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.)

flooded with moonlight

you might wonder or even assume that i continue to print poems by pound and williams and lorca and dickinson et al because they've always been my favorites, but i'd barely read any of them before (and i did read poetry; i edited a literary magazine for fifteen years). no, it's because this imagist movement of poetry was the english language version of japonisme.

"In America in 1912, the most common and popular poetry was called genteel because it was very well-behaved. Take, for example, this poem by Richard Watson Gilder.

The Woods that Bring the Sunset Near

The wind from out of the west is blowing
The homeward-wandering cows are lowing,
Dark grow the pine woods, dark and drear, —
The woods that bring the sunset near.

Around 1912 in London, some British and American poets led by Ezra Pound started a poetic movement called imagism. These poets reacted against genteel poetry, which they saw as sentimental, soft-edged, and emotionally dishonest. Instead, they advised, in Ezra Pound's formulation,

1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing,
’ whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.

In 1913, Pound added the following advice for aspiring imagist poets:

4. An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex
in an instant of time.
5. It is the presentation of such a 'complex' instantaneously which gives the sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience
in the greatest works of art.
6. It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.
7. Use no superfluous word,
no adjective which does not reveal something.

8. Don't use such an expression as 'dim lands of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always
the adequate symbol.
9. Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose.

Imagist poems were influenced by Japanese haiku, poems of 17 syllables which usually present only two juxtaposed images. This poetry strives to suggests more than its literal meaning, yet avoids overt figurative devices like allegory and even metaphor." 1

see what you think:

"Mañana", dated 7 August 1918 in Fuente Vaqueros,
from Libro de Poemas:

But the song of water
is an eternal thing.
It is light turned into song
of romantic illusions.
It is firm and soft,
mild and full of heaven.
It is mist and it is rose
of the eternal morning.
Honey of the moon which flows
from buried stars.
What is the holy baptism
but God turned into water
to anoint our foreheads
with the blood of his mercy?
For some good reason Jesus
was confirmed in water.

For some good reason the stars
repose upon its waves.
For some good reason Venus
in its breast was engendered

Federico Garcia Lorca (1898–1936) 2

Midnight. No waves,
no wind, the empty boat
is flooded with moonlight.

Eihei Dogen (1200-1253) 3

(and in case you were wondering if lorca could be a reincarnation of dogen, i have provided a helpful aide.)

break dancing

yesterday's post, on the imagist movement in poetry, said, "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." 1

Pictorialism and Photo-Secession was the movement in photo- graphy which sealed the break from older photographic traditions and opened a new world of possibilities for the camera arts. 2

In central and Eastern Europe, the titles Jugendstil (youth style) and Secession style both suggested a sudden and refreshing break from earlier design conventions. 3

The welcome fresh- ness and free- dom of Art Nouveau's treatment of natural and floral themes amounted to a dramatic break from the era's dominant classical and revival styles, which drew their inspiration from the past and used natural designs sparingly and rigidly, if at all. 4

What some people called decadent, others called modern. The Fauve painter Andre Derain complained that "we are the mushrooms on ancient dunghills."




But the dunghills produced the art and literature of the modern age, with their deliberate and unprecedented break from history and tradition. 5





and music, and dance, and philosophy, and fashion..... all of the movements of the next to last fin-de-siecle are described as "a break from" something.




i begin to think of all japonisme, perhaps all social movement at all, as being at heart, essentially, generation gap restructuring.

a letter

THE RIVER-MERCHANT'S WIFE: A LETTER
Ezra Pound

While my hair was still cut straight
across my forehead
I played about the front gate,
pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat,
playing with blue plums.
And we went on living
in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times,
I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen,
by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make
sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown,
the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already
yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;

They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

Rihaku

("The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" is based on the first of Li Po's "Two Letters from Chang-Kan." Copyright © 1956, 1957 by Ezra Pound. this clearly international phenomenon ranged from the light-hearted to the profound. ezra pound, another imagist, translated japanese and chinese poems into english, which helped popularize the forms in the west. the image at the upper right, i found here.)

green green green

GREEN

The sky was apple-green,
The sky was

green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.

She opened her eyes, and green
They shone, clear like flowers undone,
For the first time, now for the first time seen.

d h lawrence

(d h lawrence was also considered
an imagist poet.)

weep for me

WILLOW POEM

It is a willow when summer is over,
a willow by the river
from which no leaf has fallen nor
bitten by the sun
turned orange or crimson.
The leaves cling and grow paler,
swing and grow paler
over the swirling waters of the river
as if loath to let go,
they are so cool, so drunk with
the swirl of the wind and of the river—
oblivious to winter,
the last to let go and fall
into the water and on the ground.

William Carlos Williams

(as we've said, japonisme went by many many names: l'art nouveau, jugendstil, with photography there was photo secession, and with poets it was imagist.)

japonisme in the land of the pueblo

"That thin green line of cotton- woods down there is the Little Colorado River," Flo was saying. "Reckon it's sixty miles, all down hill. The Painted Desert begins there and also the Navajo Reservation. You see the white strips, the red veins, the yellow bars, the black lines. They are all desert steps leading up and up for miles. That sharp black peak is called Wildcat. It's about a hundred miles. You see the desert stretching away to the right, growing dim -- lost in distance? We don't know that country. But that north country we know as landmarks, anyway.

"Look at that saw- tooth range. The Indi- ans call it Echo Cliffs. At the far end it drops off into the Colorado River. Lee's Ferry is there -- about one hundred and sixty miles.

"That ragged black rent is the Grand Canyon. Looks like a thread, doesn't it? But Carley, it's some hole, believe me. Away to the left you see the tremendous wall rising and turning to come this way. That's the north wall of the Canyon. It ends at the great bluff -- Greenland Point.

See the black fringe above the bar of gold. That's a belt of pine trees. It's about eighty miles across this ragged old stone washboard of a desert. . . .

Now turn and look straight and strain your sight over Wildcat. See the rim purple dome. You must look hard. I'm glad it's clear and the sun is shining. We don't often get this view. . . . That purple dome is Navajo Mountain, two hundred miles and more away!"

Carley yielded to some strange drawing power and slowly walked forward until she stood at the extreme edge of the summit.






What was it that confounded her sight? Desert slope -- down and down -- color -- distance -- space! The wind that blew in her face seemed to have the openness of the whole world back of it. Cold, sweet, dry, exhilarating, it breathed of untainted vastness.

Carley's memory pictures of the Adirondacks faded into pastorals; her vaunted images of European scenery changed to operetta settings. She had nothing with which to compare this illimitable space.

"Oh! -- America!" was her unconscious tribute. --zane grey

Until the late 19th century, much of the Southwest was a mystery to Americans. Rarely did people venture into the remote corners of New Mexico and Arizona territories, which became part of the U.S. in 1848.

However, writings by such people as Charles Lummis, Mary Austin, George Wharton James, and others, and representations by artists such as Ernest L. Blumenschein, Bert Geer Phillips, and Oscar E. Berninghaus, began to appear in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Ethnographic interest in the native peoples had existed since the earlier surveys and military movements which encountered these populations. No longer considered a "vanishing race," Native Americans became mythologized through the popularity of their artwork and culture.

The Southwest was compared to the cultures of the Middle East. The spectacularly varied arid landscape, the ruins of ancient cultures, and the ongoing exoticness provided by the indigenous cultures and the Spanish colonial peoples and settlements, made the Southwest an attractive destination. 1

when arizona and new mexico became part of the united states in 1912 they were ripe for the railway tourism which had begun when the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1885. as happened in europe, the need for railway posters at that moment gave the new printmakers an opportunity.

folks who saw the posters and read the books had to go and they told their friends who came for short visits and stayed. they came from norway and sweden and england and germany and japan; the world was beckoned and the world responded. here, the plains/planes of flat color and the simple lines that had been pored over in the japanese prints came intensely to life. the shapes and shadows and tones called to the imagist poets.

“In a cold like this, the stars snap like distant coyotes, beyond the moon,” I read. “And you’ll see the shadows of actual coyotes, going across the alfalfa field. And the pine-trees make little noises, sudden and stealthy, as if they were walking about.

And the place heaves with ghosts. But when one has got used to one’s own home-ghosts, be they never so many, they are like one’s own family, but nearer than the blood. It is the ghosts one misses most, the ghosts there, of the Rocky Mountains. ...because it is cold, I should have moonshine ...” --d.h. lawrence

"I think that New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever...the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend."

"Art...is a kind of tyrant; it pushes you around. It came to me dressed in wanderlust" --gustave baumann

As the wagons went forward and the sun sank lower, a sweep of red carnelian-coloured hills lying at the foot of the mountains came into view; they curved like two arms about a depression in the plain; and in that depression was Santa Fé, at last!

A thin, wavering adobe town . . . a green plaza . . . at one end a church with two earthen towers that rose high above the flatness. The long main street began at the church, the town seemed to flow from it like a stream from a spring. The church towers, and all the low adobe houses, were rose colour in that light, -- a little darker in tone than the amphitheatre of red hills behind; and periodically the plumes of poplars flashed like gracious accent marks, -- inclining and recovering themselves in the wind. --willa cather

RED HILLS AND BONES

No one takes the absence
into account the way I do --
this rind of backbone, the bridge
and scale of its blank articulation,
sustains some perfectly whole
notes of light against the raw
muscle of the land unbound,
the undercurrents surfacing
in concert with the white riffs
of cholla spotting the swales.

Put right, one part of loss
counterpoints the next, leaves us
much to see despite the frank
abrasion of the air, Finally,
this thighbone is every bit
the bright, hard stuff of stars
and against the hills'
rust and clay sets free
a full, long silence here
that as much as anything
sings all my life to me.

Christopher Buckley

From Blossoms and Bones by Christopher Buckley,
Vanderbilt University Press. © 1988 Christopher Buckley

for a wonderful essay on how christopher buckley came to write a long series of poems based on the painting of georgia o'keeffe, click here.