Terry Whalen

[In the following essay, Whalen identifies Imagist qualities in the poetry of Philip Larkin.]

SOURCE: "Philip Larkin's Imagist Bias: His Poetry of Observation," in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer, 1981, pp. 29-46.

Larkin's use of traditional poetic forms and his openly expressed contempt for Modernism have gained for him a reputation as a relatively provincial poet. Many see his admiration for such minor poets as John Betjeman, for instance, as being in step with the narrow taste he exhibits in the selections which make up his edition of The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Verse (1973). Evaluating the technical cleverness of Modernist jazz musicians, Larkin has remarked that 'I dislike such things not because they are new, but because they are irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of life as we know it. This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetuated by Parker, Pound or Picasso: it helps us neither to enjoy nor endure'.¹ Modernist art is given to obscurity without profundity, is inclined to pretentiousness. In an interview with Ian Hamilton, Larkin has expressed his impatience this way:

What I do feel a bit rebellious about is that poetry seems to have got into the hands of a critical industry which is concerned with culture in the abstract, and this I do rather lay at the door of Eliot and Pound … I think a lot of this 'myth-kitty' business has grown out of that, because first of all you have to be terribly educated, you have to read everything to know these things, and secondly you've got somehow to work them in to show that you are working them in. But to me … the whole of classical and biblical mythology means very little, and I think that using them today not only fills poems full of dead spots but dodges the writer's duty to be original. (London Magazine, 4 (Nov. 1964), pp. 71-2)

On the basis of these kinds of reservations, it therefore makes sense that Larkin's critics have acquired the habit of discussing his poetry away from the Modernists and next to the work of such figures as Edward Thomas and Thomas Hardy, or discuss it in the context of the more close-up tradition of the Movement poets. But Larkin's poetry is not as alien to the work of the Modernists as first thoughts tend to assume.

An overlooked impulse in Larkin's poetry is its Imagist bias; Larkin is a poet of observation par excellence, and his own literary criticism is punctuated with comments which have an Imagist ring to them. It is arguable that his rejection of the Modernists is really no more than a healthy cynicism about their more pedantic and cryptic gestures, and that his own poetry and his views on poetry are in rhythm with an Imagist kind of wisdom. Robert Conquest once said that Movement poetry is 'empirical in its attitude to all that comes',² a statement which provokes one to notice that Larkin is essentially a poet of sensation and impression, a craftsman who enacts the levity of Wallace Stevens's claim that 'The greatest poverty is not to live / In the physical world'.³ Larkin is exceptionally alert to the surface suggestions of the immediate physical world, and he is also a poet of delicate epiphany. In this basically Imagist bias of his art we can recognize some of his finest poetic effects. Additionally, the anti-romantic nature of much Imagist theory is in almost exact consonance with his disposition as a poet of restraint.

Larkin's is a poetry of visual participation in the observable physical world. His speakers often beckon the reader into a beholding process. 'Look', says the speaker in 'Home is so sad', at 'the pictures and the cutlery. / The music in the piano stool. That vase'.⁴ This kind of invitation to witness is not simply an accident of form in Larkin's work, it is the result of an epistemological conviction that the truth—as Larkin sees it—is inseparable from an empirical alertness of mind ('When I see a couple of kids', begins the speaker in 'High windows'). In an important and central way, Larkin's speakers are like the people on the train in 'The Whitsun weddings'; they are 'loaded with the sum of all they saw'. What we, as readers, see is the product of the engagement of an empirical intelligence and a sensitive poetic personality with the physical fact of the world. We are involved in the process by proxy, join the perceptual journey in accordance with the degree of our own willingness to respond to the substance and the suggestiveness of the world as he presents it. The reader ventures little distance in the world of Larkin's poetry unless he participates in the speaker's empirical glance. Any concentrated experience of Larkin's poetry includes the visual process of looking, noticing, gazing, even staring at the world, as it is carefully recreated in its curious detail. The most trivial sorting of Larkin's lines in this regard gives evidence of at least his insistence on the importance of the process:

For the moment, wait,
Look down at the yard. Outside seems old
enough:
Red brick, lagged pipes, and someone walking by
it
Out to the car park, free.

('The building')

One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

('An Arundel tomb')

My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose—
('Lines on a young lady's photograph album')

The eye can hardly pick them out
From the cold shade they shelter in,
Till the wind distresses tail and mane

('At grass')

The eye sees you
Simplified by distance
Into an origin

('Solar')

Latest face, so effortless
Your great arrival at my eyes

('Latest face')

One shivers slightly, looking up there.

('Sad steps')

In what amounts to a habit of beholding visual sensitivity, Larkin aligns his art with an honoured tradition of empirically oriented poetry, one which reaches backward throughout most of the great poetry of the English speaking tradition. The centre of gravity in Larkin's poetry is the physical world as it suggestively manifests itself on the stage of his sensitive and personal imagination. The Imagists attempted to retrieve that empirical tradition in the early part of this century, and briefly to survey anew some of their comments in the context of Larkin's own reviews and his poetry is to recognise their legacy in the midst of his attitude to craft.

In an assembled shower of phrases from Larkin's critical work which follows, there is a kinship between Larkin's pencilling of empirical graces and the similarly pictorial bias of the Imagist theorists. In a recent comment on 'the poet' Larkin has stressed the need for the poet 'to recreate the familiar'.⁵ And particularly of Barnes, he has said that his 'view of nature is clear … and shining, full of exquisite pictorial natures'.⁶ His empirical bias is shown, in a negative context, in his comments on Auden's Homage to Clio (1960). In a review of that volume, he regretted the intrusion of a new 'abstract windiness' into Auden's style, censoriously noting mat Auden's poetry needed to find 'root again in the life surrounding him radier than in his reading'.⁷ He praises the fact that in Betjeman 'the eye leads me spirit'," and we can add to his lauding of mis talent his claim mat Betjeman holds a 'belief mat a poem's meaning should be communicated directly and not by symbol',⁹ and his notice of Betjeman's 'astonishing command of detail, bom visual and circumstantial'.¹⁰

Appropriately, one concludes the shower with Larkin's tribute in his treatment to Hardy's to 'often be extremely direct'¹¹ in his treatment of the physical world. In his recognition of Hardy's talent for 'a kind of telescoping of a couple of images',¹² he points to a quality of Hardy's craft which makes us realise—or perhaps simply to remember—that Hardy is a major figure in the maintenance of the imagistic base of English poetry. On such evidence we recognise in Larkin's concerns, and in his phrasing of them, a connection with the language of T. E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound. Phrases such as 'extremely direct', or 'exquisite pictorial natures', and the 'telescoping of a couple of images', are consonant with—if not in echo of—the terminology of the Imagist theorists.

If we go back to the Imagist theorists, we recall their desire to animate again the empirical basis of thought and art, and in that aim we can recognise many of Larkin's similar concerns. Thus, in a language which is in kinship with Larkin's own critical standards, there is Hulme's comment that: 'Poetry is not a counter language, but a visual concrete one. It is a compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily. It always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process'¹³ (my emphasis). For Hulme, this is not a mere matter of contriving a concrete metaphor in the work, but rather has to do with the empirical authenticity of the thought process which the poem em-bodies. The poem is conceived as a re-creation of the physical world as perceived in a moment of unusually alert attention to the meaning of its face. Hulme was therefore to say that 'Whenever you get an extraordinary interest in a thing, a great zest in its contemplation … you have justification for poetry' ('Romanticism and classicism", p. 102). And when he tried to create a critical litmus test for the authenticity of any given poem in this regard, he said that a quality of 'freshness' is visible, a freshness which is difficult to sham: 'Freshness convinces you, you feel at once that the artist was in an actual physical state. You feel that for a minute' {ibid., p. 103). It is a comment which is in step with Pound's directive that the poet must 'use his image because he sees or feels it, not because he thinks he can use it to back up some system of ethics or economics',¹⁴ a comment which somewhat ironically sounds like an early version of Larkin's scorn of 'myth-kitty'. Much of Larkin's poetry even centrally and exclusively contains a good deal of that 'zest' and that 'freshness' of which Hulme speaks. It is there, for instance, in the virtual tumble of detail from the physical world, which is at the living base of his poem, 'Show Saturday'. It is a poem which has a crowded life of its own, a Breughel-like grasp of the immediacy of life's plural detail:

In the main arena, more judges meet by a jeep;
The jumping's on next. Announcement,
splutteringly loud.

Clash with the quack of a man with pound notes
round his hat
And a lit-up board. There's more than just
animals:
Bead-stalls, balloon-men, a Bank; a beer-marquee
that
Half-screens a canvas Gents; a tent selling tweed,
And another, jackets. Folks sit about on bales
Like great straw dice. For each scene is linked by
spaces
Not given to anything much, where kids scrap,
freed,
While their owners stare different ways with
incurious faces.
The wrestling starts, late; a wide ring of people;
then cars;
Then trees; then pale sky. Two young men in
acrobats' tights
And embroidered trunks hug each other; rock over
the grass,
Stiff-legged, in a two-man scrum. One falls: they
shake hands.
Two more start, one gray-haired: he wins, though.
They're not so much fights

As long immobile strainings that end in unbalance
With one on his back, unharmed, while the other
stands
Smoothing his hair. But there are other talents—

The 'zest' continues in a celebratory rendering of a freshly animated imagery of objects, people, and their gestures. In its observation of the plural tumble of life it is reminiscent of what Randall Jarrell has termed the 'empirical gaiety'¹⁵ of William Carlos Williams's art. And it is an effect which Larkin also manages in 'The Whitsun weddings' and 'To the sea' and it is attributable to his empirical curiosity of mind and his kinship with the Imagists' view of the poem as the act of the mind in close contact with the physical world.

But it is neither the conviction of the Imagist theorists nor of Larkin that poetry is only the act of the empirical imagination in continual representation of the world's plenitude. The mistake of many of the Imagist poets was that they mistook simple selection of objects for actually saying something profound. The quality of freshness is there as part of Larkin's authenticating reality, but the expressive dimension of his poetry transforms the empirical glance into something much larger, more interesting and coherent. For Larkin, an impression of the world is at the stimulating base of the work, but there is also a process of thought regarding the impression which he also conveys. In this sense, he can be said to take the Imagist theorists more seriously than did many of the Imagist practitioners.

Larkin's Imagist impulse is visible in the process of empirical thought which is embodied in each of his works separately. Each poem evokes the world and ponders it without leaving it behind. It is for this reason that his symbolic effects are natural, and seem to rise inevitably from within the context of the poem's individual setting. This strategy of form is at work in the exploratory empiricism of 'Church going', 'The old fools', and 'High windows', for example. Interestingly, the symbolism which this kind of poetry embodies is that which Pound described as the 'perfect symbol'. Pound describes it: 'Symbols.—I believe that the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object, that if a man uses "symbols" he must so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk' ('A few don'ts', 1913; reprinted in Shapiro, p. 105). Larkin is a master of exactly this kind of effect, and it is one which he admires in the work of Hardy and Betjeman. The physical visage of the church in 'Church going', for instance, is empirically rendered as evidence of the speaker's thematic point about the decline of traditional belief. A survey of its details shows it to be a living index of the decline of all the values which it once more vigorously embodied. And in Larkin's evocation of the physical fact of the hospital in 'The building', the empirical imagination registers it as a naturally symbolic expression of the human desire to build it physically and spiritually into a substitute cathedral:

Higher than the handsomest hotel
The lucent comb shows up for miles, but see,
All round it close-ribbed streets rise and fall
Like a great sigh out of the last century.
The porters are scruffy; what keep drawing up
At the entrance are not taxis, and in the hall
As well as creepers hangs a frightening smell.

The circumstantial contemplation of the poem proceeds from here through another ten stanzas. As the speaker wanders through the hospital's sights, he gathers images of the fearful faces of the entering patients. The gestures of the patients accumulate into a powerful imaginative logic, one in which the stock natural symbolism of the hospital as substitute church is finally questioned. On the basis of the speaker's witness of the setting, he deduces that the proper metaphor for the hospital is that of a prison. 'O world', says the speaker in the sixth stanza, 'Your loves, your chances, are beyond the stretch / Of any hand from here!' And as the cumulative impression of the hospital reaches a cohering moment of integrity, he expresses the meaning of the building in a manner of saddened empirical discovery. The hospital is a natural symbol, not of healing, but of the undeniable existential fact of death. In keeping with its consistent use of natural symbolism, the speaker concludes his experiential journey through the physical details of the place, by saying of the patients that:

All know they are going to die.
Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end,
And somewhere like this. This is what it means,
This clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend
The thought of dying, for unless its powers
Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes
The coming dark, though crowds each evening try

With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers.

Thematically, the poem deals with the inadequacy of modern man's attempt to outbuild death with a new faith in medicine and technology. Ironically, the very attempt to defeat death is seen as an evasion of its presence. All of the appearance of control is an illusion. And yet the fix we are in is that religious illusions are seen as even less adequate. Up the street from the hospital is a 'locked church'. The natural symbolism of that fact is compelling evidence for the speaker's case. Hence, in a contemplation in which the physical world is intimately involved in the process of thought, the speaker accumulates the empirical evidence into a dismally accurate conclusion, given the circumstances. To use a phrase from 'Lines on a young lady's photograph album', what is 'In every sense empirically true' about the hospital is its visible testimony of our pathetic weakness in the face of the mortality which it tries to outbuild. The 'wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers' complete the foray into reality as an embodied epiphany, the discovery of a telling clue. The flowers, in their naturally symbolic effect, indicate the fragility of the human being, its sad beauty. They project a sadly ironic truth. For all their smallness, there is more meaning in their failure than in the illusion of the longevity which the 'clean-sliced cliff unsuccessfully projects.

It was Stevens who said that 'Much of the world of fact is the equivalent of the world of imagination',¹⁶ which is an empirical conviction that is at the centre of this poem, and it can also be said to underline a good deal of Larkin's poetry as a whole. None the less, the world of fact is uninteresting unless sifted and rearranged into meaning by the unifying intelligence of the poet. Additionally, the poet's colouring of the fact of the world by his poetic personality gives it a dimension which takes it still further past a mere suspension of objects.

Neither Larkin nor Stevens claims that the poem of reality, the poem of empirical fact, is an objectively verifiable medium of truth. Stevens has said that 'Poetry is an unofficial view of being' ('Imagination as value', p. 222), and Larkin, I think, would agree. But it is worth noticing that the poetry of this order does mimic the inductive method, can be said to be more directly experiential than more confidently mythic poetry. On the basis of that distinction, it is given to an openness to experience, an intelligence of the senses which more traditionally mythic poetry will tend to lack. Grounded in actual observation, each poem becomes—as Larkin once described it—its 'own sole freshly-created universe',¹⁷ and has an integrity in the recognisable world of experience.

The subjective dimension of the poem lies in the fact that it is precisely the personality of the poet which enables him to realise a meaning in what he sees. It is the emotional colouring of the personae which gives a uniqueness to the particular vision of the physical world. Thus, it is the familiar ironic persona of Larkin's 'Mr Bleaney' which colours the world which that poem embodies. The world perceived in the poem is one which that particular persona has an inclination to recognise. Paradoxically, the persona's limitation of perception is his very qualification for the uniqueness of his moment of vision.

Larkin finds the reality of the sub-heroic Mr Bleaney indexed in the physical details of his room. The prosaic quality of Bleaney's existence is captured in the speaker's beholding empirical consciousness. His eye collects impressions in a journey toward comprehension:

Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,

Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered. 'Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.'
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook

Behind the door, no room for books or bags—
'I'll take it.' So it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir…

The objects which are selected to compromise the contemplation have all the freshness and realistic presence which Hulme stated as necessary to the image. But the ordering of the images, the connecting of the spaces between them, is the cohering process which gives the poem its true brilliance. And the poem beckons us to participate in that process. There is a unifying quality in all of the central images, an essence which is recognised and abstracted. At the same time the process of thought is stated in the natural symbolism of the objects just as they are also collected into a perceptible whole. We notice the dearth of aesthetic demeanour in Bleaney's room, and how the 'Tussocky, littered' strip of building land shares with the equally tussocky curtains, light bulb, and minimally functional furniture, an unkempt, unfinished quality which physically represents Mr Bleaney's life. All of these images have an analogous form; they quite naturally represent the protean quality of Bleaney's life. Significantly, it is because the speaker detects a similarly tossed clumsiness in the sky that the somewhat glib persona can consent to an existential respect for Bleaney's unambitious and awkwardly low-keyed existence:

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread

That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don't know.

The 'frigid wind / Tousling the clouds', bears an analogous relation to the 'strip of land / Tussocky, littered'. Even the sounds are analogous to the similar visage of pictures. Because of this ragged quality which is noticed in all selected details of the scene, Bleaney's life is perceived as having a kind of sanction for its prosiness which is noticed as somehow written into the scheme of things. There are people like Bleaney, says the speaker, just as there are days and settings like the one here evoked. In the poet's foray into reality in this particular 'sole freshly-created universe', there is a realised recognition of this truth. And in terms of Imagist theory, the poem passes the test; there is the illusion that, in Hulme's words, 'the artist was in an actual physical state', and in the participating experience of reading the poem, 'You feel that for a minute'.

This physical orientation of thought and expression in Larkin's work is one of the major grounds on which we recognise a consonance of his craft—and of brilliance—with the Imagists. Both Hulme and Larkin seem to agree that, as Stevens aptly puts it, 'Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking'.¹⁸ Stevens also once said that 'The real is the only base. But it is the base' {Adagia, p. 160). The real is the stimulus, and is an integral part of the thinking process of the poem. And the poet's personality plays a central part in the colouring of the real, just as the real often challenges the colour of his view, altering its shade. The Imagist impulse in Larkin's work is always part of a larger interest in personal expression, usually of new personal discovery in the complex conversation of thinking and feeling which takes place between the poet and his world. We see this in the process of thought which 'Mr Bleaney' expresses. Further, Larkin quite typically completes the empirical journey with a qualifying agnostic gesture. The speaker finally says, 'I don't know', indicating that the epiphany of existential raggedness in the poem is not meant as a controlling perception in the world of his imagination. There is often a final scepticism in Larkin's poems. His speakers continually undercut themselves in gestures of doubt, express an urbane negative capability, an unwillingness to nail down their ponderings into dogmatic conclusions. Additionally, Larkin is a poet capable of adopting radically different postures and personae. He once said that 'What I should like to write is different kinds of poems that might be by different people',¹⁹ a comment which exists as caveat for a legion of critics who have tried to find a singularity of tone (usually a bleak one) in his work. Some of Larkin's personae are humorous and sarcastic ones, others are deeply sad, while still others are impressed by beauty, have an instinct for praise, and a sense of the mystical pro-found. And because of the temporary, circumstantial nature of his individual poems, no single poem can comfortably be said to represent his complete view; he resists conclusiveness with as much energy as many of his critics pursue it.

Larkin is a poet who writes from a versatile poetic personality, and, as in 'Mr Bleaney', the persona which he adopts is the one which he finds most appropriate to the setting which he confronts. And his settings are not always especially chosen to be dreary ones, just as the epiphany which rises from the setting does not always match the visage of the setting as we are at first led to view it. If, for instance, we turn to 'Dublinesque', the 'freshly-created universe' is, as me poet requires, 'freshly … created'. The speaker in me poem wears the familiar persona of poignant sadness, and also embodies Larkin's much overlooked instinct for praise. In its registration of a complex moment of epiphany, it reminds us of the subtlety of the Imagists' view in this regard. Its brilliant achievement characterises the Imagist requirement mat the poem represent a moment of highly suggestive illumination or epiphany out of the context of the immediate physical world:

Down stucco sidestreets,
Where light is pewter
And afternoon mist
Brings lights on in shops

Above race-guides and rosaries,
A funeral passes.

The hearse is ahead,
But after there follows
A troop of streetwalkers
In wide flowered hats,
Leg-of-mutton sleeves,
And ankle-length dresses.

There is an air of great friendliness,
As if they were honouring
One they were fond of;
Some caper a few steps,
Skirts held skilfully
(Someone claps time),

And of a great sadness also.
As they wend away
A voice is heard singing
Of Kitty, or Katy,
As if the name meant once
All love, all beauty.

Wallace Stevens has said that 'Poetry increases the feeling for reality' (Adagia, p. 162), and in this poem it takes the shape of a feeling for an entire culture. There is an essentially Imagist pictorial visibility to the scene, and the speaker's empirical imagination searches out, and realises the living reality of its physical world. The juxtaposition of the 'race-guides and rosaries' telescopes two contradictory images between which blossoms an empirically shrewd comment about the life and culture of Dublin. Larkin is here in effortless company with Joyce, giving us an immediate sense of the culture, its physical-spiritual reality. The poem as a whole embodies a moment of epiphany, one in which the ostensible contradictions in the scene are blended musically into an illumination. The illumination is based on a perception of a quality which pervades life in Dublin like the 'afternoon mist' which so evanescently suggests its surface. Hence, while the fact of the funeral initially appears in odd contradiction to the gaiety of the funeral party, a gaiety which is caught in the speaker's participation in the liveliness of its visage in the middle stanzas, the empirical intelligence accumulates the particulars of the scene into something more profound. At its centre is the recognition of a sadly beautiful quality in the life which is witnessed. As in "Home is so sad', there is a recognition of a spirited courage in the energy of the people, one which saves the speaker from a simply pathetic conclusion. The sound of the voice 'singing / Of Kitty, or Katy', rises from the scene as audibly appropriate to the imagery. In that sound, and in the sight of the physical world of the poem, it rises as a very Irish version of a Wordsworthian 'still, sad music of humanity', one which is as poignantly beautiful as it is also energetic. Larkin's respect for it shows in a rising tone of praise which turns the epiphany to song.

Stevens has said that 'Reality is the spirit's true center' (Adagia, p. 162) and we can add that the spirit is also the true centre of reality in Larkin's world. The close interplay, the conversation, between spirit and the physical world is the fulcrum on which the empirical poise of his poetry rests. His personae, each of which is governed by an astute empirical intelligence, show a willingness to move exploratively into the living detail of actually felt or imagined physical worlds. Larkin himself sees the act of recreating the experience from which the poem takes its inception to be an act of victory over time, and his statement on the matter sounds very like an essentially Imagist conviction about the work of art as the expression of life's rarest moments of realization, the poet's moments of epiphany. With the experience of 'Dublinesque' present as example, one recognises the more specifically that the following comment by Larkin has an Imagist ring to it:

I write poems to preserve things I have seen/ thought/felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others, though I feel that my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake. Why I should do this I have no idea, but I think the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.

(Poets of the 1950's, pp. 77-8)

Significantly, Larkin emphasises a close connection between seeing, thinking, and feeling. In his view, each poem recreates a real perception, moves it upward into the kind of transcendence from time which the work of art, in its qualified way, can assure. In his statement of his preservative instinct, Larkin echoes the Imagist notion, once expressed by Hulme, that 'Literature, like memory, selects only the vivid patches of life', and that in a sense 'Life is composed of exquisite moments and the rest is only shadows of them'.²⁰ Larkin's comment on his motivation to preserve not only underlines the accomplishment of 'Dublinesque', it brings to mind Pound's famous description of the 'Image' and his description of its epiphanic effect of managing a victory over time and place. When the writer successfully conveys the complexity of the experience which Larkin has termed a 'seen/thought/felt' one, he approximates the 'Image' which Pound had described as: 'that which represents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time … It is the presentation of such a "complex" instantaneously which gives the sense of a 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' ('A few don'ts', 1913; reprinted in Shapiro, 105). Both Pound and Larkin, in strikingly similar terminology, express a view of art which is concerned with the registration of a moment of perception in time that seems to transcend our more ordinary awareness of life. Of course, it is a classic definition of the artist that he is the one who sees/thinks/feels more than the people around him, and is able to articulate the complexity of his insights. The artist is the person who makes public his diary of perceptive moments. 'Dublinesque' and a whole series of Larkin's poems carefully enact the process involved in the selection of the 'vivid patches of life' which he has deemed worth trans-forming into public statement. 'Dublinesque' is the act of preservation of a thing which is 'seen/thought/felt'. In the empirical sharpness of its Imagist base, and the characteristic sensitivity of its triumph, it is the registration of a moment of deeply felt connection of the poet with his world.

