Jones - Imagist Poetry

Sir: May I beg for a clear definition of the word Imagisme, as well as information as to whether it be in French, American or Colonial language? If it were in English, would there be the e at the end? I do not think that Ezra Pound can be an American, as he does not shun the subjunctive mood Yours truly, A. E. F. Horniman.

(We believe that Imagisme comes from a city which all good Americans are supposed to visit late or soon ED)

Letter in T.P.s Weekly, 6 March 1915.

To cope with the Imagists should be an easy matter. We have their four annual anthologies 191417; we have a detailed manifesto in 1915 stating their intentions; and there is a fifth anthology in 1930 to let us know how they were faring as individuals thirteen years after the break-up of the group. There were only seven poets intimately associated with the movement four Americans (Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell) and three British (Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, D. H. Lawrence). Perhaps one ought simply to look at the manifesto and the anthologies and forget such introductions as this.

But the movement is riddled with paradox. To begin with, the poems in the anthologies often dont tally with the precepts of the manifesto (which are we to believe practice or theory?). One of the poets, D.H.Lawrence, appeared both in the imagist anthologies and in those of a group whose theory and practice were totally different the Georgians (could he honestly follow both?). The founder-poet, Ezra Pound, left the movement after its first year. And innumerable seemingly conflicting definitions of the image have proliferated over the years. Perhaps the main problem is that the poems the Imagists published as a group cannot honestly be called to stand among the great achievements of literature. Some are very fine, but many are weak by any standards. And so why bother?

Part of the answer lies in a statement made by T. S. Eliot in an The truth is that imagistic ideas still lie at the centre of our poetic practice.

The parlous state of poetry at the turn of the century is evident from the number of groups dedicated to rebellion and reform the Georgians, the Futurists, the Imagists and the Vorticists among the most prominent. Ford Madox Hueffer (later changing his name to Ford Madox Ford) wrote in 1913: the song of birds, moonlight these the poet playing for safety and the critic trying to find something to praise, will deem the sure cards of the poetic pack. They seem the safe things to sentimentalise over and it is taken for granted that sentimentality is the business of poetry. Pound had already published in 1909 a poem called Revolt Against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry:

Great God, if men are grown but pale sick phantoms
That must live only in these mists and tempered lights
if these thy sons are grown such thin ephemera.
I bid thee grapple chaos

It needed perhaps an outsider to see a way through all this. Such a man was T. E. Hulme a mathematics student sent down from Cambridge in 1904 for unspecified riotous behaviour. Abandoning a course in biology at London University in the same year, he travelled by cargo boat to Canada and there, as he worked his way across the country, he was overwhelmed by the sight of the vast prairie land: He returned to Europe determined to learn more of the art of literature; and turning to philosophy as well, in 1907 he began studies of Henri Bergson, Rmy de Gourmont and Jules de Gaultier, in Brussels. By 1908 he had begun to form his own theories of poetry, and gathered around himself a group drawn from the literary society of London to discuss literary matters. They called themselves the Poets Club. T. E. Hulme had written a few poems to illustrate his theories, and no doubt they were read out and discussed at the meetings of the Club. None of the later Imagists was a member of this group, but the poems Autumn and A City Sunset by Hulme, which the Poets Club printed in January 1909 in a booklet called For Christmas MDCCCCVIII, may reasonably be termed the first imagist poems, although the word itself was not yet in use.

Both the Poets Club and its publication received a sharp notice from F. S. Flint in a periodical called The New Age. He objected to the Clubs after dinner ratiocinations, its tea-parties in suave South Audley Street and contrasted them with the excited discussions of Verlaine and his fellow poets in small cafs. The discussions in obscure cafs regenerated, remade French poetry; but the Poets Club! the Poets Club is death.

Out of the lively argument that ensued grew a firm friendship between Flint and Hulme. Flint at that time was already an advocate of vers libre and was said to be a man who knew more of contemporary French poetry than anyone else in London. Hulme, although never completely severing his connection with the Poets Club, now formed a new (unnamed) society in conjunction with Flint. Its first meeting was held on 25 March 1909 in the Eiffel Tower, a restaurant in Soho; and its members included F. W. Tancred, Joseph Campbell, Florence Fart and Edward Storer. They met on Thursday evenings, and their talk was of the state of contemporary poetry and how it might be replaced by vers libre, by the Japanese tanka and haikai and by poems in a sacred Hebrew form. In all this, wrote Flint later, Hulme was the ringleader. He insisted too on absolutely accurate

It was to this Hulme-Flint group that Ezra Pound, then aged twenty-four and only recently arrived in London, was introduced in April 1909 a month after its foundation. But it is interesting to note that he too was already thinking along lines similar to those of this group, with their absolutely accurate presentation and no verbiage, when he wrote to William Carlos Williams, the American poet, on 21 October 1908, of his ultimate attainments of poesy as: