of Imagism. Her phrasing was usually idiomatic and economical. The units of syntax were short and there were few subordinate clauses. Abstract generalizations were infrequent. The poems were made of simple statements juxtaposed, as in "The Pool":

Are you alive?
I touch you.
You quiver like a sea-fish.
I cover you with my net.
What are you—banded one?

Such writing struck many readers as clear, swift, and uncluttered.

H.D. translated from classical Greek—Euripides, Sappho, Homer, the Greek anthology. Her original verses also brought Greece to mind, for the light, color, and landscape might be Mediterranean and she usually alluded to Greek myth or re-created it in the poem. Because her landscape, subject, and sensibility seemed "Greek," so did her style. Richard Eberhart summarized a common opinion when he said in 1958, she "gives us the best glimpse we have today of classic poetry, an English poetry … nearly Greek in concept and execution … crystal-bright, hard and pure, clean and fine." Those more deeply versed in English and Greek poetry recognized that her "Greece" was typically Romantic and literary, a Hellenic world distilled from Shelley, Keats, Byron, Arnold, Swinburne, and many another English poet of the nineteenth century. To such readers her Imagist "hardness" of style was not impressively "Greek," neither was it especially "modern," for except that the diction was idiosyncratic and the verse was free, it recalled the familiar "sculpture of rhyme" of the 1890s. It was obvious that her art, like that of the aesthetes, had limited itself by retreating from the world of actual experience. Moreover, the feelings it expressed were often strained and unreal, as when the speaker in the much-admired "Orchard" falls prostrate before a pear,

crying:
you have flayed us
with your blossoms,
spare us the beauty
of fruit-trees.

Like other Imagists, H.D. gradually abandoned the mode. The Walls Do Not Fall (1944) inaugurated a remarkable poetic self-renewal. This sequence of poems is meditative and also mythical and archetypal, showing the influence of both Freud (whose patient she was) and Jung. The symbols are taken from diverse traditions—Christian, Egyptian, cabalistic, astrological—for she assumed that these different symbolisms evoked the same underlying realities. The poem was written in London during World War II and was followed by two long sequences of a similar kind, Tribute to the Angels (1945) and The Flowering of the Rod (1946).

John Gould Fletcher (1886-1950) was only occasionally an Imagist, but because he was one of the six poets in Miss Lowell's Imagist anthologies, he was, throughout most of his life, presumed to be an Imagist by a literary public that could hardly have been paying close attention to his works. In fact, he began as an aggressively experimentalist, Modernist poet and ended as a regional one. In 1908 (one year later than Pound) he sailed for Italy, for, as he later explained, he was disgusted with the "mediocrity, the optimism, the worldliness" of the United States, and regarded Europe as the place to "acquire an education." Again like Pound, in 1909 he moved to London. He studied Impressionist and post-Impressionist painting, oriental poetry (in translation), and the French symbolist poets (he claimed to have introduced Pound to them). He read, it was said, a book of French poetry every day.

In 1913 he was briefly at the center of avant-garde affairs. He published five books of poetry at his own expense. He agreed to back Pound financially (Fletcher had inherited money) in taking over the suffragette New Freewoman, which eventually became The Egoist. When Amy Lowell came to London that summer he told her his plan to write a poem on a modern city by objectively recording just what one sees. Quarreling with Pound, he refused to appear in Des Imagistes, and proposed to Miss Lowell that they jointly edit and finance a rival anthology. He was determined "to risk everything in order to become a modern artist." His notions of what constituted modernism were strangely external and confused but for this very reason they were typical of many writers at the beginning of what Pound called "le mouvement." To be a modern artist, as Fletcher saw it, involved "a determination to make and accept every kind of experiment." If one "aroused the hatred of the mob," so had Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Stravinski. There was "but one lesson the modern artist must learn," which was (quoting Synge) that "to be human again, we must learn first to be brutal." Having just seen Stravinski's Rite of Spring, he felt that artists everywhere "were turning back to the primitively ugly, knowing that in primitiveness alone lay strength."

Fletcher's verse of this period may be illustrated by his "Irradiations" and Color Symphonies. His purpose in these poems was to evoke and orchestrate moods, while excluding any more definite content. Some of the "Irradiations" were recognizably symbolist:

Far trumpets like a vague rout of faded roses
Burst 'gainst the wet green silence of distant
forests:
A clash of cymbals—then the swift swayingy
footsteps
Of the wind that undulates along the languid
terraces.

Some however, were Imagist:

Flickering of incessant rain
On flashing pavements:
Sudden scurry of umbrellas:
Bending, recurved blossoms of the storm.

And in other instances the mood he sought to evoke required an emulation of Whitman, whom Fletcher had also been reading:

I saw that all the women—although their bodies
were dexterously concealed—
Were thinking with all their might what the men
were like.

The Color Symphonies, he later explained, attempted to render "certain predominant moods in the terms of things happening. Thus one gets expectancy described as a traveler looking at blue mountains in the distance." The "prevailing mood" was indicated by a color, as in the "Blue Symphony," in which images of blue objects recur. In this symphony the setting, decor, and suggestive spareness in description produce a vaguely "oriental" feeling, as in the lines evoking an autumnal garden:

Sombre wreck—autumnal leaves;
Shadowy roofs
In the blue mist,
And a willow-branch that is broken.

Oh, old pagodas of my soul, how you glittered
across green trees.

Becoming dissatisfied with these shimmerings, Fletcher wished to articulate ideas. In the 1920s and 1930s he composed meditative, often religiously questing lyrics and effusions of a kind that used frequently to be called "cosmic." Gradually, he became a regional poet of his native Arkansas, where he was now living, for he felt the poetic appeal of American landscape and regional life. He sympathized with the social values of Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and other Fugitive writers, for he shared their idealization of Southern agrarian traditionalism as opposed to urban, industrialized rootlessness in the North. The most important product of this late, regional phase was South Star (1941). The volume includes a poetic history of the state of Arkansas, more impressive as regional piety than as poetry, as well as shorter lyrics which effectively combine his Imagist-Impressionist methods of presentation, his search for general, ultimate meanings, and his imaginative response to local objects and scenes.

Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was one of the distinguished and wealthy Lowells of Boston. The family tree included generals, judges, historians, and the poet, James Russell Lowell; Robert Lowell is of the same family. Her brother Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who became President of Harvard, made no public comment on the avant-garde writings and other eccentricities of his sister. She was enormously overweight because of a glandular disturbance, smoked cigars, slept with sixteen pillows, and worked from midnight to dawn, sleeping by day. These and other oddities contributed to her reputation, but what contributed more were her energy, shrewdness, determination, and pluck. By these virtues she thrust herself into prominence among the poets of the time, but her position was precarious. Her poetry, though often written with sensitivity and intelligence, could not justify the importance that seemed to be hers—that was hers if we think only of her leadership in promoting the new art.

Her first volume, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1912), was conventionally derivative from the English Romantic tradition. Her next one, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914), showed the impact of her contact with the Imagist and experimentalist avant-garde in London in the summer of 1913. Along with its ballads, dramatic monologues, and rhymed, stanzaic lyrics, it included poems in free verse. There were also three examples of what she called "polyphonic prose," a way of writing, she explained, that uses cadence, assonance, alliteration, rhyme, echo effects, and even "perhaps true metre for a few minutes," but handles them in a more varying and flexible way than is possible in traditional verse:

The inkstand is full of ink, and the paper lies white and unspotted, in the round of light thrown by a candle. Puffs of darkness sweep into the corners, and keep rolling through the room behind his chair. The air is silver and pearl, for the night is liquid with moonlight.

Men, Women and Ghosts (1916) was a collection of narratives in meters, free verse, and polyphonic prose. Among them was the much-anthologized dramatic monologue, "Patterns" and a block ("The Overgrown Pasture") of four dramatic monologues by rural New England speakers. In these she was deliberately challenging Robert Frost and wrote in dialect, as she considered he ought to have done. Can Grande's Castle (1918) was a volume of polyphonic prose, and in Pictures of a Floating World (1919) Miss Lowell, who felt that volumes of poetry should have a unified character and effect, published the short lyrics she had written and stored up since 1914.

These free-verse lyrics display the qualities for which her work was exemplary at this time. Her diction and syntax are relatively simple, straightforward, and idiomatic. She renders sensations with exact impression. The poems adhere closely to the concrete, avoiding generalization and "rhetoric." "November" is an example:

The vine leaves against the brick walls of my
house
Are rusty and broken.
Dead leaves gather under the pine-trees,
The brittle boughs of lilac-bushes
Sweep against the stars.
And I sit under a lamp
Trying to write down the emptiness of my heart.
Even the cat will not stay with me,
But prefers the rain
Under the meagre shelter of a cellar window.

Despite its virtues the poem illustrates how Miss Lowell, like Sandburg, H.D., Aldington, and many other "new" poets, was "modern" only in some aspects of form and style. In sensibility and imagination she was safely within the fold of familiar Romantic convention.

In 1921 she published Fir-Flower Tablets, a volume of translations from ancient Chinese poetry. She knew no Chinese and used English versions supplied by Florence Ayscough, a friend who lived in Shanghai. "The great poets of the T'ang Dynasty," she felt, "are without doubt among the finest poets that the world has ever seen". (Such a judgment on poets she could not read tells much about Miss Lowell.) Her translations would "knock a hole" in Pound's Cathay. In 1922 her A Critical Fable appeared. Imitating a poem of the same name by James Russell Lowell, it contained doggerel criticisms of contemporary poets, including herself (her authorship was concealed at first), excited much interest, and shows how the poetic scene was viewed from one influential and representative perspective in the year of The Waste Land.

By this time Miss Lowell was heavily engaged in her massive biography of Keats. She was ill and unused to close and detailed scholarship ("Keats is killing me"); but she was indomitable, and the work was published in 1925, four months before she died. The three volumes of poetry published posthumously show no change in the direction of her talent, and include two of her better-known poems, "Lilacs" and "Meeting-House Hill."

A distinguished essayist, novelist, lecturer, and critic of art and literature, Sir Herbert Read (1893-1968) was also an autobiographer. His account of his early poetic career (The Innocent Eye, 1933) reveals much about the feelings and aspirations of the first young writers formed by the Modernist revolution. Read's situation differed from that of Hulme, Pound, Eliot, or Lawrence in the crucial respect that he did not participate in creating an avant-garde poetry but adopted one created by others. His interest in poetry was awakened by a schoolteacher, but for a long time the only audience, patron, and encourager of his verse was a Quaker tailor in Leeds, where Read was working as a bank clerk. The seventeen-year-old poet delighted in Tennyson; Blake descended on him "like an apocalypse"; he was entranced with Yeats and Ralph Hodgson, Donne and Browning. It was apparently in the Imagist anthology for 1915 that Read first encountered Imagist verse and doctrine. Now twenty-two or twenty-three, he had found, he felt, the essence of the avant-garde or modern movement in poetry. As an officer in the trenches he composed Imagist poems of war experience; for example, "Movement of Troops":

We entrain in open trucks
and soon glide away
from the plains of Artois.

With a wake of white smoke
we plunge
down dark avenues of silent trees.

A watcher sees
our red light gleam
occasionally.

To the end of his life Read was likely to identify the "new poetic awareness" of the twentieth century as Imagism and to restate some of the leading premises of the Imagist manifestos as his own poetic creed: "A poem is not a statement, but a … manifestation of being"; "The rhythmical pattern corresponds … with the inner feeling."

War experience caused him to question his Imagist procedures, for he was trying, he later said, "to maintain an abstract aesthetic ideal in the midst of terrorful and inhuman events." He wished to achieve a more direct expression of what he was feeling and undergoing; he therefore composed longer narrative and meditative poems, which turned out to be diffuse and uncontrolled. Toward the end of the war, on leave in London, he became acquainted with Flint, Aldington, Pound, and Eliot (who became a lifelong friend), and learned, he said, to write in a more self-disciplined way: "Poetry was reduced to an instrument of precision"; "Criticism had become innate.")

If we mean by Imagism only the sort of poem exemplified in "Movement of Troops," Read rarely wrote Imagist poems after 1919. He sometimes emulated the Metaphysical Poets in the 1920s and Auden in the 1930s, and practiced diverse styles through his long career. He called himself a Romantic, wrote several books on the English Romantic poets, and turned for inspiration to their work as much as to that of his twentieth-century contemporaries. His lacks of intensity and control were usually less apparent in his lyrics than in his longer meditative or "philosophic" utterances. But in a general sense of the term Imagist, Read may be said to have remained true to his first phase, for images are the especially striking and valuable element of his poetry. He had a gift for seeing freshly and for imaginatively transforming what he saw.

To represent the many, minor American poets who, though not among the original Imagist or "Amygist" groups, adopted the mode as a consequence of the publicity it received, we may mention Henry Bellamann (1882-1945). Although known mainly for his novel King's Row (1940), he published poetry in the 1920s. Applied to poets such as Bellamann, the term Imagist suggests short, free-verse impressions of objects, places, or human encounters, with a reticent evocation of emotion and deeper significance. Such poems are more concrete and succinct than the conventional poems of the previous generation. Their subjects are less likely to be beauty, death, love, and God, but, instead, such poems focus on "Hedges," "Goose Creek," "Leaf Prints," or "Wind in the Sycamores"—often with a touch of humor. Bellamann tried the notes of many poets, including Adelaide Crapsey and H.D., but the general model for all this poetry in America was Amy Lowell.

B. Rajan

[In the following essay, Rajan presents a negative assessment of Imagist aims, techniques, and achievement.]

SOURCE: "Imagism: A Reconsideration," in Modern American Poetry, Dennis Dobson, Ltd., 1950, pp. 81-94.

An article on Imagism can claim to be doubly justified in any symposium on modern American poetry. The movement assembled, particularly in its criticism, many of the tendencies which went to make up the 'Poetic Renaissance' and is consequently often discussed in detail in academic histories of the period. But it is also notable for a different reason; it is perhaps the only movement with a wide American influence, to have had English practitioners and an English following. Having said this much one is compelled to add, that the intrinsic importance of Imagism cannot now be considered very great. It produced a small amount of competent minor poetry, engaged the interests of Ezra Pound for a few years and helped to disseminate some ideas of T. E. Hulme. But it had nothing positive to say which was not said far better in the early poetry of Eliot. And the mannerisms of the school, its restricted range, its decorative monotony, its failure to utilize the resources of language make it difficult to realize that it was once radical and avant garde and a cause for consternation in academic America.

Some such movement of technical innovation as Imagism however, seems necessary at the beginning of a new literary period. The reformation of style has usually to precede the deeper reformation of the sensibilities which create style. 'Every revolution' in poetry says Eliot 'is apt to be and sometimes to announce itself as, a return to common speech. That is the revolution which Wordsworth announced in his prefaces and he was right: but the same revolution had been carried out a century before by Oldham, Waller, Denham and Dryden; and the same revolution was due over again something over a century later.¹ After the excesses of poetic diction in the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth it was certainly necessary for the good health of poetry to advocate a return to common speech. But there are many ways of achieving this return and the way Imagism proposes is unfortunately not the right one. It is necessary to insist on this criticism because of the prevalent superstition that the theories of Imagism were sound but their execution inadequate and that the failure of the movement can be attributed almost entirely to the lack of genius among the poets who composed it. Edwin Muir claims for instance that the theory of Imagism was 'insufficient though salutary' and goes on to contrast its practice as 'constricting'.² Herbert Read argues that 'though attempts have been made to create an "imagist" poetry directly under the influence of Hulme's theories, and though these attempts have been of great value in the introduction of a clearer tone into poetic expression, they have remained comparatively obscure because they have not been the vehicle of any momentous intelligence. That does not alter the validity of the ideas or the possibility of their general application'.³ I hope this essay will succeed in demonstrating that doctrines as barren as those of Imagism could not have been the vehicle of any 'momentous intelligence' and that the failure of the movement is consequently one of teaching as well as of talent. A reconsideration of Imagism is nevertheless justified because by uncovering its critical shortcomings, and the effect of those shortcomings on its poetic practice, one is able to define one's own position by dissent and to give that dissent an historical validity. A movement may be important to the literary critic for the negative but still significant reason that it has led to important and influential mistakes.

The history of Imagism has been conveniently summarized by F. S. Flint.⁴ Hulme is apparently to be regarded as its father though his poems appeared in no Imagist anthology. His meeting with Flint early in 1909 led to the formation of a 'dining-and-talking society' which held its first meeting on March 25th. Pound joined the society in April, a week after the publication of Personae, and was the first to attach the label Imagisme to the poetic theories of the group. The society dissolved in 1911 but 1912 saw the publication of Hulme's 'Collected Poems'—all five of them—as a supplement to Ezra Pound's Ripostes. In January of the same year Harold Monro opened the Poetry Bookshop in London, and in October Harriet Monroe published the first issue of Poetry in Chicago. Three poems by Aldington appeared in the November number, and three by H.D. in the following January. The March issue included the first public statement of Imagist principles by Pound, over the signature of F. S. Flint. Pound also contributed 'A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste'. Publication in England proved more difficult but the founding of Poetry and Drama by Harold Monro in March 1913 provided limited facilities. The magazine only survived till December 1914 but eleven months earlier The New Freewoman had been transformed into The Egoist, and, Aldington installed as an associate editor. The Egoist was to be the chief organ of Imagism in England, a similar service being performed in America by Poetry and by The Little Review. With the publication of the first Imagist anthology in March 1914 Imagism began to be respectable and Pound's interest in it began, characteristically, to wane. 'Imagism', he told Glenn Hughes 'was a point on the curve of my development. Some people remained at that point. I moved on.'⁵ He moved on to Vorticism and the violences of Blast. Meanwhile Imagism had discovered a fairy godmother in the ample person of Miss Amy Lowell, a writer whose poetic talents were inconsiderable but whose entrepreneurial abilities were immense. On July 17th, 1914, Miss Lowell invited her dazzled associates to what is reverentially known as the 'Imagist Dinner'. The menu, preserved for us by the devotion of Professor Hughes, is far more impressive than any Imagist poem.⁶ The result of this ceremony was the appearance in 1915 of Some Imagist Poets the first of three Imagist anthologies issued annually up to 1917. A fourth anthology, published in 1930, was little more than a nonstalgic retrospect. The 1915 collection is the most important for our purposes since it is prefaced by that celebrated manifesto from which all discussions of the movement begin. It is a manifesto which has been misunderstood and mangled often enough to deserve the courtesy of extensive quotation.

The poets in this volume do not represent a clique. Several of them are personally unknown to the others, but they are united by certain common principles arrived at independently. These principles are not new; they have fallen into desuetude. They are the essentials of all great poetry, indeed of all great literature, and they are simply these:

1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly exact, nor the merely decorative word.⁷
2. To create new rhythms—as the expression of new moods—and not to copy old rhythms which merely echo old moods. We do not insist on 'free verse' as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.
3. To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject. It is not good art to write badly about aeroplanes and automobiles; nor is it necessarily bad art to write well about the past. We believe passionately in the artistic value of modern life, but we wish to point out that there is nothing so uninspiring or old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 1911.
4. To present an image (hence the name: 'Imagist'). We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art.
5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.
6. Finally most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.⁸

Succeeding anthologies help to annotate the vocabulary employed. We are told for instance that 'the "exact word" does not mean the word which exactly describes the object in itself, it means the "exact" word which brings the effect of that object before the reader as it presented itself to the poet's mind at the time of writing the poem'.⁹ Our interest then, is not in the object itself, but in the poet's reaction to the object. So far, so good; but unfortunately nothing is said about the all-important nature of this reaction. Our only clues are in the words 'effect' and 'presented' and these, if they suggest anything, suggest that the reaction is passive, a mere registering and assembling of sense impressions.¹⁰ The annotation therefore does little to remedy the most serious weakness of the manifesto, its tacit assumption that the best of poetry is imitative rather than creative. The operative words are 'hard', 'clear', 'exact' and 'render', words which are appropriate to the description of something seen, not to the communication of something that is experienced. This insistence on poetry as accurate imitation can be seen even more clearly in the epigrams of Hulme:

It is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things.

A period of hard, dry classical verse is coming.

The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description … the poet is forced to use new analogies and especially to construct a plaster model of a thing to express his emotion at the sight of the vision he sees, his wonder and ecstasy.¹¹

The emphasis is always on outline, size and texture. There is never any recognition of the kind of experience through language, the experience defined and made permanent by language of which all enduring poetry consists. And it follows from this conception of poetry as the presentation of something seen that you are forced to label as rhetoric any comment on the thing seen. Description and evaluation become separable acts and the business of poetry is to describe and not to evaluate. Its aim is 'precise and definite description', never the transformation of description by its agent, the rebirth of the known through the experience of knowing. If the language of poetry differs from that of prose it differs only because it is more accurate, because it matches more exactly the contours of the real. 'Plain speech' says Hulme 'is essentially inaccurate. It is only by new metaphors … that it can be made more precise.' Such a conception of poetry is catastrophically misleading and not the less so for being put forward by Bergson.¹² It may be wholly admirable in analysis to separate reality from our judgements on reality. But because poetry rests on the experience of synthesis, every fact in its universe must demand the valuation of the whole poem for its context. The situation must embody its own comment. The image itself, every nuance and colour of its landscape, must be pervaded by the conclusions it is helping to establish. Imagism seldom supplies us with this unity. It is never much more than a form of poetic draughts-manship. Its style is accordingly an exterior device, a means of recording something felt or perceived, not the living power and operative agent through which that perception or emotion comes into being. The criticism can perhaps be better defined by considering the last stanza of Aldington's Choricos:

For silently
Brushing the field with red-shod feet,
With purple robe
Searing the grass as with a sudden flame,
Death,
Thou hast come upon us.
And of all the ancient songs
Passing to the swallow-blue halls
By the dark streams of Persephone,
This only remains—
That in the end we turn to thee,
Death,
We turn to thee, singing
One last song.

The passage has grace and a certain languid unity but it is a unity of gesture not of being. At the end of it we have really learned nothing about death except that it is fashionable to sing when we confront it. Contrast any Elizabethan comment in the same mood (the great scene from Antony and Cleopatra, for instance, or that between Isabella and Claudia in the third act of Measure for Measure) and it will be plain that the coherence achieved there is of an entirely different and superior order. Even in lines so apparently artless as 'Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have/Immortal longings in me' a universe of values is suggested. The crown is the imperial crown of Egypt; but it is also death, the consummation of life. The double function of 'immortal' ('immortal longings' and 'longings for immortality') is accordingly essential as a comment. One has to be arrested by the ambiguity in order to realize that it does not exist, since the 'crown', the reward of an immortal longing, can never be less than immortality. It is of course platitudinous to assert that Aldington's poems do not achieve this richness and I shall have lived unnecessarily on the public goodwill if I go on to suggest that Aldington is not Shakespeare. These differences are worth insisting on only because they exemplify an inherent deficiency in the best of Imagist writing. If the 'great aim' of poetry is restricted to description then it follows that the language of the poet must remain neutral to the objects it is describing. It can light up its subject with certain preconceptions, or bring to it the colouring of a given emotional mood. But the mood remains unqualified and static. It is asserted rather than created; the poem can stabilize but it cannot change it. Such limitations are the natural consequence of regarding the thing represented as something external to the act of representation. They are therefore to be expected not only in Imagist theory but also, to a greater or less extent, in all those 'representational' theories of poetry which descend from Aristotle and from classical criticism to Bergson. But in Greek tragedy or even Miltonic epic—forms in which the thing said is freely separable from the way of saying it—the limitation is not unfair to its material and the theory provides the appropriate apparatus for the poetic facts which it was designed to interpret. The difficulty arises with reflective and lyric poetry, where the language is the form, not the vehicle of its content, and where the thing said is inseparable from the way of saying it. To discuss such material adequately we need a theory of poetic activity in which, to quote Coleridge, 'the act of contemplation makes the thing contemplated'. The mind, in such experience, is united to its object in order to create the reality which it knows. This unity, in my opinion, is characteristic of the best lyric and reflective poetry; a theory like Imagism which can make no provision for it is bound to approach such writing in the wrong way. Its consequence can only be that the poet, compelled to represent rather than to experience, is forced to expel from his imagination all generalizations, all moral imperatives, and all evaluations or syntheses of fact which must be lived through to acquire their poetic validity. But a universe so simplified is necessarily devoid of any significant structure or of any sense of movement to an inclusive unity. The order it provides is formalized and lifeless and the images it initiates never extend into or demand the context and completion of the poem. These deficiencies are evident in several of H.D.'s lyrics:

I saw the first pear
as it fell—
the honey seeking, golden-banded,
the yellow swarm
was not more fleet than I,
(Spare us from loveliness)
and I fell prostrate
crying:
you have flayed us
with your blossoms.
spare us the beauty
of fruit trees.

The honey-seeking
paused not,
The air thundered their song
and I alone was prostrate
O rough-hewn

god of the orchard
I bring you an offering—
do you, alone unbeautiful,
son of the god
spare us from loveliness

these fallen hazel-nuts,
stripped late of their green sheaths,
grapes, red-purple,
their berries
dripping with wine,
pomegranates already broken,
and shrunken figs
and quinces untouched,
I bring you as offering.

It will be noted that if the particular images in this poem possess any force, it is only because of the repeated (and 'cosmic') supplication. But the poem merely circles round this supplication; the decorative catalogue of fruits with which it ends is evidence that no progression has been achieved or attempted. There is not, as in the well-known lines which follow, a completion of the abstract by the concrete, a demand by each for the presence of the other:

Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society.

The effect here depends on two contrasted sets of associations. 'Harmony' and 'Workmanship' suggest a pre-ordained pattern based on eternal law; 'reconciles' and 'cling' with their suppressed image of separated lovers suggest the tension and conflicts of actual existence and the sense of order it progressively achieves. But the immortal spirit 'grows like harmony', reconciling discords; the 'dark, inscrutable' workmanship cannot be separated from its concrete and human realization. The passage therefore does not merely declare certain abstract and cosmic principles of order; it also defines through its distinctive imagery the way in which that order is established in human reality. The concrete lives 'in one society' with the general in Wordsworth's metaphors as well as in his philosophy; speculative truths are made vital by their functioning in an accurate, precise and definite experience. If the Imagists had followed Pound's condescending advice ('read as much of Wordsworth as does not seem too unutterably dull"¹³) they might perhaps have understood from such passages that no isolation of the local from the cosmic can be effected, and that an image is poetically justifiable only when its own implicit valuation completes a whole system of metaphor and comment. The requirement is well illustrated by this 'abstraction' from Troilus and Cressida:

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.

Even the casual 'my lord' is indispensable. It is 'in character' for Ulysses, but in character also for the life of the image. It is part of the picture which the image proposes (the generous lord helping the impoverished beggar) but it also succeeds in commenting on that picture since, by suggesting that time lives on our charity, it makes us more conscious that we can afford to yield nothing to time. Ulysses' ironical courtesy moreover stimulates the recognition that the negligent 'lord' is really time's servant. After this one cannot help seeing that time's 'wallet' is really bottomless and that all that remains of the grandeur of Achilles is his helpless and destructive reliance on his past. The manner in which the second line fades away (the last foot of the pentameter can barely be sounded) perfectly captures this self-defeating negligence. The personification is thus intensely dramatic, and dramatic not only because it occurs in a drama. Like every poetic image it possesses its own life; but that life is made more particular and vivid by its incorporation in the context of the whole. Similarly when Ulysses talks of 'this chaos where degree is suffocate', 'degree' and 'chaos' are presumably two of the cosmic abstractions which the well-dressed Imagist is advised to abhor. But like the mendicant 'time', they acquire their local reality. The image of 'suffocation', of 'chaos' stifling 'degree' suggests far more forcibly than any direct assertion the inherent will of the universe to order. That suggestion is weighted by the theme of Ulysses' homily, the progressive collapse of each stage of being into the stage below it till everything returns to that murderous impotence from which the creation of order first began.

Without needing to press illustration further, it should be plain that no vigorous tradition of poetic writing can afford to separate description from comment or the abstract from the concrete. When the eighteenth century did so its powers of observation became atrophied and abstract, and when the nineteenth did so, its powers of generalization became standardized and lifeless. The concern of any new movement in poetry should be to reconcile these separated elements, and to bring them together in the wholeness of poetic experience. All that Imagism seems to propose, however, is a new version of an ancient mistake. The dissociation of sensibility it inherits is strengthened and not corrected by its doctrines, its implicit separation of the object described from the language of describing. Its fear of 'sonorous' generalities thus leads, not to a fusion of the general with the particular, but to a microcosmic obsession with the minute and concrete. The elements of the poetic synthesis are driven further apart instead of being unified. The world of description becomes flat, characterless, and devoid of moral shading but those who like Aldington find its climate unhealthy can only desert it for the kind of cosmic statement which Imagism has ostensibly been designed to repudiate:

And even if the release takes place
And the dialogue of the two natures is perfect
Still, the end must be tragic. It is easy to see that,
Though the fundamental essential tragedy perhaps
(Some say 'of course')
Is not death but birth.

And here is another sample of 'accurate, precise and definite description' taken from Aldington's poem on his childhood:

The town was dull;
The front was dull;
The High Street and the other street were dull—
And there was a public park, I remember,
And that was damned dull too.

The two worlds exclude, instead of completing each other. Generalities in these poems are uncompromisingly general just as the images in other Imagist poems are husks of sensation emptied of all comment. And when as in Fletcher's The Attainment, the two elements are mingled, the relationships between them remain static and external:

Daring in my humility
I tore the veil aside and there lay truth
Outstretched and shining like a sleeping bride
Beyond the grasp of genius or of youth.
Long I gazed lovingly on her; she slept still;
And in her naked glory all the earth
Dwindled down to a narrow speck, until
I rose and, ere I passed the gates of birth,
I prayed that as Isaiah's lips with fire
Were purged, so on my lips the fire might be.
And then I merged with that eternity
Which is beyond the world and its desire.