Moments of epiphany are of central importance in Larkin's work. The complexity and delicacy of his art lies precisely in the carefully recreated difficulty of perception which these moments embody. In especially his longer poems, he registers transcending epiphanies which heighten inevitably as his speakers' observations accumulate into vision. The lengthy observations of the speaker in 'The Whitsun weddings', for instance, gather into a concluding statement of praise and celebration which transcends ordinary limits of awareness and moves to that 'lift off the ground' (to borrow Larkin's own locution for the effect)²¹ which we associate with the poetry of vision:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there
swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

The image travels safely past easy analysis. The effect is a vorticistic one in that it recalls Pound's claim that the 'VOR TEX' is a 'radiant node or cluster' of imagery, a complex 'from which and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing' ('Vorticism', p. 469). Larkin's strategy of imagery captures all of the beauty, pathos, hope, anxiety, and deep sense of community which the 'frail/Travelling coincidence' finally represents for the speaker. The vorticistic design of the imagery moves triumphantly past mere idea and arrives at the rich suggestivity of Imagist art.

In other poems, Larkin uses the suggestive dimension of images to further his more religious speculations. He quite often knocks at those doors of eternity which, at the same time, he tends to think lead nowhere. As the speaker in 'The old fools' contemplates a calmness in the old people, he momently cheers himself with the thought that their minds have distilled images from experience which linger in a deeply intimating way:

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can't quite name; each
looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors
turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair,
extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes
only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun's
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where
they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.

Each image is both slight and very suggestive at the same time; each one embodies mat hint of meaning which Stevens once claimed is the miracle of logic or 'pheasant disappearing in the brush' (Adagia, p. 173) that characterises poetry at its most expressive. Larkin refuses to build the suggestions into a mythic conviction. There is the potential here for a Platonic view of being, or one which entertains notions about a collective consciousness, but characteristically, the speaker in the poem concludes his long contemplation about age and death with the agnostic conclusion that 'Well, / We shall find out'. Gestures toward the eternal are always held back by Larkin's tentative cast of mind. As a poet living in a post-Christian world, he has, like the speaker in 'Church going', a 'hunger in himself to be more serious', but that hunger is disappointed by the conviction that established religion is presently no more than, as he named it in 'Aubade', a 'vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die'. None the less, many of Larkin's poems move toward an imaginative dimension of transcendence in a highly personal and uniquely cautious way. He is a very sceptical poet, but his scepticism does not completely erase a more romantic impulse in his poetry, a thirst for a mystical dimension to existence which is visible in his religious poems.

Interestingly, Hulme's views on the work of classical art as being religiously inconclusive now read, in retrospect, as centrally appropriate to Larkin's kind of tentativeness in such matters. In Hulme's seminal definition of the 'classic motion' he made a statement which can both sanction and focus Larkin's kind of restraint; it defines a kind of control which is restrained without being simply inhibited:

What I mean by classical in verse, then, is this. That even in the most imaginative flights there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets his finiteness, his limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas.

You might say if you wished that the whole of the romantic attitude seems to crystallise in verse round metaphors of flight. Hugo is always flying, flying over abysses, flying up into the eternal gases. The word infinite in every other line.

In the classical attitude you never seem to swing right along to the infinite nothing. If you say an extravagant thing which does exceed the limits inside which you know man to be fastened, yet there is always conveyed in some way at the end of an impression of yourself standing outside it, and not quite believing it, or consciously putting it forward as a flourish. You never go blindly into an atmosphere more than the truth, an atmosphere too rarefied for man to breathe for long. You are always faithful to the conception of a limit.

('Romanticism and classicism', Shapiro, p. 103—my emphasis)

Hulme's definition unwittingly provides us with a predated description of Larkin's carefully measured moments of epiphany in some of his more mystical poems. Larkin's tendency is to record the moment of flight and at the same time to hold back from the 'swing right along to the infinite nothing'. Thus, the speaker at the end of 'Church going' for instance, remembers that he is 'mixed up with earth' even though he is also gesturing toward an eternal land of the mind. His classical (or new classical) attitude holds him back from the conclusiveness of faith:

For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much can never be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

We have moved successfully into a rarefied 'atmosphere', but are returned to 'the conception of a limit'. Significantly, the ironic turning back leaves us seriously facing the graveyard, a perspective which underlines the need to be 'serious' just as it also prevents us from 'flying away into circumambient gas'. The flight is romantic, but romantic in the order of the difficult realism which Hulme is speaking of.

In the concluding epiphany of 'High windows', there is the same reining in of the flight, the same recognition of the power of the 'atmosphere', and the same corresponding recognition that it is 'too rarefied for man to breathe for long':

Rather than words comes the thought of high
windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

The speaker is both given to a flight into an epiphany of wonder, and into an epiphany of void. The precarious poise of the moment, its designed ambiguity, is as delicate as anything which is conceivable in art. The image is crafted carefully to embody a gracefulness of vorticistic motion. There is the suggestiveness of Pound's 'VORTEX' at work in the dramatic quality of the moment, and there is also the recognition of limit which Hulme has defined as the hallmark of the 'classic of motion'. A sense of the boundless mystery of the universe is momently captured as an instance of beautification suggested by the high windows, but there is also the recognition of the vacancy of the sky and its counter-suggestion of void. The wonder is definitely there but it is passing and it is also diminished by ambiguity. It is not, in other words, as confidently and mythically based as Shelley's otherwise very similar sense of wonder in these famous analogous lines:

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows
fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

(Adonais, LII)

Larkin's kind of wonder is more contemporary, it is not underpinned by a Platonic mythic conviction. Hulme had said that 'Wonder can only be an attitude of man passing from one stage to another, it can never be a permanently fixed thing' (Rom. & Ci, p. 104). Wonder was once encouraged by myths which became stale, and that is why 'A romantic movement must have an end of the very nature of the thing' ('Romanticism and classicism', pp. 103-4). While many twentieth-century poets have attempted to revitalise the myths, others have settled for a passing wonder which is suggested by the physical world in those moments of rare perception which are poetry of another order. In the context, one thinks of the Imagist practitioners, the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and even of D. H. Lawrence, a poet whose influence on Larkin has yet to be noticed as a profound one. Larkin writes in this tradition of incidental wonder, and it has caused a great deal of confusion (and annoyance) in his more myth-hungry critics. But the poet must write from his own lights, so it is pointless to lecture him on his perspective, especially given mat its shade can shift so radically from poem to poem.

Larkin's moments of epiphany are varied; he turns up epiphanies of both light and of void. In particularly negative poems such as 'Ambulances', 'Absences', and 'Aubade' (to make only a short list), the epiphanies are of bleakness; these are representative poems which discover an emptiness just beneath the surface of existence. They are poems which seem to have had more effect on Larkin's critics than is called for, given that he has so many other poems which turn up epiphanies of light. In short, there is even a kind of balance in Larkin's view, a balance which comes from the basically dualistic view of existence that accumulates in the evidence of all of his poetry to date. He is a poet who—in a metaphorical sense only—knows a great deal about heaven and a great deal about hell. So it is very ironic, I think, that the consistently more hellish wasteland and Confessional poetry of the century is not recognised for the all but terminal despair which it embodies, and that Larkin's work is not perceived as an unillusioned and yet relatively hopeful alternative to that tradition. Again ironic is the fact that Larkin has been handed a reputation for being an extremely bleak writer who suffers from a kind of existential ill will, an inability to get on with sharing a few wholesale illusions with the rest of humanity. But he has gone as far as his honesty and his imagination will allow him, and it is a distance which is further man is commonly assumed. Its extent is gestured at in 'Water', where his speaker says mat if he 'were called in / To construct a religion', he would,

… raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

There is an approximate religious experience, an agnostic wonder, which is suggested to the receptive empirical imagination as it sparkles out of the fact of the physical world. It will not very readily atone one to the reality of human failure, suffering, and death, but it beckons the imagination in a hopeful way. It is elusive and it does not suggest a myth. None the less, it is evidence of a hope, and evidence that the metaphor of the wasteland is a very abstract metaphor indeed—so abstract that it overlooks the persistence of beautification even in the midst of decay. Subjectivism, that bane of the modern intellectual which turns toward insanity in most of its manifestations, is unaware of this truth at its peril. That Larkin is a poet who continues to resist its fashionable call is a measure of his vitality and originality as a poet. That he could absorb the healthier aspects of Modernism in the form of an Imagist bias, without being absorbed by Modernism's more cryptic and solipsistic gestures, is a feat which has too long gone unnoticed.

It is unfortunate, I think, that the nature of the Modernist revolution has not yet been fully seen for the mixed, even contradictory, movement that it was. While it is usual to mark off its identity in the subjectively allusive and sometimes bookish poetry of Eliot and Pound, the more empirical poetry of the Imagists stands, in a sense, in opposition to that very aspect of their achievement. Interestingly, Thom Gunn, speaking of the relationship between the contemporary poet and the Modernists, has said:

The only assumption shared by the poets who have emerged in the last ten or fifteen years is that they do not want to continue the revolution inaugurated by Pound and finally made respectable by learned commentaries on the Four Quartets. Yet nobody has pretended that, once the revolution was abandoned, it was possible simply to take up where Hardy left off, as if the experiments of Pound and Eliot had never taken place. Clearly we must, without embodying the revolution, attempt to benefit from it, to understand its causes and study its mistakes. ('Modes of control', Yale Review, 80 (1964), p. 447)

Gunn claims that contemporary poets have much to learn from the Imagist aspect of the revolution, and he admires the Imagists' ability for 'exact delineation of the external world' (p. 449), noting that in the poetry of observation there is often the discovery of a momentary spiritual health which transcends confinement in the self. And to highlight a phrase from one of Gunn's own poems, this attention to 'the world's bare surface'²² is an especially emphatic one in his most recent volumes. Ted Hughes and R. S. Thomas are also poets who are remarkable in their empirical bias, their desire to connect freshly with the mystery of the physical world. All three of these poets are radically different from Larkin (on several grounds), but they nonetheless would appear to share with Larkin a rudimentary conviction that 'The greatest poverty / Is not to live in the physical world'. Interestingly, Gunn, Hughes, Larkin, and Thomas are all poets of crisp observation and epiphany, and they are also poets of doubt and wonder at the same time. Their works constitute one of the most vital emerging traditions of English poetry today, and a good deal of its poetic is a neoImagist one.

NOTES

¹All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961-68 (London, 1970), p. 17.

²New Lines, (1956 rpt. New York 1967), p. xv.

³ 'Esthetique Du Mal', in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York, 1957), p. 325.

⁴ With the exception of 'Aubade', which appeared in TLS (23 Dec. 1977, p. 1491), all quotes from Larkin's poetry are from the following editions: The Less Deceived (1955; rpt. London, 1966); The Whitsun Weddings (1964; rpt. London, 1968); High Windows (London, 1974).

⁵ 'Subsidies and side effects', 7X5 (18 Feb. 1977), p. 183.

⁶ 'The poetry of William Barnes', Listener (16 Aug. 1962), p. 257.

⁷ 'What's become of Wystan?', Spectator (15 July 1960), p. 104.

⁸ Introduction to John Betjeman: Collected Poems (London, 1971), p. xxiii.

⁹ 'Betjeman en bloc', Listen, 3 (spring 1959), p. 15.

¹⁰ 'The blending of Betjeman', Spectator (2 Dec. 1960), p. 913.

