born in evil days

AS I STEP OVER A PUDDLE AT THE END OF WINTER,
I THINK OF AN ANCIENT CHINESE GOVERNOR

And how can I, born in evil days
And fresh from failure, ask a kindness of Fate?

-- Written A.D. 819

Po Chu-i, balding old politician,
What's the use?
I think of you,
Uneasily entering the gorges of the Yang-Tze,

When you were being towed up the rapids
Toward some political job or other
In the city of Chungshou.

You made it, I guess,
By dark.

But it is 1960, it is almost spring again,
And the tall rocks of Minneapolis
Build me my own black twilight
Of bamboo ropes and waters.

Where is Yuan Chen,
the friend you loved?

Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness
Of the Midwest?Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing
But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter.

Did you find the city
of isolated men
beyond mountains?

Or have you been holding the end of a frayed rope
For a thousand years?

James Wright

on imagist time

Imagism flourished in Britain and in the United States for a brief period that is generally considered to be somewhere between 1909 and 1917.


As part of the modernist movement, away from the sentimentality and moralizing tone of nineteenth-century Victorian poetry, imagist poets looked to many sources to help them create a new poetic expression.

For contemporary influences, the imagists studied the French symbolists, who were experimenting with free verse (vers libre), a verse form that used a cadence that mimicked natural speech rather than the accustomed rhythm of metrical feet, or lines.

Rules of rhyming were also considered nonessential.

The ancient form of Japanese haiku poetry influenced the imagists to focus on one simple image.

Greek and Roman classical poetry inspired some of the imagists to strive for a high quality of writing that would endure.

T. E. Hulme is credited with creating the philosophy that would give birth to the Imagism movement.

Although he wrote very little, his ideas inspired Ezra Pound to organize the new movement. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is often given as one of the purest of his imagist poems.

Amy Lowell took over the leadership role of the imagists when Pound moved on to other modernist modes.

Her most anthologized poems include “Lilacs” and “Patterns.”

Other important imagist poets include Hilda Doolittle, whose poem “Sea Poppies” reflects the Japanese influence on her writing, and her “Oread” is often referred to as the most perfect imagist poem. 1

(some of the posts with imagist poems can be found here, here, here, and here.)