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English novelist Virginia Woolf declared that human nature underwent
a fundamental change "on or about December 1910." The
statement testifies to the modern writer's fervent desire to break
with the past, rejecting literary traditions that seemed outmoded
and diction that seemed too genteel to suit an era of technological
breakthroughs and global violence.
"On or about 1910," just as the automobile and airplane
were beginning to accelerate the pace of human life, and Einstein's
ideas were transforming mankind's perception of the universe, there
was an explosion of innovation and creative energy that shook every
field of artistic endeavour. Artists from all over the world converged
on London, Paris, and other great cities of Europe to join in the
ferment of new ideas and movements: Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism,
Acmeism, and Imagism were among the most influential banners under
which the new artists grouped themselves. It was an era when major
artists were fundamentally questioning and reinventing their art
forms: Matisse and Picasso in painting, James Joyce and Gertrude
Stein in literature, Isadora Duncan in dance, Igor Stravinsky in
music, and Frank Lloyd Wright in architecture. The excitement, however,
came to a terrible climax in 1914 with the start of the First World
War, which wiped out a generation of young men in Europe, catapulted
Russia into a catastrophic revolution, and sowed the seeds for even
worse conflagrations in the decades to follow. By the war's end
in 1918, the centuries-old European domination of the world had
ended and the "American Century" had begun. For artists
and many others in Europe, it was a time of profound disillusion
with the values on which a whole civilization had been founded.
But it was also a time when the avant-garde experiments that had
preceded the war would, like the technological wonders of the airplane
and the atom, inexorably establish a new dispensation, which is
called modernism. Among the most instrumental of all artists in
effecting this change were a handful of American poets. With the
death of Walt Whitman in 1892, American poetry came to a longer
pause. In the second half of the nineteenth century American life
changed rapidly and with it the language and the conditions of modern
life were changing radically, too. A new poetry seemed ineluctable.
With few exceptions, however, the poets of late nineteenth century
America wrote an artificial verse, derivative of Romantic, essentially
British, models, full of classical allusions and lofty ideals, with
little reference to the changing social and political realities.
What America needed at the turn of the century was a poet, or group
of poets, to carry on the tradition of earlier American writers,
such as Emerson, Hawthorne and Whitman and to translate that tradition
into modern terms. Those writers had seen themselves and their fellow
Americans as the new men who would create a new world; the poet
was not only an Adam, a newly created and self- creating pioneer,
but a prophet and a rebel, warning his culture and, if necessary,
opposing it. The poetic mainstream of the day was considered to
be obsolete in its presentation of experience, insular and untrained
in technique and flabby in its use of language. The verbal currency
coined by both their British and American predecessors had by now
become unacceptably worn and dulled and, language, the central issue
in modernist thought, had to be impoverished and revived because
this time it was used as an instrument.
American poetry became independent sometime between 1910 and 1920;
1912 is the year often mentioned. That year Robert Frost went to
England, where he published his first book and there he met and
was promoted by Ezra Pound, already busy forging transatlantic modernism.
Imagism, the most important single literary movement of the 20th
century is usually dated back to 1912.
The extraordinary outburst of poetic activity that was taking place
in America in the work of poets like William Carlos Williams, Wallace
Stevens and Marianne Moore had links and parallels with the literary
movement that developed from 1912 to the end of the 1920's in London;
a remarkable assimilator of the experimental ideas and techniques,
Pound was the prime mover in the evolution of the "new poetic";
in fact, without him, it seems totally unlikely that the British
and American traditions would have come temporarily in a volatile
mixture that would completely radicalize them both.
The suddenness with which international modernism was introduced
into England and the slowness of its acceptance had much to do with
the fact that many of the writers were in fact not English: Henry
James, Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford in fiction, William Butler
Yeats, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in poetry; George Bernard Shaw,
Barrie Synge and Samuel Beckett in drama. Partly for the same reason,
the modernists, especially Pound and Mac Diarmid, could be said
to have forced British poetry away from its ' natural', or, at least,
indigenous, development, represented by the Georgian "week-end
poets" Walter de la Mare, Robert Graves and Edward Thomas whose
poetry was considered to be "an Indian summer of romance".
Instead of imitating them, the Imagists attempted to reproduce the
qualities of ancient Greek and Chinese poetry, aiming at clear,
brilliant effects instead of the soft, dreamy vagueness or the hollow
Miltonic rhetoric of the 19th century tradition.
With characteristic brusqueness, Ezra Pound remarked that the common
verse...from 1890 was a horrible agglomerate compost, “not
minted, most of it not even baked “, all legato, a doughy
mess of third- hand Keats, Wordsworth, fourth-hand Elisabethan sonority
blunted, half- melted and lumpy. In reaction against all this, a
group began to gather around T.E.Hulme and F.S. Flint in London
dedicated, among other things, to the aim of reproducing “the
peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces
and wide horizons of the virgin-prairie” and to the belief
that poetic ideas are best expressed by the rendering of concrete
objects. The group was joined in April 1909 by the young expatriate
Pound who had already outlined his own ideas about poetry in a letter
to Williams Carlos Williams six months earlier.
Pound was in the habit of meeting Hilda Doolittle and Richard Aldington
in a tea shop in Kensington to discuss their verse with them, and
it was at such a meeting that he informed them that they were Imagistes,
suggesting by the French version of the term a connection with modern
French poetry. In 1914, an anthology of verse appeared in which
H.Doolittle and Aldington were the centrepieces, but it also included
the work of Williams Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, F.S.Flint and
Ford Madox Ford. Later, Pound was to declare that, in fact, the
whole business of Imagism and the Imagist anthology was invented
to launch H.D. and Aldington before either had enough stuff for
a volume, which is only partially true, because his interest in
Imagism antedated and clearly survived his enthusiastic promotion
of the two poets. By 1916 Pound lost interest and abandoned Imagism,
leaving clear way for Amy Lowell to assume control of the movement
and to publish the two anthologies of 1916 and 1917; he dismissed
the movement as "Amy-gisme", an excuse for brief, mediocre
descriptive pieces, written in free verse and modulated into pleasant
fancy.
The most important thing about Imagism was, in his view, not the
way in which the movement articulated itself, but rather the practical
focus it managed to provide; it helped crystallise, define and promote
certain tendencies and notions about the nature of poetic experiment.
In 1913, Pound wrote that the point of Imagisme "is that it
does not use images as ornaments. The image itself is the speech.
The image is the word beyond formulated language." This idea
suggests the primary Imagist objective, that is, to stick closely
to the object or experience being described, and hardly ever, if
any at all, to shift from this too more explicit generalisation.
It also articulates the belief in the primacy of a condensed, intense,
and above all, intuitive form of communication; the observation
of the concrete allows the observer to catch the wonder that surrounds
simple things in imaginative rather than rational discourse. T.E.Hulme
sees the poet as gliding through an abstract process, in an effort
to make the reader discover for himself and intuit the meaning of
the poem from the reverberations and resonance of the image.
In his 1913 Poetry essay Pound insisted that one should not use
any superfluous word “no adjective, which does not reveal
something". This, the second of Flint's rules, was perhaps
what Amy Lowell had in mind when she said that the Imagist principles
are not new; they have fallen into desuetude. They are the essentials
of all great poetry. It follows then, that the test of the artist
became a preoccupation with functional speech, that is, a speech
that achieves a maximum effect with the minimum possible resources,
in Marriane Moore's view: Precision, economy of statement, logic
employed to means that are disinterested, drawing and identifying
and which liberates imagination. Flint's third rule, expanded upon
by Pound in his typical fashion, adds another touch to the written
word: the tough, sinuous, sharply etched rhythms that describe the
contours of the individual experience — a hidden but nevertheless
clearly audible music that captures the pace, poise and tone of
the personal voice.
The Imagists believed in a flexible verse form, which was in fact
the symptom of a broader commitment to an open, unpremeditated structure;
the free verse was by no means new as an occasional recourse; it
derived from many sources, including Whitman and Mallarmé
and it basically gave up the subtleties of spoken rhythm counter-pointed
with metre, in exchange for a single rhythm defined only by line
length and line break. As he saw it, Pound believed that poetry
should be at least "as well written as prose", but with
the possible difference that in poetry, words are infused with something
more than their prose meaning- with a musical quality that gives
them substance and thrust; "To break the iamb, that was the
first heave", as he put it in The Cantos, meant first and foremost
shaking off the tyranny of predetermined verse forms, not in the
direction of Amy Lowell's "fluid, fruity, facile stuff",
but rather in that promoted by idiosyncratic rhythmists like Yeats
and Eliot and later by Williams Carlos Williams and the Black Mountain
poets.
The most influential aspect of Imagism was, above all, its scrupulous
devotion to the craft of poetry, Pound never abandoned those values
and became impatient with Imagism’s studiously miniature world
and he set out to find whether a diminished aesthetic–one
that eschews discursive breadth in favour of obsessive precision
and radical condensation—can produce a long poem; at this
time he was already at work on The Cantos, a brilliant mixture of
condensation, concrete expression and lyric intensity forged into
a mythopoeic expansive “multiverse”.
Around 1914, Pound moved on to Vorticism, a stricter form of Imagism
that emphasized the dynamic nature of the image. Vorticism reveals
a certain iconic dimension of imagist poetry and relates it to painting
in general and to Cubist painting in particular; this conception
of form is indebted to an aesthetic of space developed by modern
art and expressed in the works of Brzeska, Lewis, Epstein and Brâncusi.
In fact, several Cubist techniques are to be found in imagist poetry,
such as: the tendency to focus on banal, ordinary objects, the foregrounding
of isolated details and the backgrounding of outer form, the visualisation
of the essence of an object or of an abstract representation of
the thing. Cubist- influenced semi- abstract painting and poetry
were linked and shaped anew under the span of Vorticism, Pound's
neo-futurist alternative to Imagism demanded a transforming modern
explosion in the arts and was meant to start a whirl of artistic
creation. In terms of the visual arts, Vorticism represented an
original variant of elements borrowed from Cubism and Futurism.
What Vorticism meant in terms of poetry is less clear. Pound's only
obviously vorticist poem is considered to be "Dogmatic Statements
on a Game of Chess: Theme for a Series of Pictures", whose
angular shapes and abrupt movements could describe a vorticist painting.
Unfortunately, the movement and its lead review, Blast, filled with
belligerent manifestoes and a typographical style that signalled
its origins all too plainly, was greeted with a revealing lack of
critical acceptance; contrary to what later critics have urged,
contemporaries were neither shocked nor provoked by it, but simply
bored – and not because it represented an incomprehensible
novelty, but because, as one reviewer remarked, "it was an
all too familiar attempt at being clever". However, for all
its faults, the movement remains a notable attempt to address and
provoke an audience through a programmatic polemical onslaught,
and ultimately, as far as Pound is concerned, an explicit attempt
to distinguish his imagist poetry from symbolist poetry.
Pound's poetic principles remained essentially imagist: sharpness
of observation, economy of phrasing and organic rhythm. He successively
refined his theory of the image and of its functioning, in the form:
image > vortex > ideogram, until he reached a stage where
he felt that language itself could be made to work presentationally,
entirely free of discursive content in which the crucial catalyst
is the vital world of intuition and to which he added his discovery
of the possibilities of Chinese as a language which still worked,
he claimed, to a significant measure, pre-discursively.
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