¹¹ 'Philip Larkin praises the poetry of Thomas Hardy', Listener (25 July 1968), p. 111.

¹²Ibid., p. 111.

¹³ 'Romanticism and classicism', 1924; rpt. in Prose Keys to Modern poetry, ed. Karl Shapiro (New York, 1961), p. 101.

¹⁴ 'Vorticism', Fortnighty Review, 96, (1914), p. 464.

¹⁵ 'An introduction to the selected poems of William Carlos Williams', 1948; rpt. in Poetry and The Age (New York, 1955), p. 217.

¹⁶ 'Imagination as value', 1949; rpt. in The Modern Tradition, ed. Richard Ellman and Charles Feidelson Jr. (New York, 1965), p. 223.

¹⁷ Quoted by John Press in A Map of Modern English Verse (London, 1969), p. 258. His source: Poets of the 1950's, ed. D. J. Enright (Tokyo, 1955), pp. 77-8.

¹⁸ 'Adagia', in Opus Posthumous, ed. and Introd. by Samuel French Morse (New York, 1966), p. 158.

¹⁹ 'Not like Larkin' (transcription from BBC Radio 3), Listener, 88 (1972), p. 209.

²⁰ 'Notes on language and style', 1925; rpt. in Further Speculations, ed. Sam Hynes (Minneapolis, 1955), p. 99.

²¹ Thwaite tells us that Larkin once said to him that in the reading of 'The Whitsun weddings', as the voice comes to the close, it should 'lift off the ground'. See 'The poetry of Philip Larkin' in The Survival of Poetry, ed. Martin Dodsworth (London, 1970), p. 48.

²² 'A snow vision', in Poems 1950-1966: A Selection (London, 1969), p. 43.

Linda W. Wagner

[In the following essay, Wagner discusses the influence of Ezra Pound's Imagist aesthetics on the early works of Ernest Hemingway, in particular his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926).]

SOURCE: "The Sun Also Rises: One Debt to Imagism," in The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 2, No. 2, May, 1972, pp. 88-98.

Ernest Hemingway's appreciation for Ezra Pound is widely known—his constant praise for Pound during a life marred by broken friendships and bitter words; his 1956 check for $1000, sent to Pound seemingly in lieu of the Nobel Prize medal. Yet Hemingway's fiction is rarely read as having benefited from his intense relationship with the older writer in the early 1920's. We know the legends of the young Hemingway in Paris, apprentice to Stein, Joyce, and Pound, but we have never known what happened to Hemingway's early work. John Peale Bishop remembers, however, that the early manuscripts went to Pound and "came back to him blue penciled, most of the adjectives gone. The comments were unsparing."¹ Whereas Stein's influence was mainly general, it would seem that Pound's dicta were substantiated with practical suggestions.

By the early 1920's, Pound had enriched his earlier Imagist and Vorticist theories with precepts directed toward prose. From 1916 to 1918 he had read all of Henry James' writing, in the process of editing the James issue of The Little Review; and his long friendship with Ford Madox Ford was finally bearing conscious fruit. So mat by the time of his meeting with Hemingway, Pound was deeply interested in prose; in fact, in 1923, he helped William Bird bring out the six books of "new prose" that were to reform prose in the same way Imagism had revitalized poetry a decade before. Among those six books were Williams' The Great American Novel, Pound's Indiscretions, and Hemingway's first book, 3 Stories & 10 Poems.

Pound's excitement over Hemingway's writing (judging it the best prose he had read in forty years) probably allowed the presence of those ten poems in a series dedicated to prose. By 1922, Hemingway had written more poems than stories,² poems easily marked as Imagist. Among others, "Along with Youth" and "Oklahoma" illustrate well the chary use of words, the reliance on free verse, and the emphasis on the observable detail of an "Image."

During the years following 1913, when the essays about Imagism first appeared, the trademark of that poetic movement was concentration. One of the primary aims was "To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation,"³ a directive aimed at eliminating from poetry its weak phrases and lines of filler. "Use either no ornament or good ornament," Pound warned; "Don't be descriptive.… Go in fear of abstractions." Such axioms demanded that the poet employ his craft consciously, a word at a time, and that he give his impression the sharp focus of the image.

Pound also defined the image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." By stressing the wide inclusive powers of the image, he greatly strengthened the Imagist concept; and his emphasis on speed gave new life to the post-Victorian poem that was nearly buried in expected details. As he continued, "It is the presentation of such a 'complex' instantaneously which gives the sense of sudden liberation … that sense of sudden growth which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art"—epiphany, if you will.

The Imagists usually worked in free verse forms because they could thus more easily attain organic form, a shape consistent with the mood and subject of the poem being written. Concentration, speed, and the use of the writer's own conversational language—these were the chief means the Imagists chose to present those objects or experiences which would convey the "white light" of full meaning. Concentration, speed, and the use of the writer's own conversational language—these are certainly trademarks of the famous Hemingway style.

Influence studies are impractical unless intrinsic evidence exists in quantity. The montage effect of the highly compressed stories and vignettes of Hemingway's 1924 In Our Time is the young writer's most obvious tribute to Imagism itself, and has been noted by several critics. But perhaps the most sustained example of the Imagist method transferred to prose is that maligned novel, The Sun Also Rises, 1926. In using the methods of suggestion, compression, and speed within the outlines of traditional novel form, Hemingway achieved a lyric evocation of one segment of life in the 1920's.

Perhaps we should remember that Hemingway was disap-pointed throughout his life because SAR was the novel most often misread; it was the "naturalistic" Hemingway, or at any rate, the "realistic" novel. As he recalled much later, "I sometimes think my style is suggestive rather than direct. The reader must often use his imagination or lose the most subtle part of my thought."⁴

The Sun Also Rises is not, of course, a picture of the "lost generation." Hemingway's poetic method of telling the reader that has caused some confusion. His epigraphs to the book and his final title (the book was called Fiesta in its European publication) prove that to him Stein's comment is indeed only "splendid bombast."⁵ He uses Stein's comment as the first epigraph for the novel, but the second—the quotation from Ecclesiastes—follows it, as if in contradiction:

One generation passetti away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever.… The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose.… All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

By choosing an affirmative phrase as title, Hemingway further reinforces his view, that these characters are not "lost," but merely "beat up." More important, they still have the strength to act against worn out social forms and find truth for themselves. Jake does, when he gives Brett to Romero in order to make her happy; and Brett does when she sends Romero away. But, because society's arbitrary evaluations of these acts would be unsympathetic, Hemingway has to create the organic whole of the novel so that the acts in themselves convey the proper nobility. It is a difficult task, bucking conventional morality; but Hemingway made it even more difficult by using techniques that could easily be called "poetic," at least in relation to Pound's terminology.

One of the most troublesome of Hemingway's techniques was the strict first person narration. Jake Barnes, with his self-effacing terseness, gives the readers of SAR only skeletons of action and characterization. We know very little about Bill and Mike, for example, though everything Hemingway tells us about Bill is positive. But in Mike's scenes, interpreting his remarks is sometimes hard. The same kind of ambivalence surrounds both Brett and Jake. Obviously they are the protagonists, but some of the circumstances surrounding them could stand a more sympathetic explanation—or at least a fuller one—than Jake with his assumed stoicism can realistically give them. Hemingway tried rewriting this novel in third person, so that his 1926 audience would have help with the somewhat unconventional characters, but he evidently liked that effect less well. So he returned to the strictly "objective" presentation of Jake's telling his own story, as it occurred, rather than in a past tense, which would at least have allowed for more reflection. This turning loose a character on an audience, reminiscent as it was of Pirandello, was also a manifestation of Pound's principle, "Direct treatment of the 'thing' concerned," with little ostensible interference from the author. How different Jake Barnes' version of his story was from Carrie Meeber's account of hers.

When Pound directed writers to "Use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation," he was implying a sharp selection of detail. Because Hemingway's selection of detail was so accurate, even skeletal presentations are usually convincing. Brett's bowed head as Mike and Robert argue shows well her tired submission to the present situation, just as Jake's drinking too much after Brett leaves with Romero tells us clearly his emotional state. The repetition of mealtime and drinking scenes in the novel is particularly good for showing the slight but telling changes in a few recurring details. It is of course these changes in the existing relationships that are the real center of the novel, rather than any linear plot.

Following the sometimes minute vacillations in a friendship, or the subtle shadings in a conversation, admittedly demands close attention from the reader. As T.S. Eliot was to point out, reading the modern novel requires concentration as intense as reading poetry—as well as training in that kind of skill. "A prose that is altogether alive demands something that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give."⁶

Hemingway also used a somewhat oblique characterization of his protagonists. Jake and Brett are not always present. Jake as narrator usually speaks about others rather than himself, and when he does think about his own dilemma, it is again in the laconic phrases that leave much to the reader's own empathy. Even though Hemingway introduces Jake in the opening chapter, his focus seemingly falls on Robert Cohn. He tells us innocently enough that Cohn was a college boxing champ, although "he cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it." Then Hemingway begins to accumulate related details: later we see that Romero loves his bullfighting, just as Bill and Jake love fishing. We must then be suspicious of a man who devotes himself to something he dislikes. Subsequent chapters continue the parallel descriptions of Jake and Cohn, and less apparently of Frances Clyne with Brett. It is a stroke of genius that Hemingway waits until we have clearly seen what Jake and Brett are not to present them for what they are—sad but honest people—together, in a would-be love scene.

The Sun Also Rises is also filled with passages that could easily be considered images if they were isolated from their context. An image to Pound was to be more than just a pictorial representation: "an image presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." The brief moment when Brett enters the cafö in the company of homosexuals combines a good set of graphic details with the evocation of Jake's sad excitement and anger as he sees her:

A crowd of young men, some in jerseys and some in their shirt-sleeves, got out. I could see their hands and newly washed, wavy hair in the light from the door. The policeman standing by the door looked at me and smiled. They came in. As they went in, under the light I saw white hands, wavy hair, white faces, grimacing, gesturing, talking. With them was Brett. She looked very lovely and she was very much with them.

One of them saw Georgette and said: "I do declare. There is an actual harlot. I'm going to dance with her, Lett. You watch me."

The tall dark one, called Lett, said: "Don't you be rash."

The wavy blond one answered: "Don't you worry, dear." And with them was Brett.⁷

The policeman's smile, the grimacing, the dancing—Hemingway often worked through actions to reveal character and specific mood. But the touchstone here, as often throughout the book, is Jake's own mood, his astonished sadness, caught in the simple refrain line, "And with them was Brett."

Not only does Hemingway use concentrated descriptive passages, he also moves quickly from one passage to another, sometimes without logical transition. This use of juxtaposition to achieve speed in impressions is another poetic technique, enabling a short piece of writing to encompass many disparate meanings. Near the end of the novel, when the reader's attention should be on Brett and Romero as lovers, or on Jake as sacrificial figure, Hemingway instead moves to the account of a young man killed in the morning bull run. "A big horn wound. All for fun. Just for fun," says the surly bartender, picking up one of the repeated key words in the book—-fun, luck, values. The bartender's emphasis on the unreasoning fun ends with Hemingway's objective report of the younger man's death, his funeral, and the subsequent death of the bull.

The coffin was loaded into the baggage-car of the train, and the widow and the two children rode, sitting, all three together, in an open third-class railway-carriage. The train started with a jerk, and then ran smoothly, going down grade around the edge of the plateau and out into the fields of grain that blew in the wind on the plain on the way to Tafalla.

The bull who killed Vicente Girones was named Bocanegra, was Number 118 of the bull-breeding establishment of Sanchez Taberno, and was killed by Pedro Romero as the third bull of that same afternoon. His ear was cut by popular acclamation and given to Pedro Romero, who, in turn, gave it to Brett, who wrapped it in a handkerchief belonging to myself, and left both ear and handkerchief, along with a number of Muratti cigarette-stubs, shoved far back in the drawer of the bed-table that stood beside her bed in the Hotel Montoya, in Pamplona (198-99).

Hemingway follows this already wide-reaching image with the suggestion of Cohn's "death" as Brett leaves with Romero. This brief descriptive sequence, then, has established the deaths of man, bull, man—all at the whim of the fiesta and its larger-than-life hero, the matador.⁸

Another device used frequently in the book is Hemingway's re-creation of natural idiom—in both dialogue and introspective passages—and perhaps more importantly his use of prose rhythms appropriate to the effect of the writing desired. Although the Imagist axiom, "Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not that of the metronome," was more liberating to poetry than it was to prose, it also spoke for a kind of freedom in prose—sentences unrestricted in tone, diction, or length because of formal English standards. In passages like this opening to Part III, Hemingway arranges sentences of varying lengths and compositions to create the tone he wants (here, a melancholic nostaligia), a tone which may be at odds with the ostensible facts of such a passage.

In the morning it was all over. The fiesta was finished. I woke about nine o'clock, had a bath, dressed, and went down-stairs. The square was empty and there were no people on the streets. A few children were picking up rocket-sticks in the square. The cafös were just opening and the waiters were carrying out the comfortable white wicker chairs and arranging them around the marble-topped tables in the shade of the arcade. They were sweeping the streets and sprinkling them with a hose.

I sat in one of the wicker chairs and leaned back comfortably. The waiter was in no hurry to come. The white-paper announcements of the unloading of the bulls and the big schedules of special trains were still up on the pillars of the arcade. A waiter wearing a blue apron came out with a bucket of water and a cloth, and commenced to tear down the notices, pulling the paper off in strips and washing and rubbing away the paper that stuck to the stone. The fiesta was over (277).

In these two paragraphs Hemingway moves from an emphasis on Jake's feelings and actions to the specific details of his locale, using those details to complete his sketch of Jake—alone, and now numbly realizing only that "it was all over." To open the second section with more description of Jake helps the reader keep his focus on the protagonist. The observable details are significant to the story (here and usually throughout the novel) primarily because they help identify an emotional state. Even the movement within this passage, building from the short rhythms of the opening to the longer phrases of the penultimate sentence, and coming back to the restrained "refrain," suggests a crescendo in feeling.

"The fiesta was over," repeated as it is in varying contexts, is an example of Pound's organ base, which term he described as "a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear" and acts to establish mood.⁹ That Hemingway was cognizant of the effects single repeated words or phrases might have is evident not only in his fictional techniques but in his comments about this repetition. Lillian Ross, for one, quotes his saying, "In the first paragraph of Farewell, I used the word and consciously over and over the way Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach used a note in music when he was emitting counterpoint."¹⁰ It seems unlikely that Hemingway would have missed Pound's later enthusiasms about the "prose tradition in verse." As Pound explained,

Good writing is writing that is perfectly controlled, the writer says just what he means. He says it with complete clarity and simplicity. He uses the smallest number of words.… Also there are various kinds of clarity. There is the clarity of the request: Send me four pounds of ten-penny nails. And there is the syntactical simplicity of the request: Buy me the kind of Rembrandt I like. This last is an utter cryptogram. It presupposes a more complex and intimate understanding of the speaker than most of us ever acquire of anyone. It has as many meanings, almost, as there are persons who might speak it.…

It is the almost constant labour of the prose artist to translate this latter kind of clarity into the former; to say "Send me the kind of Rembrandt I like" in the terms of "Send me four pounds of ten-penny nails."¹¹

Hemingway's emphasis on clarity and seemingly simple diction certainly reflects these kinds of distinctions.

The passage describing the fiesta also provides a good example of Hemingway's failure to use overt symbols (a failure which troubled many critics enough that they began inventing parallels between bulls, steers, and men). In repeating "The fiesta was over," Hemingway suggests broader implications for "fiesta"—a natural expectation of gaiety and freedom, here ironically doomed because of the circumstances of the characters. Through the description, we easily feel Jake's nostalgia, but not because fiesta is a true symbol; it never assumes any existence other than its apparent one. As Pound, again, had phrased the definition, "the natural object is always the adequate symbol.… if a man use 'symbols' he must use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude."¹² In one sense, in The Sun Also Rises, the amount of liquor a person drinks is symbolic—of both the kind of person he is, and the emotional condition he is in. So too is anger, and various stages of it. But the purely literary symbol—which the unsuccessful fireworks exhibition might suggest—is rare. Even the fireworks sequence is used more to show various characters' reaction to the failure than it is to represent another object or state of being per se. That Brett does not want to watch the failure is as significant for her character as the fact that she enjoys the artistry of the bullfights.

A corollary to the principle about symbolism is Pound's warning that the writer "Go in fear of abstractions." Love, hate, grief, religion, death, fear—these are the prime movers of the novel, yet the words scarcely appear. SAR is essentially a study of various kinds of love, yet no character ever discusses that passion. We are forewarned of Hemingway's definition to come in Death in the Afternoon, that "obscenity" is "unsoundness in abstract conversation or, indeed, any other metaphysical tendency in speech" (95). As Floyd Watkins has capably pointed out, Hemingway characters are nearly always to be mistrusted when they speak in abstract terms, whereas Hemingway heroes identify themselves by their preference for the concrete.¹³

Perhaps more than being a study of kinds of love, SAR is the paradigm of Jake's initiation into the fullest kind of that emotion. Jake's self-abnegation is not martyrdom; he knows he can not benefit from Brett's affair with Romero. But his education throughout the book consists in learning just how much his love—and hers—can bear.

In Part I, it is Jake who wishes they could marry. By Part III he has learned that any fulfillment of their relationship is impossible. There is no question that he still loves Brett, perhaps even more in her new-found and convincing nobility.¹⁴

The novel in its three-part division is also the story of Brett's coming to maturity. Although in Part I she considers herself one with the Count and Jake, the men share satisfactions she does not understand. By the end of the novel she has lost the coy femininity that makes her somewhat cloying. She has thought of someone else—Romero—and she continues thinking, of Mike and—always—of Jake. Stanley Edgar Hyman suggests, "The key action of the book is Brett's renunciation of Romero for the boy's own good, the first truly unselfish act of her life."¹⁵ It could well be that her separation from the church is suggested throughout the novel to help build toward the ending, with her turn to Jake. Brett has no suprahuman comforts; she must call Jake, and the reader must see her telegram to him, as he does, as completely natural.

In his first novel, Hemingway appears to have drawn a little on a Hamlet-like situation. The many male characters act as either complements or foils to Jake, and the inevitable comparisons serve to keep Jake before us at all times, whether he is or not. By making him physically less than a competitor, however, Hemingway allows Jake as person rather than as male to occupy the center of these relationships, even the peripheral ones with Krum and Woolsey, the Britisher Harris, and the Basques. All of these masculine ties help to substantiate Jake's real if injured manliness (see Hemingway's Paris Review comments), and add pathos to his love affair with Brett. Jake's wound is his ironic gift from life, and he has no choice but to live with it—gracefully. Never again will Hemingway create such a sensational wound for a protagonist, even in the more obviously war-oriented novels, but it does serve a powerfully dramatic function in keeping the otherwise normal Jake out of the normal rivalry for Brett's affections.

Yet, for all his anguish, what does Jake say? Hemingway's choice of idiom for his hero could well have been auto-biographical, but it also bears the trace of Pound's ideal character, who speaks in his own unliterary voice, speaks in cryptic suggestion, and speaks with truth. "I've got a rotten headache," when he can no longer bear seeing Brett; "I wanted to get home." The leave-taking scene with Brett after the dialogue with Count Mippipopolous has Jake vacillating between "Don't be sentimental" and then, after a kiss, "You don't have to go." But after Brett does go, Hemingway gives us some brief introspection so that we understand the depth of Jake's feelings. When he comes to the more important good-byes at the end of Part I, as Brett is going to San Sebastian, Hemingway relies on our earlier knowledge, and gives us Jake as an objective sketch: "The door opened and I went upstairs and went to bed." We can presumably re-create the rest for ourselves.

Hemingway relies on Jake's silence or near-silence frequently, not only in the love scenes. Jake says only "Wasn't the town nice at night?" trying to reach Cohn through his own foggy bombast. (Jake's method here is Imagist also, bringing Cohn back to one specific experience, one night, one town; and having Cohn react like the most literal-minded of men.) Instead of dialectics, Hemingway here gives us suggestion.

Even Jake's wound is given in a simple declarative sentence, the poignancy of its terseness aided by the opening modifier: "Undressing, I looked at myself in the mirror of the big armoire beside the bed." The only adjective in the sentence describes a piece of furniture; the situation itself needs no description. Hemingway is, graphically, and in mirror image, "presenting," as Pound had edicted. The mention of bed also adds pathos to the brief line. The concentration on the furniture offers a moment of deflection also, before Hemingway brings us back to more understatement:

Undressing, I looked at myself in the mirror of the big armoire beside the bed. That was a typically French way to furnish a room. Practical, too, I suppose. Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny (30).

The climactic act of the novel, for Jake, his giving Brett to Romero, is another model of suggestive gesture instead of speech: "He looked at me. It was a final look to ask if it were understood. It was understood all right."

The chief danger in reading Hemingway is, I think, to over-look this rather apparent origin of many of his stylistic traits. Simplicity has too often become simple-mindedness, just as Williams' "No ideas but in things" has become "No ideas." For instance, a recent essay by Ihab Hassan equates Hemingway's style with the character of Jake Barnes. I agree with Hassan's summary of Hemingway's remarkable tightness in writing, "Its rigor, terseness, and repetitions, its intractable concreteness and vast omissions, resist rhetoric, resist even statement, and discourage the mind from habitual closure." We cannot read Hemingway with any sense of complacence because we are thrown too much on our own, and the old patterns of expectation do not work. But Hassan goes on to move from seeing style, somehow separated, to seeing style as the only possible means of re-creating any Hemingway hero, any Hemingway theme, because he finds Hemingway very close to a contemporary "blankness and rage.… Indeed, Hemingway's fiction makes for itself a place in the tradition of silence that extends from Sade, through Kafka, Genet, and Beckett, to the inverted literary imagination of our day."¹⁶ He continues,

the ethic of Hemingway's characters is not only reductive but also solitary. What they endure, they can never share with others. Existentially, they remain alone; they find momentary communion only in a dangerous ritual. Always they disengage themselves from the complexities of human relations, and simplify their social existence to the primary functions of the body. "The only thing that could spoil a day was people … " Hemingway writes. "People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself'(91).

While Hassan's thesis in the complete essay is almost convincing, I am bothered by his tendency to overstate—just as Hemingway's use of always in the above excerpt is quickly disproved, so can Hassan's be a few lines before. There is a tone of pride here that is misleading; an attitude of "my-knowledge-is-so-dreadful-that-I-cannot-communicate-it." Perhaps the Hemingway protagonist is "alone" in that he is usually limited to a few confidants rather than a menage. But he does have intimates—Bill Gorton, the Count, Montoya, in a sense Romero, and in another sense, Brett. In fact, Jake seems much less isolated than the miserable Cohn, who has literally no one to talk with. And yes, the kind of idiom Hemingway uses is terse and cryptic, but primarily because the emotions are too big to handle in abstract words, not because no emotions exist, or because there is no desire to communicate. The Sun Also Rises gives evidence, in its various set scenes, of a great deal of communication. Jake understands perfectly what he must do for Brett, and Brett knows how little she has to say to reach him (in contrast to Frances Clyne who takes an entire chapter to do what Brett can do in three lines). "Let's not talk," Brett tells him. 'Talking's all bilge" (25).

The tacit understanding that exists here is better evidence of the author's interest in love, it seems to me, than of his obsession with death. The too-facile equation between death and silence need not shadow every cryptic idiom in American literature. Neither is the prevalent mood in this novel one of terror, as Mr. Hassan later states. (Terror of what? In Jake's eyes, the worst has already happened.) It seems to be rather one of sorrow, of sorrow growing from the unfulfilled love of Jake and Brett which acts in turn as a graphic image for the loves of me many other characters—men with men as well as men with women—which come so seldom to fruition. For those few relationships that had the warmth of the sun in his title, Hemingway was only too grateful. In fact, most of his fiction stands in tribute to just such slight moments.

In his eagerness to present radier than to tell (to render radier than report), Hemingway erred only in following the Imagist doctrines perhaps too closely. The Sun Also Rises is a difficult book to read correctly, until the reader understands the way it works; then it becomes a masterpiece of concentration, with every detail conveying multiple impressions, and every speech creating both single character and complex interrelationships. It also takes us back to Pound's 1923 description of the best modern prose, which should "tell the truth about moeurs contemporaines without fake, melodrama, conventional ending."¹⁷ There is nothing fake about anything in The Sun Also Rises, least of all the writing. And to read it as a masterpiece of suggestion makes one compliment Mark Schorer for his statement that Hemingway had in his career written "the very finest prose of our time. And most of it is poetry."¹⁸

NOTES

¹ Quoted by George Wickes in Americans in Paris (Garden City, New York, 1969), 162.

² Throughout his life, Hemingway considered himself a poet, and occasionally talked of bringing out a collection of poems.

³ "Imagism" and "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste," Poetry, I, No. 6 (March 1913), 199-201.

⁴ "The Great Writer's Last Reflections on Himself, His Craft, Love, and Life," Playboy, X, No. 1 (January 1963), 120ff.

⁵ Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story (New York, 1969), 179.

⁶ Introduction to Nightwood, The Selected Works of Djuna Barnes (New York, 1962), 228.

⁷The Sun Also Rises (New York, 1954), 20. Later page references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text.

⁸ As Hemingway's columns on bullfighting substantiate, the lure of the matador is irresistible, for both sexes. See pp. 90-108, By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, ed. William White (New York, 1967).

⁹Poetry, 205.

¹⁰ Lillian Ross, "Ernest Hemingway," The New Yorker (May 13, 1950), 60.

¹¹ "The Serious Artist," Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (Norfolk, Conn., 1935), 50.

¹²Poetry, 205.

¹³ See The Flesh and the Word (Nashville, Tenn., 1971).

¹⁴ Hemingway's interest in Brett as character—much like his later fascination with Pilar—seems genuine. As he wrote in a 1956 column (By-Line, 461): "I have always considered that it was easy to be a man compared to being a woman who lives by as rigid standards as men live by. No one of us lives by as rigid standards nor has a good ethics as we planned but an attempt is made."

¹⁵ Stanley Edgar Hyman, Standards: A Chronical of Books for Our Time (New York, 1966), 31.

¹⁶ Ihab Hassan, "Hemingway: Valor Against the Void" in The Dismemberment of Orpheus (New York, 1971), 80 ff.

¹⁷ Pound, Pavannes and Divagations (Norfolk, Conn., 1958), 50-51.

¹⁸ "With Grace Under Pressure," New Republic, 127 (October 6, 1952), 19.

Ethan Lewis

[In the following essay, Lewis interprets Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" utilizing Imagist poetic theory.]

SOURCE: "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Imagism," in South Dakota Review, Vol. 30, No. 4, Winter, 1992, pp. 66-86.

"Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this."[1] Despite, or perhaps on account of this critique, Wallace Stevens wrote a work that rivals any for its imagism. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (PM, 20-22) was written in the year Amy Lowell published her third (and final) installment of Some Imagist Poets. "Ways" is itself another, better imagist anthology—better, but also different. Like most of the poems in Lowell' s collection, each "Way" treats things of no ostensible importance. In the process, however, each is a study of a mode—a "Way"—of perceiving, which for Stevens, is "the Thing Itself," while the objects perceived are but "Ideas about the Thing" (PM, 387).

This shift in focus differentiates Stevens not only from the Imagist school, but from Ezra Pound as well. Much of this essay is cast as an implicit dialogue between Stevens and Pound, the major innovator, arguably the founder of imagist poetry. Pound and Stevens of course transcended the narrow limits of this form. Indeed, to call "Ways" and some other Stevens works "Imagist" requires that we look at him in Pound's terms. I must stress from the outset that this approach is, simply, an approach. Its utility lies in what it reveals. As Marjorie Perloff points out, Stevens critics tend not to explore his structures, but rather his ideas.[2] A "Poundian/Imagist" approach to Stevens works because his structures are so rich. Further-more, the use of Pound's critical vocabulary enables us to look at Stevens' own criticism in a more technical light. My aim is less to read Stevens as Pound might (and never did); but to add another dimension to Stevens' gloss upon himself, which in Harold Bloom's words, "is more advanced as interpretation than our criticism as yet has gotten to be."[3] With this in mind, let us look at the "Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" as thirteen imagist poems.

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

Pound described "The 'one image poem'" as "a form of superposition, … it is one idea set on top of another." Such juxtapositions were intended to convey "the precise instant when a tiling outward and objective transforms itself … into a thing inward and subjective."¹⁴¹ "Way I" is a different type of image, joining two "ideas" by description rather than super-position. "Among" and "only" suggest that the "twenty snowy mountains" and the "eye of the blackbird" compose a single natural scene. We might well impose one image on another in thought, as it is almost physically impossible to behold twenty mountains and a blackbird's eye in one sighting, and we are not invited to visualize them sequentially. Still, one is not definitely forced into this cognitive response, because the syntactic structure of the poem implies that the images may be understood to follow upon each other, viz.: We scan our eyes across a snowy, mountainous landscape. Suddenly, our gaze falls upon a blackbird, as still as his surroundings except for his twitching eye.

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

Here, the thing seen is literally in the mind's eye—or rather there is no thing seen, only a thing considered (the fact that "I was of three minds"), to which an impression ("a tree in which there are three blackbirds") is appended via simile. Moreover, this impression, Pound might protest, "is used as an ornament" (GB, 88), i.e. as something that lends grace or beauty, but is accessory to the thing itself. For Stevens, however, this accessory nature might be an attraction. As an ornament, the simile is analogous to 'being of three minds.' II is therefore a poem in which "The thing stated has been accompanied by a restatement and the restatement has illustrated and given definition to the thing stated.… the fundamental books of the human spirit are vast collections of such analogies and it is the analogies that have helped to make these books what they are" (NA, 129). Stevens, in other words, revels in analogy, where Pound tries to efface it—either by replacing "like" or "as" with a colon (as in the famous "In a Station of the Metro"); or by using a figure "there with purpose … to interpret a definite meaning"[5]—a figure so essential to the presentation as to be no less a thing than that for which it is an analogue. For Pound, there is, ideally, no "restatement;" only "interpret [ation]," which by definition differs from what it interprets.

Another way to look at II in Pound's terms is as a super-position of perceptual modes—one type of idea (reflection [here specifically, reflection on reflection]) set upon another type (vision).

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

(Cf.: The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.)

I and "In a Station of the Metro" are two different forms of "one image poem." III also differs from Pound's image, though perceived one way, III shares "Metro"'s principle of construction. I, as was mentioned, forms a single natural image. The single image in Pound's work comes from the "super-position [of] one idea set on top of another" (GB, 89). III arguably presents a single image in the first line and a commentary on this image in the second. But III then also "sets one idea on top of another": an idea in the form of a vision atop an idea in the form of a comment. Is III an instance of "super-position"? Cognitively, yes; visually, no—unless for "pantomime" one substitutes a picture of what one imagines a pantomime to look like (e.g. Marcel Marceau in performance). Even then, there might not be super-position if the blackbird's role as a "part of the pantomime" were considered. (One might then imagine a single impression: Marceau and hovering blackbird together on an outdoor stage in October).

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

IV and V do not present images of any particular things seen at all. This fact of course does not preclude their being imagist poems, by either Pound's standards or what are apparently Stevens' (which, Stevens never having written a treatise on the image, must be inferred from his other writings). According to Pound, an image needn't be seen, only felt. An image is defined not by its appearance, but by the fact that, as poetic expression, it is irreducible. "The image is the poet's pigment."

The painter should use his color because he sees it or feels it. I don't much care whether he is representative or non-representative. He should depend, of course, on the creative, not upon the mimetic or representational part in his work. It is the same in writing poems, the author must use his image because he sees it or feels it, not because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed or some system of ethics or economics. (GB, 86)

The fourth of the "Thirteen Ways" is an abstraction—and there is nothing Stevens appears to have felt more intensely. "The imagination is the only genius. It is intrepid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction" (NA, 139; emphasis added). It is worth considering this highly unusual facet of Stevens' intellect in relation to Pound and Williams, whose poetics are explicitly opposed to abstraction. Pound concurs with Ernest Fenollosa, in linking poetry with science and abstraction with pedantic "philosophical discussion." Williams is even more directly antithetical to Stevens than is Pound in this regard, for Williams sets imagination against abstraction. "[T]he thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses … It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity."¹⁶¹ The image for Williams and Pound is concrete and particular—it is never the abstract "man," "woman" and "blackbird" who together form a more abstract "one." It is "the apparition of these faces in the crowd;" a "red wheelbarrow beside the white chickens on which so much depends."

One hesitates to push this point too far—"so much depends" is a somewhat abstract expression; so are "a," rather than the "red wheelbarrow" and "the" instead of a particular crowd. Then again, Williams and Pound might counter that such descriptions were superfluous to the idea being presented and would actually detract from the specificity of the images. Stevens, on the other hand, might defend such vagueness as intrinsic to the image and perhaps even support this defense by citing Pound, viz.: the image, being irreducible, must mark the extreme of the poet's achievement. The image must therefore be abstract. Yet whether the abstract or concrete is least reducible is itself matter for "philosophical discussion." It is the old Many vs. One, Aristotelian vs. Platonic confrontation: do we derive the idea from particulars, or are particulars emanations of one idea? The answer depends on the way one looks at things, and since for Stevens, "Things seen are things as seen" (OP, 162), his "primary pigment" is abstract.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Way V is chiefly an auditory image. It is comparable to what Robert Frost called an "image to the ear,"[7] the effect of which emerges from how the poem is spoken. But one might protest that V is merely about images to the ear—"The beauty of inflections," "the beauty of innuendoes," "The blackbird whistling," the sound or silence "just after" the blackbird whistles—that it does not present these things despite its sonorousness. Yet what constitutes "an image to the ear," Robert Kern observes in his essay on "Frost and Modernism," is not the sound per se, but the manipulation of tone. Such an image allows a reader to "encounter, through his speech, the inwardness of a person, rather than just objects in the world, no matter how emotionally evocative.… The effect is not the imagist avoidance of 'rhetoric,' the virtual displacement of linguistic conventions by sharply observed concrete particulars (or what Hulme refers to as the bodily handing-over of sensations), but a conscious indulgence in rhetoric, understood as the careful fashioning (or capturing and preserving) of speech-sounds."[8] Kern's words apply to Frost' s "A Patch of Old Snow," but are readily transferable to "Way V" and other Stevens' poems, such as "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," "To a High-Toned Old Christian Woman," or "The Emperor of Ice Cream," in which "a conscious indulgence in rhetoric" is so important. Stevens actually says of rhetoric that "mere is nothing more congenial … to the imagination" (NA, 145). And indeed, in these poems, rhetoric seems as generative of the speaker as it is indicative of him:

"Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,
O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon,
There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,
Like the clashed edges of two words that kill."
And so I mocked her in magnificent measure.
Or was it that I mocked myself alone?
(PM, 39)

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VI resists super-position in several ways. In a manner similar to I, lines 1-4 comprise a single image: a window covered by icicles behind which the shadow of a black-bird crosses "to and fro." Unlike I, we needn't even superimpose in thought one image (11. 1-2, or 3-4) upon another (11. 3-4, or 1-2) because they may both be readily encompassed in one view. As a gloss on 1-4, lines 5-7 seem to invite the possibility that two different kinds of ideas may be superimposed (as was the case in II, and possibly in III): an objective presentation of an image (1-4) set upon a subjective reinterpretation of a portion of that image (5-7). But this possibility is negated upon closer inspection of line 2: "barbaric glass" serves notice that the imagination works subjectively upon the image from the moment of visual contact with the thing seen.

Must such images necessarily be given emotional or causal motives appended to their surface forms? Stevens implies that they must in order for poetry to be a truly (and perhaps true) imaginative act:

The bare image and the image as a symbol are the contrast: the image without meaning and the image as meaning. When the image is used to suggest something else, it is secondary. Poetry as an imaginative thing consists of more than lies [sic] on the surface.… Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this. (OP, 161, 168)

For Stevens, then, a work of the first intensity cannot be the "bare" presentation of a form. Pound essentially agrees:

By the "image" I mean … an equation; not an equation of mathematics, not something about a, b, and c, having something to do with form, but about sea, cliffs, night, having something to do with mood. (GB, 92).

Where Stevens and Pound differ is in their notions of what the image is about. The Pound image primarily concerns sea, cliffs, and night (or "faces" and "petals," or whatever the poem apparently presents)." [I]f a man use 'symbols,'" Pound writes elsewhere, "he must so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude" (LE, 9). Stevens' case is quite different. VI, for instance, might be described as 'an equation about mood having something to do with icicles, shadow, and blackbird.'

Compared with Ways I-V, one could see how unsatisfactory VI would be had it ended on line 4, "barbaric glass" not-withstanding. By themselves, lines 1-4 come as close to comprising a "bare image" as Stevens would allow. (Cf. "The Snow Man" in which even "the nothing that is" is subjected to imaginative appraisal, such that "junipers [are] shagged with ice" and "spruces [are] rough in the distant glitter" [PM, 54]). The preceding poems all chiefly concern "Ways of Looking" (or Thinking) rather than the object of sight (or thought). Each implies a mind-set: the search for movement ("Among twenty snowy mountains, / The only moving thing…"); being "of three minds;" musing on life's "pantomime," on unity, on "which to prefer, … " VI joins this list with the addition of lines 5-7:

The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

By themselves, these lines would compose an image in the Stevensian sense, for we need not know what the shadow is of. If as Pound insisted, an image "direct[ly] treat[] the 'thing'" (GB, 83; LE, 3), the thing "directly treated" by the Stevens image is the manner of thought.

Hence, Stevens' images are often symbolic in the sense that their meaning is extrinsic to what they ostensibly depict. Since meaning inheres in the perception of the image, the image itself must generally be "secondary." The exceptions would be passages like this from VI, or from Stevens' longer meditative poems like "Description without Place":

There might be, too, a change immenser than
A poet's metaphors in which being would

Come true, a point in the fire of the music where
Dazzle yields to a clarity and we observe,

And observing is completing and we are content,

(PM, 272)

Yet pure images of thought like this are difficult to attain, harder still to sustain for any duration. Even here, the image-content is expressed metaphorically, as "a point in the fire of the music." Often in his meditative verses, Stevens attaches the concept of perception to a thing perceived. The same poem begins:

It is possible that to seem—it is to be, As the sun
is something
seeming and it is.

The sun is an example. What it seems It is, and in
such seeming
all things are.

Thus things are like a seeming of the sun Or like a
seeming of
the moon or night…

(PM, 270)

But though one's focus is directed to the concrete "sun," the "sun" itself is not the thing 'treated directly,' rather it is a symbol for the concept of 'seeming as being.' Only "the image as a symbol" is for Stevens, "the image as meaning."

VII

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

These poems may be jointly explored as more explicit statements of Stevens' dictum mentioned in relation to VI: i.e. that the image must also be a symbol, "Poetry as an imaginative thing consist [ing] of more than lies upon the surface" (OP, 161). In VII and VIII, the blackbird is 'looked at' as the symbolic embodiment of the intrinsic relation between reality and the imagination. As is put so eloquently in "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," for Stevens, "the nature of poetry … is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals" (NA, 27). An imaginative construct that does not adhere to reality is impossible to believe in; on its part, the imagination brought in contact with reality through the poetic medium "enhances the sense of reality, heightens it, intensifies it," "gives to everything it touches … a[n] inherent nobility" (NA, 77, 33). The speaker in VII implores a mystical society, presumably of poets (the "thin men of Haddam" are "imagine [rs]" or perhaps "imag [eineers]"), to think not of "golden birds" unconnected to their Haddamite environs, but of "the blackbird / Walk[ing] around the feet / Of the women about you." That the verbs "imagine" and "see" are opposed in this context, and that "imagine" refers to "golden birds" and "see" to the blackbird, actually supports this reading. One can "imagine" anything so long as the components of the thing-imagined (here "gold" and "birds") are of the material world. (Stevens wrote, "the imagination creates nothing. We are able to romanticize and to give blue jays fifteen toes, but if there was no such thing as a bird we could not create it" [LWS, 465]). One can, then, imagine something one has never seen and in which one cannot believe. Things seen, however, are also things imagined, for "Things seen are things as seen" (OP, 162); and what is visible and imagined forms the basis of belief:

There is, in fact, a world of poetry indistinguishable from the world in which we live, or, I ought to say, no doubt, from the world in which we shall come to live, since what makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it. (NA, 31)

It is therefore beyond question that "the blackbird is involved / In what I know." What may be questioned is whether VII and VIII constitute images, even in the Stevensian sense, which as we have seen includes (in fact prefers) abstract images of thought. I suppose that within this definition, VII and VIII are included. Yet they seem less vivid than the other Ways, less examples of "direct presentation" than rhetorical statements. The thoughts are not expressed with the precision of IV, the other exclusively cognitive image in the collection. Perhaps it is just that, that VII and VIII do not direct us to see (i.e. see or feel) much at all. They read like short (free) verse essays. If they do not contradict Stevens' sanction of rhetoric as "congenial to the imagination," they yet reinforce Pound's insistence that the image be at "the farthest remove from rhetoric" (GB, 83). What saves VIII for me is its music, specifically the onamatopoeia of lines 1-2, which are what they describe: "Nobl [y] accented" with rhythms "loose" though "inescapable." Like V, VIII is mainly an image for the ear. VII, though instructive, is in my view the weakest of the Ways.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

Way IX is as impressive as Way VII is weak. I have chosen that term to convey what is most striking about IX: the form the image impresses upon the reader's mind. If "the form of sphere above sphere" in the Paradiso comprises part of "the most wonderful image," as Pound claims (GB, 86), IX replicates that "part" in little. "Marked" and "edge" refine the form of "many circles;" so too does the reference to the blackbird's departure. With the bird "out of sight" what remains in the image is solely a form—hence, a form heightened, enhanced. The importance of form in imagism is therefore dramatized by this absence. In theory, the imagist poet seeks to capture the form of something more so than the thing itself; that is, "direct treatment of the thing" means delineation of its form. Pound lauded vorticism for having made him "see form[s].… new chords, new keys of design," like "the appearance of the sky where it juts down between houses," or "the great 'V's' of light that dart through the chinks over the curtain rings" (GB, 126). T.E. Hulme, similarly, wrote that modern poetry "attempts to fix an impression," and his biographer describes Hulme's own poetic efforts in terms of "bend[ing] his language to the exact curve of his thought.""¹ For Stevens, it is in form where the real and imaginary coincide. "Art, broadly, is the form of life, or the sound or color of life. Considered as form (in the abstract) it is often indistinguishable from life itself (OP, 158)

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

Like V and VI, X is a complex image of multiple super-positions: black upon ("in") green, euphony upon cacophony ("cry … sharply"), vision ("the sight of black-birds / Flying in a green light") upon sound (the bawds of euphony / Would cry out sharply").

Stevens is the most colorful of Imagists. Although Pound, Williams, and Hulme include colors in some images, they do not treat colors as images. Mention of "a red wheel / barrow // beside the white / chickens," of "the figure 5 / in gold / on a red / firetruck," or of "Petals on a wet, black bow," "Pale carnage beneath bright mist," or "the ruddy moon … like a red-faced farmer" do not invite the reader to abstract the color from the object of which it is a part, thus to think of the color as a "thing" treated.¹¹⁰¹

The line from "April" illustrates particularly well the difficulty of abstracting color from the colored object in Pound. The colors are too integrated with their objects to be "solid"—i.e. white, gray, or gray-green (olive boughs are being described); they are instead "pale" and "bright." Notice too that were these colors solid, they would be achromatic, capable of setting a mood (of thus being essential to the image), but less able in themselves to project memorable colorforms. (The same can be said of "black" in "Metro," "white" in "The Jewel Stairs' Grievance," and "grey" in "Gentildonna"). The colors in the Williams and Hulme images here cited stand out more than Pound's colors, but are clearly subordinate to other forms.

"Black" is of course subordinate to "blackbird" in Stevens' "Ways," yet it is possible to abstract "black" from "bird" because the object that blackness is superimposed upon is, first and foremost, a color. "Green" turns "green light" into a perceptible form. Thus, the super-position of objects is fundamentally a super-position of colors—there is no "wheelbarrow," "chickens," "moon" or "farmer" to share what is here, literally limelight.^[11]

In "Disillusionment of Ten O' Clock" (PM, 11), color may be said to inhere in the poem itself:

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.

The colors (note their vibrancy, hence their potential to stand as images by themselves) do not belong to the night-gowns ("None are green, … "). Deprived of an object (indeed, objectively nonexistent), the colors subsist solely in the poem, a thing not to be seen so much as read. What we are meant to see are colors. Like a poem or natural light, weather is invisible unless there is something in it—like rain, or "red." And so, at the end of "Disillusionment" ("Only, here and there, an old sailor,… Catches tigers / In red weather"), we see red.^[12]

Stevens' most effective color-image is "Sea-Surface Full of Clouds" (PM, 89-92). Unlike "Disillusionment," this poem does not simply invite us to see colors divorced from objects; nor to abstract a color-pattern, as does "Way X"; but rather, to take color as a primary component of both reality and imagination—as an instance of "fact as we want it to be" (PM, 206). But along with stating Stevens' thesis on the interdependence of real and imagined, it is also an extended commentary on Pound's dictum that an imagist poem tries "to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself into a thing inward and subjective" (GB, 89). The consistent structure of the work (five six tercet sections, with each line corresponding to those lines in parallel position in the other four sections) mimes the frame of mind in which the speaker holds one seascape at five separate moments. As in Pound's and Williams' poems, colors and objects are inseparably joined in images; and yet like Stevens' other color-studies, colors as images are also foregrounded. This double-vision emerges partially from a tension between our knowledge of what the poem represents, and the syntactic representation of color as an object in itself:

… Paradisal green
Gave suavity to the perplexed machine

Of ocean, which like limpid water lay.

(I. 5-7)

The reference to "Paradisal green," we know from the context, is to the color of the ocean. And yet, "green" is the subject of the sentence in which "ocean" appears merely as the possessive modifier for a metaphor.

Syntactic structures at the close of sections I, III-V create a similar impression.

… And sometimes the sea
poured brilliant iris on the glistening blue.

(I. 17-18)

The shrouding shadows,…

Deluged the ocean with a sapphire blue.

(III. 14, 18)

… —But more suddenly the heaven rolled

Its bluest sea-clouds in the thinking green,

(IV. 15-16)

… Then the sea
And heaven rolled as one and from the two
Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue.

(V. 16-18)

Color in these lines becomes the object of the verb, or prepositional phrase. Though the color subsists in the ocean and in the reflection of the clouds upon the ocean, mention of "glistening blue," "sapphire blue," "thinking green," "freshest blue," and (most striking, I think) "brilliant iris"—each without a referent, and preceded each time by an adjective referring to the color, evokes a double-vision of a colorful scene, and of the color itself.

The repeated effect of the color allusions at corresponding loci in each section, also accounts for this double-vision. "[I]t is not too extravagant to think of … the repetitions of resemblances as a source of the ideal," Stevens wrote (NA, 81); and here indeed repetitions-of the shade of green at line five, of the variant of blue within the last four lines-create ideals (understood Platonically in this context as ideas) in the reader's consciousness. Because the resemblances repeated are primarily of color ("Paradisal green," "sham-like green," "uncertain green," "too-fluent green," "motley green;" "glistening blue," "blue heaven," "sapphire blue," "bluest sea-clouds," "freshest blue"), ideals of "green" and "blue" are engendered along with ideals of green and blue 'things' (sea, sky, clouds).

XI

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook the shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

This is a very abstract image—though we are asked to perceive events, an ostensibly easier task than the perception of concepts that Ways II and IV required. The protagonist of this image-drama "rode over Connecticut / In a glass coach" (first event). He then "mistook / The shadow of his equipage / For blackbirds." Yet the inci-dents in XI are in fact more difficult to see than are the earlier conceptual forms. To the experience of being "of three minds" in II was attached the concrete symbol of "a tree / In which there are three blackbirds." To the abstract notion of "one"ness in IV were appended three abstractions, which despite their generality, are readily conceptualized. "Man," "woman," and "blackbird" are each specific enough to have their own form—contrast "human," "bird," or "Connecticut." What does it mean to "ride over Connecticut," or, while we are on this subject, to "place a jar in Tennessee"? Neither state is very large, though each is diverse enough to foster uncertainty. In "Anecdote of a Jar" (PM, 46), we are at least informed that the jar is in the Tennessee wilderness—but to "r[i]de over Connecticut" might refer to a Hartford street, a path in Old Saybrook, the interstate, or some other course. It may even allude to all of the above—because "He rode" (i.e. was riding) no one time is necessarily referred to.

With this opening, Stevens achieves "that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits" which, according to Pound, is an effect produced by the image (LE, 4). But rather than doing so by Pound's means of "super-position"—"which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time"—he relies on a technique more consistent with his own tenets. He engages imaginatively with the reality of space and time (the state of Connecticut at plausibly more than one time) to create an image free from spatial and temporal exactitude. The super-position that follows is likewise mediated by Stevensian propensities:

Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

That "Once" threatens to inject the moment described into a particular historical moment. Yet if the prologue works as intended, the reader is sufficiently removed from time so that that "Once" merely delineates an "instant" in which me image occurs. Moreover, as we have seen, Stevens is less intent on capturing what he perceives than he is on recording the "Way" that he perceives—whether this be expressed in the study of a working mind (II, VI), a comment on the perceived (I, III, X), an abstract concept (TV), a personal reflection (V, VIH), or a rhetorical statement (VII).

Thus, where Pound might make an image of this instant by compressing details to produce "that sense of freedom from time and space"—

The shadow of his equipage:
Blackbirds.

—Stevens presents another image at a further remove, or rather, at two removes. For his image is not of "the shadow of his equipage" seen as blackbirds; nor of this seeing, i.e. the "mis[aking]" of the shadow for black-birds; but of the "fear" occasioned by this mistaking: "Once, a fear pierced him, / In that he mistook / The shadow of his equipage / For blackbirds."

Yet Stevens can present a Poundlike "sense" of instantaneousness:

XII

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XII may be understood discursively, as a premise with the minor following upon the major: Since "The river is moving," "The blackbird must [then] be flying." Yet since 'Since' must be assumed, one may read XII as a super-position of two unrelated statements—as an attempt, possibly, to depict two different times and places at once and in the same place. The punctuation somewhat impedes this reading, hence the impression is less powerful than what Pound achieves in "Metro," where the colon between "ideas" implies their fusion into a single time and place. That fusion is impossible,'¹³ ' but Pound, and to a lesser extent Stevens in Way XII, create an illusion of this effect and thus a "sense of" (one can never have more than a "sense of) "freedom from time limits and space limits."

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing.

And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Of XIII, one might say what Pound did about a line of Lionel Johnson's (LE, 362): that "no one has written purer Imagisme than [Stevens] has in the[se] line[s]." The subject is treated extraordinarily directly. Each word is essential to the presentation. The first two of Pound's famed Imagist tenets are thus fulfilled. With respect to the third: "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome" (LE, 3)—it is difficult to imagine the sequence of this musical phrase assuming a different form than it does here. Arguably, the tenet "regarding rhythm" is least conducive to empirical proof. Way IV would seem a rare exception; mere, the sequence of the first two lines appears to dictate mat the verbal equation can only be extended in line three, in order for the new equation to still equal "one." Had Stevens written:

A man and a woman
Are one.

A man and a woman
And a blackbird
Are one.

the equation might then appear imbalanced: "A man and a woman / And a blackbird" are two lines. There is an obvious logical fallacy to this 'proof: "one" need not refer to one line. Still, that "one" could have this denotation; and above that, the reader's desire for symmetry in an image about equivalence, suggest that the fallacy, though logical, is not experiential.¹¹⁴ '

A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.

A man and a woman
And a blackbird
Are not.

If we are willing to dispense with logic to the extent that Pound and Stevens are (the former by distinguishing science from logic [ABC, 18], the latter by asserting that "Poetry must be irrational" [OP, 162]), it is clear—indeed, quasi-logical—that XIII is composed in the only musical sequence appropriate to the image. "It was evening all afternoon" is one complete statement, or "phrase." Of course, a phrase need not appear entirely on a single line of poetry (cf.: "so much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow"); but because this phrase does, and because it is the initial phrase in the image, it determines the musical time signature of XIII. XIII, as it were, begins in the signature "1/1"—one phrase to one line; a complete grammatical statement equaling one phrase (a signature often utilized by Pound).[15] Lineation thus fol-lows accordingly, until the last line:

It was evening all afternoon=complete
grammatical statement=musical phrase=line
It was snowing =complete grammatical
statement=musical

phrase=line
And it was going to snow = [complete
grammatical statement = musical phrase = line]
The blackbird sat = [complete grammatical
statement = musical phrase = line]

"In the cedar-limbs" is not a complete statement though it does not disrupt the pattern. Just as a piece of music might end on a partial phrase, or coda (literally, a concluding section of a musical, literary, or dramatic work that is formally distinct from the main structure; something that serves to summarize, or round out and conclude), so too might the image. (There can be no coda in the middle of a piece, hence "all afternoon" becomes part of the first phrase.)

This exercise in "scoring" points to the intrinsic relation between imagist and organicist doctrines; to what Frank Kermode views as the hallmark of symbolist and imagist works. Such works "derive their power," writes Kermode, "from internal reference: their quality … is dependent upon the organisms to which they belong."[16] Ideally, then, "the sequence of the musical phrase" in an imagist poem is determined by single lines or groups of lines mat conform to a particular sequence. Such rules would not always apply, yet would be applicable to a pure image like XIII.

EPILOGUE

As we have been looking at Stevens' work from a Poundian slant, and as "Thirteen Ways" is listed in Stevens' ouevre as a single poem, one wonders: are the "Ways" altogether construable as an Image? May they (it?) be viewed as 'one idea set atop another set atop another set atop another …' so as to comprise a complex "form of super-position" (or "visual chord," in Hulme's words[17]), and thus "a one-image poem"? Theoretically, I suppose "Ways" may, though I confess great difficulty in so interpreting them. Again, the premise of the Ways, and of Stevens' imagism generally, is that we are not invited to see some thing but some way of seeing the thing. This I perceive to be the fundamental difference between Stevens' work, and Pound's and Williams': where the latter poets are intent on "lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses," Stevens seeks to lift the scrutinizing apparatus—i.e. the imagination—up to the senses.

NOTES

¹ Stevens, Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse (New York: Alfred A. Knopff, 1957) 168; subsequently cited in the text as OP. The following works of Stevens' will also be cited in the essay according to the abbreviations with which they are here accompanied: Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly. Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966) LWS; The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951) NA; The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopff-Vintage, 1972) PM.

² Perloff neatly delineates the debate between Pound and Stevens critics as to "whose era" modernist poetry really is. Stevens criticism frequently subordinates matters of technique to those of content; essays on Pound are often inversely disproportional. (See "Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?", The Dance of the Intellect [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985) 1-32. It is hoped that this essay moves toward redressing the first of these imbalances by focusing on Stevens' technique, on his syntax especially.

³Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977) 168.

⁴ "Vorticism," in Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916; New York: New Directions, 1970) 89; subsequently cited in the text as GB. "Vorticism" premiered in the Fortnightly Review, XCVI (1914) 461-71.

⁵ Pound, Literary Essays (New York: New Directions, 1935) 154; subsequently cited in the text as LE.

⁶ Pound, ABC of Reading (London: Faber and Faber, 1951) 20; subsequently cited in the text as ABC; see also

⁷Selected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966) 60.

⁸ Robert Kern, "Frost and Modernism," American Literature, 60: 1 (1988) 11.

⁹ T.E. Hulme, Further Speculations, ed. Sam Hynes (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1955) 72; Alun R. Jones, The Life and Opinions of T.E. Hulme (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960) 50.

¹⁰ These lines are excerpted from Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "The Great Figure"; Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" and "April"; and Hulme's "Autumn." The extreme example of an Imagist using color as a pretext for presenting something else is John Gould Fletcher, whose series of color "Symphonies" (more symbolist than they are imagist) describe emotions to which colors are subjectively assigned. Only H.D. approximates Stevens' method of abstracting color from the object in which it inheres, so as to directly treat color. (Vide "Oread": "Whirl up, sea—… Hurl your green over us"; or "Evening": "black creeps from root to root"). Yet she does not employ colors as frequently as does Stevens, nor is her color-range as wide as his.

¹¹ When light is presented as a perceived form, that is a form in itself, it is then divine or supernatural, and so without color reference. Eliot and Pound are masters of depicting such light. Vide Eliot's Tenth Chorus from "The Rock," Pound's late Cantos (especially the fragment titled "From Canto CXV"), and such early Pound lyrics as "The House of Splendour" and '"Blandula, Tenella, Vagula'." In "'Blandula'," color is a medium in which light inheres. In Way X, light is the medium in which color inheres. Pound and Eliot are unquestionably the great Imagists of light but the great Imagist of color is Stevens.

¹² Could Stevens have intended the pun: that at the end of disillusionment, one "sees red," i.e. is angry. The old sailor catching tigers seems to be having an exciting time, but the speaker's tone is rather combative ("None are green, … None of them are strange, … People are not going / To dream of baboons and periwinkles"), and what he is protesting against is the failure of imagination, the failure to create illusions. The pun would be consistent with Stevens' train of thought. Of course, for the pun to work we must understand the "end of disillusionment" negatively, not as signaling the dawn of new illusions.

¹³ John T. Gage explains this impossibility in some detail in his remarkable study, In the Arresting Eye: The Rhetoric of Imagism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981) 60-63.

¹⁴ Gage describes this effect as follows: "the feeling which results from the experience of the figure is not the same as the emotion being described.… [A]nalogy communicates a feeling which is distinct from the experience of the poem, yet which is fundamental to its communication because morphologically like it" (In the Arresting Eye, 78-79).

¹⁵ The best account of Pound's lineation comes in Donald Davie's comments on "South-Folk in Cold Country": "The poem establishes a convention by which the gauge of a poetic line is not the number of syllables or of stressed syllables, or of metrical feet, but the fulfillment of the simple grammatical unit, the sentence." Davie develops this remark in Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (New York: Oxford UP, 1964) 41-47; 60-63.

¹⁶ Frank Kermode, "Romantic Image" (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957) 102.

¹⁷ Hulme, Further Speculations, 73. Though the concepts of "visual chord" and "super-position" can be linked, as they are here, they cannot truly be identified. The visual chord implies a union of images "to suggest an image which is different to both" (73). Super-position, on the other hand, implies the paradoxical separation of images conjoined, such that, in Fenollosa's words, "two things added together do not produce a third dung but suggest some fundamental relation between the two" ("The Chinese Written Character," 10). The product of super-position is indeed "a third thing"—what Pound calls an "image" as distinct from the "ideas" superposed—though its existence is predicated on "relation " radier than coalescence. Even the so-called "fusion" of ideas into a single time and space does not negate the individuality of each superposed idea. For a more detailed discussion of super-position, see Chapter 1 of my "Modernist Image: Imagist Technique in the Work of Pound, Eliot, and Williams," diss., Boston College, 1991.