Professor Hughes informs us that this reversion to nineteenth century rhetoric was dictated by Fletcher's 'inner needs'.¹⁴ But it is surprising how often the needs of Imagist poets either prevent them from writing poetry at all or else make them write poems which are the very reverse of Imagist. Thus Pound left the movement soon after it began and Flint after 1920 devoted himself increasingly to translation and reviewing. Fletcher's return to 'cosmicism' has already been discussed. Lawrence's appearance in the Imagist anthologies was not much more than an entertaining accident. Aldington whose early poems rank as Imagist classics drifted more and more towards philosophical rhetoric. Only H.D. has remained faithful to the Imagist manifesto and H.D.'s development, as Professor Hughes admits, 'has been chiefly from the short lyric to the long, or rather, from the lyric to the narrative and dramatic poem. Certainly she has not perceptibly widened her art and it is questionable how much she has deepened it; what she has done is to lengthen it'.¹⁵ The sterility of Imagism could not be better brought out than in a comment of this kind on the perfect Imagist, and it is a barrenness which unfortunately extends to something more than a local failure of doctrine or procedure. The conception of poetry as a form of description, rather than as a mode of experience, is one which corrupts not only Imagism but many of the alternatives which criticism sets against it. It limits our use of the resources of language since not all the evocations of language are descriptive. It compels us to distinguish the technique of a poem from the perceptions which that technique has been devised to express. It separates imagery from its kernel of comment and generalities from their concrete validation. Because of these simplifications it is also unhistorical; it can see the past only as an external prescription, not as a power of meaning in the present. Finally these partitions and exclusions, even if they do not make poetic experience impossible, must interfere seriously with its range and effectiveness. They are therefore bitterly hostile to that personally experienced yet representative synthesis from which the poetry of each generation requires to be created.

Having discussed the failings of Imagism one is in a better position to assess its historical significance. Critics have usually seen in the movement the first premonitions of a new order in poetry, an order whose interests are dramatically opposed to the traditional standards of nineteenth century writing. One's doubts about such credentials are natural; they are strengthened by Livingstone Lowes's discovery that admirable Imagist poems can be made by putting Meredith's novels into free verse.¹⁶ Since, similar results can be secured by rearranging Pater (see, for example, the passage from The Renaissance which Yeats puts at the beginning of the Oxford Book) one is forced to conclude that the Imagists are really less modern than they are made to be. The manifestoes apparently deny this—'we believe passionately in the artistic value of modern life'¹⁷—but despite this brave show of up-to-dateness the preferences of Imagism seem rooted in the past and its reaction to the present essentially defensive: 'It is not good art to write badly about aeroplanes and automobiles; nor is it necessarily bad art to write well about the past'. Far from being a credo of modernity this is almost an apology for not being modern enough. One would expect the people who devised this formula to be far more interested in Sapphics than in aeroplanes. So it is not surprising that when Aldington thinks of Dover, he uses it exclusively as material for disgust, and that when Flint writes of London, his poem is not about city life at all but about green skies, moonlight, and the climbing of a birch tree. This repudiation of the present (or what is only a stage better, the cultivation of simplified and static emotions about it) culminates in these remarks of H.D.'s:

… the inner world of imagination, the ivory tower, where poets presumably do live, in memory, does stand stark with the sun-lit isles around it, while battle and din of battle and the whole dreary, tragic spectacle of our time seems blurred and sodden and not to be recalled, save in moments of repudiation, historical necessity.… Miss Monroe was one of the first to print and recognize my talent. But how strangely, farcically blind to our predicament.¹⁸ The letter suggested with really staggeringly inept solicitude that H.D. would do so well—maybe, finally, if she could get into 'life', into the rhythm of our time, in touch with events, and so on and so on and so on. I don't know what else she said. I was laughing too much.

It may be true, as her critics have frequently argued, that H.D.'s talents were born out of their time. That in itself is no condemnation of them. Anachronisms have their place in poetry and the language and values of a different civilization may well speak significantly of the age in which we live. But to do so they must be regulated by an emotion more complex and civilized than one of dainty disgust. Since the doctrines of Imagism, and the temperaments of many of its poets are hostile to the development of this complex reaction the movement fails to be vitally representative either of the traditional or the new. It is therefore unable, as the best of poetry is able, to discover and regenerate tradition as an element in the meaning of the new. The technical changes it initiates merely preserve the sensibility of the nineties by providing it with an up-to-date exterior. One must turn to other and more critical talents for the deeper changes of sentiment and insight which should inform and justify these outer innovations.

¹ 'The Music of Poetry', Partisan Review, Nov.-Dec. 1942, p. 457.

² 'The Present Age', Introductions to English Literature, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (London, 1939), Vol. V, p. 51.

³ Intro, to T. E. Hulme's 'Notes on Language and Style', The Criterion, July 1925.

⁴ 'The History of Imagism', The Egoist, May 1st, 1915.

⁵ Glenn Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists (Stanford University, 1931), p. 38.

⁶ Hughes, op. cit., p. 36.

⁷ Presumably an allusion to a remark of Hulme's: 'Plain speech is essentially inaccurate. It is only by new metaphors … that it can be made more precise.'

⁸Some Imagist Poets (London, 1915), pp. vi-vii.

⁹Some Imagist Poets 1916 (London, 1916), p. vi.

¹⁰ Pound, who on occasion is wiser than his brethren, defines the image as presenting 'an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time'. He adds that 'it is the presentation of such a "complex" simultaneously which gives that 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'. (Pavannes and Divisions, New York, 1918.) A poetic image however does not merely 'present' but compels through language a response to the thing presented.

¹¹ Quotations from T. E. Hulme throughout this essay are from Speculations, ed. H. Read (London, 1925) and from Michael Roberts's T. E. Hulme (London, 1938), pp. 258-303.

¹² T. E. Hulme, 'Bergson's Theory of Art', Speculations, pp. 143-69.

¹³ 'A Few Don'ts by an Imagist', Poetry (Chicago), Jan. 1913.

¹⁴ Hughes, op. cit., p. 149.

¹⁵Ibid., p. 111.

¹⁶ 'An Unacknowledged Imagist', Nation, February 24, 1916; Convention and Revolt in Poetry (London, 1930), pp. 178-84.

¹⁷ The claim is more fervent a year later: 'Imagism asks to be judged by different standards from those employed in nineteenth-century art.… This must not be construed into the desire to belittle our forerunners. On the contrary, the Imagists have the greatest admiration for the past and humility towards it. But they have been caught in the throes of a new birth. The exterior world is changing, and with it men's feelings, and every age must express its feelings in its own individual way.' Some Imagist Poets 1916 (London, 1916), Preface, pp. vii-viii.

¹⁸ 'A Note on Poetry', The Oxford Anthology of American Literature (New York, 1938), p. 1287.

A. R. Jones

[In the following essay, Jones examines sources for establishing a factual history of Imagism.]

SOURCE: "Notes towards a History of Imagism," in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 60, Summer, 1961, pp. 262-85.

"Imagism is a faded legend," wrote J. Isaacs in 1951, "and its history has been misrepresented by interested parties."¹ If Imagism was ever a faded legend, recent criticism and research has quickened interest in the period to which it belongs until it has begun to take on brighter, even blatant, coloring. The interest of the modern critic in the early years of this century has now little or nothing to do with any nostalgia for the good old Edwardian days, which was the case with much of the earlier writings on the period; nor have most of the recent critics any personal axe to grind in their telling of the history of the time. It is not, for most of them, a period that they themselves lived through and in which they buried their own youth and aspirations. Indeed, this period has at last taken on the same kind of distance as any other and yet at the same time is both rich in interest and diversity and pertinently related to the contemporary scene. The period has been taken out of the field of autobiography and memoir and handed over to the biographer and the literary historian whose work is now to establish the facts.

If J. Isaacs' first proposition now seems untrue, there can, at least, be no doubt whatsoever about the truth of his second. Imagism certainly has been "misrepresented by interested parties." Indeed, we might point out by way of illustration that J. Isaacs himself has to some extent contributed to this misrepresentation.² Moreover, in 1954 he reported, without comment, that Robert Frost had told him that "Flint was responsible for the imagist movement in poetry, not Ezra Pound, nor T. E. Hulme."³ This, as he must have realized, conflicts with his own account of the movement's genesis published three years before.

A more interesting misrepresentation is that of Ford Madox (Hueffer) Ford, whose foreword to the Imagist Anthology 1930 ⁴ takes the form of a rhetorical reminiscence which he gives the nostalgic title, "Those Were the Days." In that foreword he confuses the history of Imagism to an extent that does credit to his imaginative powers;

It is difficult to disentangle Futurism from Cubism and Vorticism and Imagism … and, indeed, even from Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and Dadaism and Hyper-realism. At least it isn't now. But in those days it was bewildering. You have to remember that by 1913 Futurism was really a world movement.… But by 1913 there had come divisions. A strong group in France, Germany and London began to call themselves CUBISTS.… Mr Ezra Pound and the at present ubiquitous Mr. Wyndham Lewis with the assistance of Mr Richard Aldington and my bewildered and not unpleasantly titillated self—evolved VORTICISM, which was, like CUBISM, a step toward some sort of constructive aesthetics What exactly VORTICISM was—though its most loyal champion—I never knew.… And as a by-product of VORTICISM there evolved itself … Imagism.

Ford's flirting among the isms of the period is, to say the least, cavalier, and his idea that Imagism emerged lightheartedly from a meaningless chaos of artistic and poetic movements sometime after the break-up of Futurism in 1913 is, as he says, "bewildering," even now. Ford shows himself to be hopelessly out of touch with a period in which these isms were felt to be irreconcilably divergent by those who believed in them with such passionate conviction. Vorticism, for example, was felt to be not "like Cubism" in any way, but directly opposed to it and was "evolved" by Gaudier-Brzeska. Anyway, it had nothing to do with Imagism except perhaps that Ezra Pound was somehow involved with both movements and Imagism certainly predates Vorticism and cannot have been evolved from it, not even as a by-product.

Yet Ezra Pound clearly asks us to take Ford seriously. On numerous occasions Pound has persisted in his contention that "during the years immediately prewar in London," Ford was preeminently "the critical LIGHT." In fairness to Ford we should point out that he makes no such claim for himself though no one would claim that Ford was a retiring or modest man or anything but a boastful and arrogant one. As far as Imagism is concerned, Ford confesses to not knowing any of the contributors to the Imagist Anthology 1930 for which he wrote his foreword. Or rather, he puts the matter the other way round by saying that, "No doubt every contributor in this volume will … protest to its editor that till now they have never heard of me. And that would be Proper … because at that date I died." The contributors to that anthology—Richard Aldington, John Cournos, H.D., J. G. Fletcher, F. S. Flint, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams—must be considered as forming a significant nucleus of Imagist poets, and yet, as Ford admits, none of them was likely to have even heard of him. Ezra Pound alone of the Imagist poets, it seems, knew Ford. If Ford's influence did not reach these poets, then we can only remark how dimly "the critical LIGHT" must have been burning.

By saying that he "died" at the birth of Imagism, Ford means to tell us that he retired at that time from the literary scene: "I wrote a farewell to Literature … and, Fate taking me at my word," he says, "it was ten years before I wrote another book. (I except Propaganda which falls into the category of biblia abiblia.)" In fact, for the sake of precision, between 1913 and 1924, inclusive, Ford published no less than sixteen volumes of one kind or another, including The Good Soldier (1915), and collaborated in three others, as well as translating Pierre Loti's The Trail of the Barbarians. We can only wonder what he would have done more had he not taken a fare-well to literature. However, as a reason for his "retirement" from the world of letters he says that the young Imagist poets of the time were beginning to practice what he had always preached and therefore he felt justified in leaving the further development of the English language in their safe-keeping.

If I then went underground, it was quite sincerely because I considered that in this group of young people were writers perfectly calculated to carry on the work that I had, not so much begun, as tried to foster in others. I desired to see English become at once more colloquial and more exact, verse more fluid and more exacting of its practitioners … and above all … that it should be realized that poetry, as it were dynamically, is a matter of rendering, not comment. You must not say: "I am so happy"; you must behave as if you were happy.… And perhaps above all I was anxious that Anglo-Saxondom should realize that all creative prose like all imaginative verse is Poetry … emotions have their own peculiar cadences and … poetic ideas are best expressed by the renderings of concrete objects.…

Ford says nothing here about poetry that had not been said, and said much more precisely, many times before by the young experimental poets who grouped themselves around T. E. Hulme from 1908 onwards. There is little or no evidence of Ford's having any direct influence on poetry, either on its practice or on its theory, and little or nothing, so far as objective evidence is concerned, to justify Pound's insistence that Ford "did the WORK for English writing"—apart, that is, from Pound's insistence.

With so many luminaries to choose from at that time in London, we wonder what exactly Pound saw in Ford that made him single him out in this way. In spite of the achievement of Ford's much overpraised novel, The Good Soldier, neither his critical work nor his poetry nor his novels seem to support such extravagant claims for him. The force of personal influence is, of course, extremely elusive and not easily measured but we can say that in the case of Ford it does not seem to have been very distinctly felt except by Pound. Perhaps it was Ford's qualities as an editor that attracted Pound for he said, "The EVENT of 1909-10 was Ford Madox (Hueffer) Ford's 'English Review,' and no greater condemnation of the utter filth of the whole social system of that time can be dug up than the fact of that review's passing out of his hands." First of all, it is worth noting that the reason it passed "out of his hands" was because under Ford's management the review was losing, according to Violet Hunt, about 120 a month. Moreover, during the twelve issues of the review which Ford published from December, 1908, he printed work mainly by established writers such as Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, John Galsworthy, and W. H. Hudson. It is well to recall Pound's attack on what he called London's "respectable / and middle generation" of this period which he derided as "stew like Wells, nickle cash register Bennett. All degrading the values. Chesterton meaning also slosh at least then and TO me. Belloc pathetic in that he had MEANT to do the fine thing.… " Pound seems to have over-looked the fact that Ford published in the English Review work by H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc and thus furthered, presumably, the degradation of the values. In fact Ford's review on the whole stood for the literary establishment and published the work of accepted writers. It cannot really be said to have been revolutionary or even experimental and avantgarde. In poetry, for instance, apart from printing D. G. Rossetti's "The Ballad of Jan Van Hunks," Ford also published poems by Rupert Brooke and Walter de la Mare. He was persuaded to publish three poems by W. B. Yeats out of respect for his established reputation, but he did not really appreciate his poetry until he had been converted by Pound's instruction. Ford's "discovery" of D. H. Lawrence, his publication of poems by Flint and Pound, do not look very daring, or even surprising, when set into the context of the review as a whole. Ford had too great a respect for the established figures of literature, was too much of the literary and social snob, ever to have offended the accepted conventions and tastes of his time by turning the English Review into a platform for the new, experimental writing. Pound introduced him to some of London's younger and livelier poets and authors and managed to broaden his taste and outlook. Indeed, there is evidence that Pound effected a considerable and, in some ways, decisive influence on Ford and also managed to exercise some little influence on the English Review.

Pound is the chief propagandist for the Ford myth. He is also one of the main sources of information about the genesis and development of the Imagist movement. Both René Taupin, when writing his book, L'Influence du symbolism français sur la poésie américaine (de 1910 à 1920), and Glenn Hughes, when writing Imagism and Imagists, wrote to Pound for information which he freely gave.

Pound's letter to Taupin⁵ is of the greatest importance to the history of Imagism because, in the first place, he takes credit for beginning the Imagist movement, although dissociating himself from its later development, and, in the second place, he asserts that the movement had begun before the poets involved had become familiar with the work of the French Symbolist poets. He says that the influence of the French Symbolist poets on the formation of the new English poetry was tenuous and indirect, "Comme le pain doit quelquechose au vanneur de blé, etc. Tant d'opérations intermédiaires." He goes on to stress this point:

Réforme métrique plus profonde—date de 1905 on commence avant de connaître Fr. modernes. J'ai "lancé" les Imagistes (anthologie Des Imagistes: mais on doit me dissocier de la décadence des Imagistes, qui commence avec leurs anthologies postérieures [même la première de ces anthologies]).

There is no telling why Pound chose the date 1905 as the beginning of metrical reform; otherwise his position is clearly stated. In this letter he also makes an interesting reference to the earlier group associated with T. E. Hulme:

En 1908-9 à Londres (avant le début de H.D.): cénacle T. E. Hulme, Flint, D. Fitzgerald, moi, etc. Flint, beaucoup français-ifié, jamais arrivé à condensation

concentration

avoir centre

Symbolistes français les "90's" à Londres.…

Fort[e] diffèrence entre Flint: {tolérance pour toutes les fautes et imbécilités des poètes françaises). Moi—examen très sévère—et intolérance.

Although Pound includes Hulme, with himself, in the cénacle of 1908-9, he does not single him out as the leader of the group and furthermore he confuses the unity of the group by including the name of Fitzgerald. Nevertheless, he does single out F. S. Flint as an enthusiastic (although, compared with himself, indiscriminate) admirer of French poetry, but he associates that admiration with the decadents of the 1890's and with Arthur Symons. He reiterates his belief that the vogue in England for French Symbolist poetry came about through his advocacy and came after the Imagist movement had already got under way: "Mais ma connaissance des poètes fr. mod. et ma propagande pour ces poètes en Amérique (1912-17-23) venait en sens genéral après l'inception de l'Imagisme à Londres (1908-13-14)." Taupin's interest was, of course, in the influence of French Symbolist poetry during the decade 1910-1920 and although he launches into generalization that spread over the period 1890-1923 we can take it that he was in fact answering a letter which asked for information about a specific period and sought to clarify the part played by Pound as regards the influence of the Symbolists during that period. A curious point to note is that although Pound takes credit for launching the Imagists with Des Imagistes, which was published in the spring of 1914, he nonetheless dates the inception of the movement some-what vaguely as "1908-13-14."

In reply to Glenn Hughes's enquiry regarding Imagism and the Imagists, Pound is rather more lucid but only a little less vague.

Lawrence was never an Imagist. He was an Amygist. Ford dug him up and boomed him in Eng. Rev. before Imagism was launched. Neither he nor Fletcher accepted the Imagist program. When the prospect of Amy's yearly outcroppings was by her assured, they agreed to something different.… The name was invented to launch H.D. and Aldington before either had enough stuff for a volume. Also to establish a critical demarcation long since knocked to hell.

T. E. Hulme was an original or pre-[.] Bill Williams was as "original" as cd. be managed by writing from London to N.J. Flint was the next acquisition, tho' really impressionist. He and Ford and one or two others shd. by careful cataloguing have been in another group, but in those far days there weren't enough non-symmetricals to have each a farm to themselves.⁶

The main point that emerges from this letter is that Pound launched Imagism in order to establish a particular critical doctrine and to push the work of H.D. and Richard Aldington. He does not consider that D. H. Lawrence, J. G. Fletcher, Ford, Flint, and "one or two others" were genuine Imagist poets. William Carlos Williams he classes as "original." The original members of the anthology, Des Imagistes, number eleven in all and were, apart from Pound himself, Richard Aldington, H.D., F. S. Flint, Skipworth Cannell, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Allen Upward, and John Cournos. If we eliminate those poets who Pound considers were not really Imagist poets at all, we are left with only four Imagist poets proper including Pound himself. Also we may note that although Pound gives Hughes the impression that he was responsible for organizing the movement—and, indeed, he was both editor and contributor—he is not very helpful in volunteering information about his own relations with Imagism and the Imagists or about his own attitude towards the critical doctrines by which they wrote and for which he has been credited. He does on this occasion single out T. E. Hulme as "an original or pre-" but does not commit himself any farther.

In spite of Pound's assurances to the contrary, René Taupin, after exhaustive research, managed to determine a vital connection between the French Symbolists and the Imagist poets. He traced the influence of Rèmy de Gourmont and, to a lesser extent, Jules de Gaultier on the Imagist aesthetic and also isolated the influence of specific French poets on the work of individual Imagist writers. He found that Pound had read widely in French poetry and was indebted mainly to Gautier, Rimbaud, Corbière, and Laforgue, but also to Tailhade and Jammes; F. S. Flint was strongly influenced in his work by Verhaeren and de Bosschère; Amy Lowell by de Requier and Paul Fort; J. G. Fletcher by a succession of French poets, particularly by Rimbaud, Corbière, and Laforgue, and more consistently by Verhaeren. In the case of H.D. and Richard Aldington, Taupin found difficulty in tracing specific influences and concludes that they were mainly indebted to the work of classical writers. Taupin's exacting study demonstrated that the Imagist poets as a whole had a thorough knowledge of French Symbolist poetry and were, at least after 1910, decisively influenced by their work and example.

Pound's unreliability as a source of the history of literary London before the 1914-1918 war is further illustrated by his replies to Michael Roberts' inquiries. In 1937 Michael Roberts was engaged in writing his book on T. E. Hulme⁷ and he wrote to Ezra Pound asking for information. Pound's replies are of interest in themselves but, again, his answers to specific questions are evasive, vague, and impatient in what is now recognizably the Pound epistolary manner. He gives little away on the question that interested Roberts particularly, which was that of Pound's relations with Hulme and the Hulme circle. Such information, if it had been forthcoming, might well have shed invaluable light on the history of Imagism as well as giving important and in some respects crucial insight into his own poetic development. Only one of these replies has been previously published, and then in an expurgated form.⁸ They are all addressed from "EZRA POUND / Via Marsala 12-15/ RAPALLO / Italy" and have the heading "A tax is not a share/ A nation need not and / should not pay rent for / its own credit./ 1937 anno XV."

[Postcard dated 1st May]

Have you decided whether FIVE poems are ONE poem?

Are you paying any attention to relation of Hulme's ideas to those functioning or lying fallow in London in 1908?

and or to dates of printing, also N. Age stuff our pseudonym?

Naturally I cd. do a month's work on yr/book … and who wd/ thank me even impolitely for doing it?

Yrs E.P.

[Letter dated 9th May]

Re/Hulme What are you doing the book FOR????

Preface by Eliot wd. sell the book, but he wasn't in London then.

I mean do YOU want to prove or DO something, or are you out to harmonize with the shit which is Squire's england, and to use retrospect to blanket and damp down the active thought (what tiny particle there is) of the time?

In any case can't learn anything about it from me short of coming here and talking.

Balzac comedie humaine needed to convey the London of then to young men of now. I haven't the time.

If Hulme has anything CONstructive for tomorrow/ Fire away. But if you are merely out to maintain bloomsbuggy yatter….

Personally I have no use for any man who is distracting attention from vital question at this time.

Yrs. E.P.

[Letter dated 15th May]

Waaaal, yng/man lemme remind you ONE thing. I mean I can help you if you have the sense to be helped, and it won't take long.

What do think ARE Hulme's ideas?

Hulme said that all any man ever THOUGHT wd/ go on the back of an envelope.

What he said about the rest of one's scribblings you can prob/ discover from his "graphic remains."

Shall be interested in the "back of the envelope" when you have succeeded in digging it out and reconstructing it.

Yrs. E.P.

[Postcard dated 14th July]

do you want to warm up possible public by printing poem or foretaste of Hulme book in magazine Ronald Duncan/co /Lloyds, 6 Pall Mall, says he will go to press by Aug/6.

(last day for vasi)

Lecture probably to QUEST society (G.R.S. Mead's) W. Lewis, I, and, I am fairly sure, T.E.H. lectured to Quest/ I suppose trace is left in Quest (the quarterly or monthly mag/edt/ by Mead).

I take it you mean "we shd/establish hierarc/ of val/" Bother of T.E.H. inverting his word order in sentence//. As nearly as I recall someone took me to Tour Eifel for group dinner after publication of Personae or at least while it was in the press/ I think . . in fact yes, sure, Personae was out. Flint in press/ and I read Altaforte/ No means of metting 'em till I had been pubd/

Fitzgerald, occasionally or once or twice Colum/ Jo. Cambell, Flint, Tancred. First talk I remember H. talking of Upward's "New Word." H "useful" mainly re/ sculpture.

"cinders" attitude NOT american—good deal later. Problem for writers in 1909 was OF language, word order. H's slopping round with Bergson a BORE.

[Letter dated 20th July]

Dear R/

what I am trying to get into yr/ head is the PROPORTION of ole T.E.H. to London 1908 to 1910, '12, '14.

Hulme wasn't hated and loathed by the ole bastards because they didn't know he was there.

The man who did the WORK for English writing was Ford Mx Hueffer (now Ford).

The old crusted lice and advocates of corpse language knew that the English Review existed.

You ought for the sake of perspective to read THROUGH the whole of the Eng. Rev. files for the first two years/ I mean for as long as Ford had it.

Until you have done that you will be prey to superstition/

You won't know what WAS. and you will consider that Hulme or any of the chaps of my generation invented the moon and preceded Galileo's use of the telescope.

Don't think that I read the Eng/ Rev/ then. I did NOT lie down with Wells, or read "Tono Bungay." Nothing to be proud of, but so was it.

I was learning how Yeats did it. I believe that T.E.H. (if you dig up ms/ you can verify) referred in verse to "the pavement grey" or gray, don't remember his spelling.

He had read Upward's new word. I didn't till I knew Upward about 1912-16 and I suppose I am sole reader of all Upward's books now surviving.

I spose there is a set in Brit/Mus/ and it might be poss/ for you to borrow my set, if you are in London.

I believe Hulme made mrs K/ and Flint do a good deal of the sweating over the actual translations of Bergson and Sorel/ having got his slice on the options.

I remember Flint glumpily talking about Hulme as a "dangerous Man" Wich I take to mean that he colluded Frankie into doing something useful

TO T.E.H. at least.

Frankie is another study

You ought also to remember who were still alive in those years/ and on whom young eyes were bent. Hulme's weren't that was part of his value. The respectable/ and the middle generation, illustrious punks and messers/ fakes like Shaw/ stew like Wells, nickle cash register Bennett. All degrading the values. Chesterton meaning also slosh at least then and TO me. Belloc pathetic in that he had MEANT to do the fine thing and been jockeyed into serving, at least to some extent, a shitten order of a pewked society, but NOT, as I felt, liking the owners of the shit pile.

Of course for those years london was Strand Magazine romance to young foreigner/

Dare say Mike Aden Kilyumjian was the last rrromantic in Aladin's cave. Ansum kebs/ décolété ladies etCet and SETera.

ALL vurry pleasant oh mahrrrvelous.

War prob/ bitched most of that for you fledglings. or mebbe youth iz yewth.

Wonder what Doc/ Johnson wdV have done about cubism?

Apart ça do you see any change from Hume's england to Hulme's?

I mean the england INside his head?

Yrs. E.P.

The subject of Hulme clearly continued to worry Pound after this exchange with Michael Roberts. Although Roberts never took up Pound's suggestion to publish a poem or an article in Ronald Duncan's magazine, Townsman, in January, 1939, Pound published in that magazine two poems, "Song of Empire" and "Slice of Life," and an article called "This Hulme Business"' in which he tries to put Hulme in his place once and for all. In this article he repeats much that he had said before in his letters to Roberts. He emphasizes the relative insignificance of Hulme compared to the total intellectual picture of London at that time; and he stresses the importance of Ford Madox Ford and the English Review. Altogether Pound ignores Hulme's role as a decisive, influential leader among London's avant-garde, a role adequately substantiated by the testimonies of F. S. Flint, J. G. Fletcher, Richard Aldington, Wyndham Lewis, J. C. Squire, Edward Marsh, and many other writers and artists of the period who agree that Hulme's influence on London's intellectual life was profound and enduring. Moreover, all these contemporaries agree that Hulme was the prime mover in establishing a changed attitude towards, and new methods in, poetry and aesthetics. Pound's insistence that the critic should keep a proper sense of proportion and should place his subject in the right perspective of his time is a most salutary reminder as a corrective to the excesses that biographers are given to committing. Nevertheless, Pound's idea of proportion might also represent an essential distortion of fact particularly when it neglects the force of certain personalities and ideas which might well be out of all proportion to relative numbers or reputations. A literary historian of the period is bound to give considerable weight to what Pound has to say not only because his remarks are important in assessing his own biography and development as a poet, but also because he himself figured so large in the intellectual life of London at the time. In his letters to René Taupin and Glenn Hughes, as in his correspondence with Michael Roberts, we might well be impressed by the fact that Pound was generous enough with his time to trouble to answer at all, but in assessing the actual documentary worth of these answers we cannot overlook certain curious and significant "misrepresentations."

Glenn Hughes's account of the history of Imagism is indebted to Pound although he owes much more to F. S. Flint's history of the movement which he published in the Egoist.¹⁰ J. Isaacs also uses this article by Flint. Although neither Hughes nor Isaacs is agreed in detail, they are both broadly similar in their accounts. Glenn Hughes¹¹ sees French Symbolism as being "the principal as being ner of imagism" and he gives an elaborate account of the development of Symbolist poetry from the time of the Parnassians' revolt against Romanticism in 1860 to the emergence of Symbolism proper under Jean Moréas down to the classicists of the "Ecole Romane," the Cubists, the Fantasists, the Unanimists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists. He allows T. E. Hulme the title "father of imagism" and starts his account with Hulme's founding of the Poets' Club in 1908. Though none of the members of the Poets' Club were themselves poets, Hughes tells us, they discussed experimental, Imagist poems (we wonder where Hughes thinks they got them from). Early in 1909, says Hughes, Hulme met F. S. Flint and thereafter a new dining and talking society was founded. This society met in Soho on Thursday evenings, the first meeting being held on March 25th, 1909. On April 22nd, 1909, Ezra Pound joined the group, says Hughes, and thereafter Pound became the leader of the Imagist poets at least until he was displaced by Amy Lowell.

J. Isaacs' account of the movement is briefer and more lucid:

The movement began … in 1908 when T. E. Hulme founded a Poets' Club which met in Soho every Wednesday to dine and to read poetry. A small pamphlet was issued For Christmas 1908 which contained Hulme's Autumn, the first and most famous of the Imagist poems.… Early in 1909 T. E. Hulme met F. S. Flint and from 25th March a new group was formed.… On 22nd April 1909 there was introduced an American poet, Ezra Pound … so ended the first phases, the softer phase, the 90'sh phase of the "School of the Image".… The next phase is the invention of the label "Imagist" and the reign of Ezra Pound.… Ezra Pound became the impressario of the movement.¹²

Clearly both Glenn Hughes's and J. Isaacs' accounts rely heavily on Flint's article, "The History of Imagism," and should be compared with it as well as with each other:

Somewhere in the gloom of the year 1908, Mr. T. E. Hulme … proposed to a companion that they should found a Poets' Club. The thing was done there and then. The Club began to dine; and its members to read their verses. At the end of the year they published a small plaquette of them, called "For Christmas MDCCCCVIIII." In this plaquette was printed one of the first "Imagist" poems by T. E. Hulme; Autumn.

I think what brought the real nucleus of this group (1909 group) together was a dissatisfaction with English poetry as it was then (and still is alas!) being written. We proposed at various times to replace it by pure vers libre; by the Japanese tanka and haikai.… In all this Hulme was ringleader. He insisted too on absolutely accurate presentation and no verbiage.… There was also a lot of talk and practice among us … of what we called the Image. We were very much influenced by modern French symbolist poetry.…

Pound collected together a number of poems of different writers … and in February-March 1914 they were published in America and England as "Des Imagistes; an Anthology" which though it did not set the Thames seems to have set America on fire.… There is no difference, except that which springs from difference of temperament and talent, between an imagist poem of today and those written by Edward Storer and T. E. Hulme."¹³

Glenn Hughes and J. Isaacs both document, with varying success, the rather bare account of Imagism given by F. S. Flint. All the accounts agree that there were two groups to which T. E. Hulme belonged, the 1908 Poets' Club and a new group which was formed in 1909 and joined first by Flint and later by Pound. Hughes rather surprisingly says that the members of the 1908 Poets' Club were not themselves poets although they discussed poetry. J. Isaacs says that the Poets' Club met in Soho on Wednesday and Hughes says the 1909 group met in Soho on Thursdays. The plaquette which Flint says was produced by the 1908 Poets' Club and called For Christmas MDCCCCvn is ignored by Hughes and described by Isaacs as a "pamphlet" called "For Christmas 1908." The difficulty that both writers face is that using Flint as their "source" they are unclear as to how the 1908 Poets' Club became what Flint calls merely the "1909 group." Moreover, of course, neither Flint nor Pound was an original member of the 1908 Poets' Club and yet Flint, Isaacs, and Hughes are agreed that Imagism was born in that club and that it was T. E. Hulme who gave it birth.

In July, 1906, T. E. Hulme, having been sent down from Cambridge and having broken the ties with his family, took a passage on a cargo boat to Montreal, Canada. He traveled widely over the vast prairie lands of the middle west, working only in order to provide himself with enough money to enable him to move on to the next town or province. It was during this period that he began to concern himself seriously with aesthetics and with poetry and it was during this period that he came, quite independently, to certain conclusions concerning the nature of poetic language and the supremacy of the image. "The first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse," he said, "was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of Western Canada."¹⁴ At that time he wrote to Miss A. M. Pattison to say, "I have got lots of ideas and experiences and am very glad I came, even if it were only for a suitable image I thought of one day working in the railway."¹⁵ He began to write a number of poems centered on the ideas and feelings aroused by his experience of the vast space, the huge sky, and the flat, rolling grass lands of Canada. "The flats of Canada," he wrote, "are incomprehensible on any single theory."¹⁶ He sought to encompass this incomprehensibility by containing it within the image:

Somewhere the gods (the blanket-makers in the
prairie of cold)
Sleep in their blankets.

Or again,

Brand of the obscene gods
On their flying cattle,
Roaming the sky prairie.

He later worked some of the images he had conceived in Canada into his poetry. The important point to stress is that by the time that he had returned from Canada in the spring of 1907 he had already conceived the salient features of the theory and practice of what came to be called Imagism. What Pound calls his "slopping round with Bergson" enabled Hulme to lend his theory at least the trappings of philosophical respectability. He found that he could use (or rather misuse) Bergson's philosophical ideas in order to provide himself with a suitable language in which to order and propagate his conception of poetry and poetic language. Bergson had said that there are two distinct ways of "knowing" reality; intellectually by means of the analytic method, and instinctively by means of the intuition. Hulme assumes that there are two distinct kinds of language; prose which is a counter language, a practical but essentially blunt instrument of communication, and poetry which is, or can be, a sensitive and individual instrument for communicating the unique, imaginative experience of the poet. Prose is the language of the intellect, a concept language; poetry is the language of intuition, an imagistic language. Only the language of poetry can communicate our intuitions of the intensive, real nature of experience. "No image," says Bergson, "can replace the intuition of duration" but

many diverse images, borrowed from very different orders of things, may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized. By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, we shall prevent any one of them from usurping the place of the intuition it is intended to call up, since it would then be driven away at once by its rivals. By providing that, in spite of their differences of aspect, they all require from the mind the same kind of attention, and in some sort the same degree of tension, we shall gradually accustom consciousness to a particular and clearly defined disposition—that precisely which it must adopt in order to appear to itself as it really is, without any veil.¹⁷

Moreover, as Bergson points out, "the image has at least this advantage, that it keeps us in the concrete." It is not, of course, necessary to understand Bergsonian metaphysics in order to understand Hulme's theory and practice of Imagism, but in Bergson Hulme found a congenial language in which to clothe his theory of creative imagination as well as justification for asserting the paramount importance in poetry of the image or conceit. Indeed, Bergson himself was surprised at the way Hulme was applying in aesthetics what to him were philosophical ideas and enthusiastically testified to the brilliance of Hulme's ideas;

Ou je me trompe beaucoup, ou il est destiné à produire des oeuvres intéressantes et importantes dans le domaine de la philosophie en général, et plus particulièrement peut-être dans celui de la philosophie de l'art.¹⁸

Hulme's conception of Imagism was individually conceived under the pressure of his own personal experiences in Canada; he looked to Bergson to provide a language in which he could frame an appropriate aesthetic and to the practice of Japanese poets to furnish a hard, concise illustration as to the handling of the conceit in a pithy, condensed form.

When he returned to London, Hulme vigorously publicized his views about poetry in the literary clubs and meetings. He became friendly with a number of poets, particularly Selwyn Image, Edward Storer, and the remnants of the Rhymers' Club. Early in 1908 he founded, together with Henry Simpson, the "Poets' Club" and became its first secretary. The rules of the club show that it was a club for poets, that it met monthly, not weekly, and that it met in St. James' Street and not in Soho. The club consisted of not more than fifty members with a committee of five. The club met once a month, July, August, and September excepted, at the United Arts Club (above Rumpelmayer's), 10, St. James' Street, S.W., where the members dined and after dinner read original verse compositions and papers on some subject connected with poetry which were then discussed by the members. Rule 7 of the club proposed that "The Club shall endeavour to promote the publication of the poems of such of its members as shall be deemed to possess exceptional merit." and it was in accordance with this rule that, somewhat belatedly, in January, 1909, in fact, there appeared a volume of poetry, printed under the Club's auspices, entitled For Christmas MDCCCCVIII. This was certainly something more than a pamphlet and contained poems by Selwyn Image, Lady Margaret Sackville, Henry Simpson, Mrs. Marion Cran, F. W. Tancred, and Dermot Freyer. Hulme contributed two poems, "A City Sunset" and "Autumn," both of which demonstrate the maturity to which he had brought his practice of Imagism.

Hulme's interest in the Poets' Club did not sustain itself very long and the members were soon complaining of his inefficiency. However, in spite of this, the Club had established itself as a center of fresh poetic activity and by February, 1909, it was at least prominent enough to be singled out for attack in the New Age, curiously by F. S. Flint;

I think of this club and its after dinner ratiocinations, its teaparties in suave South Audley Street; and then of Verlaine at the Hôtel de Ville, with his hat on the peg, as a proof of his presence, but he himself in a café hard by with other poets, conning feverishly and excitedly the mysteries of their craft—and I laugh.¹⁹

F. S. Flint's attack is really directed against the upper class, dilettante character of the Poets' Club. As secretary Hulme, replied to this attack on the Club's behalf.²⁰ He pointed out, reasonably no nec- enough, essary correlation between obscure cafés and good poetry, neither is there any reason to suppose that good poets must be addicted to Circean excesses and discoloured linen. Flint's nostalgia for the Bohemian life and French poetry gave Hulme his excuse for attacking him as a "belated Romantic," and thus demonstrating that at this early stage not only his Imagism but also his anti-Romanticism was fully developed. Hulme continued to regard the elegant meetings of the Poets' Club as essentially classical and civilized and the verses that the Club nourished as cultivated exercises in the new classicism which he was ushering in. This clash with Hint led very quickly to a firm friendship between them from which Hulme at least profited in a number of ways. The most important contribution which Flint made was to introduce Hulme to French Symbolist poetry. It was through Flint that Hulme was brought into contact with the contemporary French poetry and Hulme was quick to see how their example could help him and his fellow poets achieve mat hardness, clarity, and restraint that he had already made the keystone of his Imagism. Hulme ceased to act as secretary to the Poets' Club but never ceased to attend their meetings as an ordinary member. He gathered about him his own friends and admirers and although it was never formalized into a club this group met fairly regularly in the Eiffel Tower, a Soho restaurant. Hulme was very much the center of diese informal gatherings, the first of which is recorded as being held on 25th March, 1909. He dominated the discussions and argued endlessly and dogmatically about poetic tradition and poetic form and tirelessly impressed upon the meetings his idea of the new Imagism. Poems were read at the meetings and the points raised were passionately argued, but Hulme himself dictated the terms of the meetings and even insisted that only Imagistic poems were to be written by the members at all. The nucleus of this group, apart from Hulme himself and F. S. Flint, were Francis Tancred, Edward Storer, Florence Farr, and Joseph Campbell. Hulme's continued close association with the original Poets' Club is testified to by the fact mat he proposed both F. S. Flint and Ezra Pound to election as members and that at Christmas, 1909, he published two further poems in their volume, The Book of the Poets' Club. Bothi F. S. Flint and Ezra Pound also contributed to that volume.

