Imagists

To persuade the reader that their emotions deserve attention, poets refer to classical Greek and Roman gods, they spin lofty similes, or they turn to nature for their witness. They employ archaic language and syntax to present their experience as somehow more universal or more deeply felt than the reader’s. For hundreds of years this worked. But by the end of World War I, these poet tricks were being questioned. Ezra Pound—a significant trickster himself—began to think that real world references, plain language and the power of particulars offered a more convincing way to convey the poet’s feelings. He was pushing back against a long poetic tradition.

Consider three poets trying to convince the reader that their personal aging process is interesting: Here is Shakespeare (“Sonnet 73”) comparing his own age to a tree losing its leaves in fall:

“That time of year thou mayest in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

Here is Tennyson in 1850 (“In Memoriam”), describing his age in cosmic terms:

“I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world’s altar stairs
That slope through darkness up to God.”

Here is T. S. Eliot in 1921 using stark everyday references:

“For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?”

Pound was pushing for something new. Though never one for simple verse himself, he was a keen judge of poetry and a great evangelizer. As foreign editor for Harriet Monroe’s American Poetry magazine, he found those newcomers whose plain style he liked and he promoted them, beginning brilliantly with T. S. Eliot. Particularly on Eliot’s The Waste Land, he further sharpened the outlines of a new style, applying simple principles. No sentiment. No unnecessary words. No classical allusions or flowery speech. He wanted vivid images like those he had found in translations of Chinese verse.

Here is his friend William Carlos Williams (“To Waken an Old Lady”), demonstrating what imagism was trying to become:

“Old age is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze.”

Imagism was a turn in a new direction. Amy Lowell arrived in London in 1914, invited Pound and his friends to dinner, and went home to embrace, promote, and expand the movement beyond Pound’s poor power to resist. In 1917 she declared that Edward Arlington Robinson, Frost, Sandburg, and Edgar Lee Masters were all imagists. In the years that followed, her definition grew broad enough to take in Teasdale, Wylie, and Millay. Poets were moving toward the new style, even as the boundaries of that style expanded beyond definition. By 1940 to say a poet was an “imagist” no longer offered a useful distinction. Everyone was.

Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns