Imagism was a poetic vogue that flourished in England, and even more vigorously in America, between the years 1912 and 1917.
It was planned and exemplified by a group of English and American writers in London, partly under the influence of the poetic theory of T. E. Hulme, as a revolt against what Ezra Pound called the "rather blurry, messy. . . sentimentalistic mannerish" poetry at the turn of the century.
Pound, the first leader of the movement, was soon succeeded by Amy Lowell.
After that Pound sometimes referred to the movement, slightingly, as "Amygism."
Other leading participants, for a time,
were H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, John Gould Fletcher, and Richard Aldington.
The Imagist proposals, as voiced by
Amy Lowell in her preface to the first of three anthologies called Some Imagist
Poets (1915-17), were for a poetry which, abandoning conventional poetic materials and versification, is free to choose any subject and to create its own rhythms, uses common speech, and presents an image or vivid sensory description that is hard, clear, and concentrated.
The typical Imagist poem is written in free verse and undertakes to render
as precisely and tersely as possible, and without comment or generalization, the writer's impression of a visual object or scene; often the impression is rendered by means of metaphor, or by juxtaposing, without indicating a relation, the description of one object with that of a second and diverse object.
Imagism was too restrictive to endure long as a concerted movement, but
it served to inaugurate a distinctive feature of modernist poetry. Almost every major poet from the 1920s through the middle of the present century, including W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, manifests some influence by the Imagist experiments.
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