Pound did not arrive upon London's literary scene until the late summer of 1908 and did not really become part of it until after the publication of Personae in April of the following year. As late as May, 1909, the bewildered and enthusiastic Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams lavishly recommending the London literary world and criticizing his own shortcomings as a poet:

I have sinned in nearly every possible way, even the ways I most condemn.… There is no town like London to make one feel the vanity of all art except the highest. To make one disbelieve in all but the most careful and conservative presentation of one's stuff.…

If you'll read Yeats and Browning and Francis Thompson and Swinburne and Rossetti you'll learn something about the progress of English poetry in the last century. And if you'll read Margaret Sackville, Rosamund Watson, Ernest Rhys, Jim G. Fairfax, you'll learn what the people of second rank can do, and what damn good work it is.²¹

This letter indicates the limitations of Pound's attitude towards English poetry before his meeting with Hulme. He was very quick to change his attitude and to adapt himself to the general tone of dissatisfaction with English poetry which prevailed at the Hulme gatherings. He soon lost this uncritical enthusiasm for English poetry as it then was and, taking Hulme's lead, he adopted with evangelical fervor, the cause of English poetry as it ought to be. Indeed, his enthusiasm for "the progress of English poetry in the last century" hardly outlasted the posting of this letter for on 22nd April, 1909, he was introduced into the Eiffel Tower gathering.

Pound's introduction to the group was characteristically dramatic. Dressed like the hero of Italian grand opera with his bright carroty beard waving, he read aloud his poem Sestina: Altaforte standing on a café table. He gave this dramatic monologue the full Browning Society treatment, roaring it out until the restaurant trembled and the waiters discreetly placed screens round the tables occupied by Hulme and his friends. Pound could hardly have been aware that this kind of behavior was calculated to arouse antagonism among a group of poets dedicated to restraint in poetry. Under the influence of Hulme and of the Eiffel Tower discussions, Pound soon abandoned the rhetorical and declamatory stylisms of his early poetry and began to experiment with epigrams and short lyrics and altogether to write in a more modest and retiring tone of voice. He also applied his enormous energy to the task of disseminating the ideas and views conceived and adopted by Hulme and his friends and, in the process, made them his own. Pound exercised his considerable talent for publicity on behalf of the group and very soon Hulme's theories of poetry were being distributed in London and America under the banner of Imagism. Pound both formalized and organized the Imagist movement; he issued the so-called Imagist Manifesto and recruited new poets, in particular H.D. and Richard Aldington, to its ranks. Hulme and his friends tolerated Pound because of his obvious poetic ability and perhaps more important, because of his immense goodheartedness, but they all felt that Pound had taken over Hulme's poetic theories without sufficiently acknowledging their source, as, indeed, they felt he had taken over F. S. Flint's views of French Symbolism without acknowledging his indebtedness. So far as poetry is concerned, there is no reason to suppose that the theory and practice of Imagism as directed by Pound and as exported to America is essentially any different from that conceived by Hulme and hammered out in argument and discussion over the tables of the Eiffel Tower or in the more select atmosphere of the Poets' Club. However much Pound says he owes to Ford or to Guido or to Fenellosa, he owes the ideas behind the Imagist movement to Hulme.

In an essay on his poetry, Richard Aldington pointed out that Pound's real gift as a poet was "the power of becoming absorbed in another personality long enough to produce from this stimulus one or several lyrics"²² and this chameleon-like gift also allowed him to take on other men's theories and attitudes and make them his own.

In January, 1912, Hulme published five of his short poems in the New Age, under the title "The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme,"²³ and these poems were reprinted as an appendix to Pound's volume of poetry Ripostes²⁴ with a short preface by Pound in which the word Imagisme is first officially associated with the new poetry. In 1913, Pound followed this up by publishing "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste" in Poetry (Chicago)²⁵ by which time he had joined several American poets in the movement, including H.D., J. G. Fletcher, and William Carlos Williams.

In December, 1912, Edward Marsh published the first volume of Georgian Poetry with immense success. He had invited Pound to contribute two of his poems, "The Goodly Fere" and "Portrait d'une Femme," to the Georgian anthology but Pound replied that he was just bringing the latter poems out in a volume of his own and could not let him have the "Portrait d'une Femme," and that "The Goodly Fere" did not illustrate any modern tendency in poetry.²⁶ By the time the second anthology was being collected, Marsh had decided to exclude American poets so that there was no question of including Pound. By that time, anyway, Pound and Marsh had quarrelled over the principles of the new system of quantitative verse and Marsh has recorded that "this planted in me a lasting suspicion of his artistic seriousness." In June, 1913, Marsh learnt from Wilfrid Gibson that "there's a movement for a 'Post-Georgian' anthology, of the Pound-Flint-Hulme school, who don't like being out of G. P. but I don't think it will come off."²⁷ Clearly, Marsh saw the Imagist antholgy as an answer to Georgian Poetry by those poets who had been left out by Marsh. Pound himself says he published the anthology in order to launch H.D. and Richard Aldington. Yet Aldington confesses that what he calls "Ezra's 'Imagism'" was "forced on H.D. and me against our wills" and that neither he nor Hilda Doolittle was fully aware that it was "simply advertising bull-dust."²⁸ He also confirms that Hulme did not take Pound, or his attempts to publicize Imagism as his own, at all seriously but, in fact, treated both as a joke. Whatever Pound's motive was, he edited Des Imagistes in 1914 and closed rather than opened an epoch in English poetry. In 1915 Pound was responsible for publishing the Catholic Anthology, which virtually introduced T. S. Eliot to English poetry and also introduced a new epoch in modern poetry.

Pound had no intention of turning Des Imagistes into an annual anthology on the lines of Georgian Poetry, but this was the intention of Amy Lowell, one of the contributors to Pound's volume. At first Pound welcomed Amy Lowell's plan although he made it clear that he would not contribute and also that he would rather she did not publish under the flag of Imagism;

I think your idea most excellent, only I think your annual anthology should be called Vers Libre or something of that sort. Obviously it will consist in great part of the work of people who have not taken the trouble to find out what I mean by "Imagisme." I should, as I have said, like to keep the term associated with a certain clarity and intensity.

A number of your contributors object to being labelled. Vers libre seems to be their one common bond. Also if you use such a title (or anything similar) there need be no bothersome explanation of my absence.…

If you want to drag in the word Imagisme you can use a sub-title "an anthology devoted to Imagisme, vers libre and modern movements in verse" or something of that sort.²⁹

Amy Lowell had just published a volume of poems entitled Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, the advertisement for which read:

Of the poets who today are doing the interesting and original work, there is no more striking and unique figure than Amy Lowell. The foremost member of the "Imagists"—a group of poets that includes William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Hueffer—she has won wide recognition for her writing in new and free forms of poetical expression.

Pound was naturally outraged at what he calls "arrant charlatanism" on the part of the publishers and he reports W. B. Yeats as "more amused than delighted"³⁰ at being numbered among the Imagists. Pound's relations with Amy Lowell cooled perceptibly after this and when the anthology appeared in 1916, it was called Some Imagist Poets. Clearly she had ignored Pound's plea not to call it Imagist, thinking that the success of Pound's original anthology was too good not to be followed up. In fact, Amy Lowell in the anthologies she published in 1915, 1916, and 1917 introduced only two poets whose work was not represented in the original anthology: J. G. Fletcher and D. H. Lawrence. Pound had already taken Fletcher under his wing and had already grouped his work with that of the Imagists. D. H. Lawrence, however, appeared regularly as a contributor to Georgian Poetry. Pound was right to object that he "never was an Imagist" and certainly his inclusion alone is enough to establish that Amy Lowell never really understood the "critical demarcation" which Pound had inherited from Hulme, had developed and modified into a program of poetic reform, and had assiduously worked to uphold for the six years between 1908 and 1914. Imagism is a pioneer movement in poetry that, more than anything else, opened up the ground on which modern poetry has been built; it is the movement that led poetry from the romantic decadence of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. The history of Imagism has yet properly to be written but a start cannot be made until the misconceptions surrounding it have been examined and swept away.

NOTES

¹The Background of Modern Poetry (London, 1951), chap. iii.

²Ibid.

³ B.B.C, talk printed in the Listener, April 1, 1954.

⁴ London, 1930.

⁵The Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. D. D. Paige (London, 1951), pp. 292-95.

⁶Ibid., p. 288.

⁷T. E. Hulme (London, 1938).

⁸ Pound to Roberts, 20th July 1937, The Letters of Ezra Pound, pp. 388-89. This transcription should be compared to the version printed by D. D. Paige.

⁹Townsman, II, no. 5 (January, 1939).

¹⁰ "The History of Imagism," Egoist, II, no. 5 (May 1, 1915).

¹¹Imagism and Imagists (Stanford, 1931).

¹²The Background of Modern Poetry, chap. iii.

¹³Egoist, II, no. 5 (May 1, 1915).

¹⁴ "A Lecture on Modern Poetry," T. E. Hulme, Appendix II.

¹⁵ Herbert Read, The True Voice of Feeling (London, 1953), p. 52.

¹⁶Speculations, ed. H. Read (London, 1924), p. 223.

¹⁷ H. Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (London, 1913), p. 14.

¹⁸Speculations, p. x.

¹⁹New Age, IV, February 11, 1909.

²⁰New Age, IV, February 18, 1909.

²¹The Letters of Ezra Pound, pp. 41-42.

²²Egoist, II, no. 5 (May 1, 1915).

²³New Age, X, January 23, 1912.

²⁴Ripostes (London, 1912).

²⁵Poetry (Chicago), March, 1913.

²⁶ Christopher Hassall, Edward Marsh (London, 1959), p. 193.

²⁷Ibid., p. 229.

²⁸ Letter dated April 30, 1954.

²⁹The Letters of Ezra Pound, pp. 78-79.

³⁰ Ibid., pp. 84-85.