A Brief Guide to Imagism

—Ezra Pound

Imagism was born in England and America in the early twentieth century. A reactionary movement
against romanticism and Victorian poetry, imagism emphasized simplicity, clarity of expression, and
precision through the use of exacting visual images.

Though Ezra Pound is noted as the founder of imagism, the movement was rooted in ideas first
developed by English philosopher and poet T. E. Hulme, who, as early as 1908, spoke of poetry based on
an absolutely accurate presentation of its subject, with no excess verbiage. In his essay “Romanticism
and Classicism,” Hulme wrote that the language of poetry is a “visual concrete one….Images in verse are
not mere decoration, but the very essence.”

Pound adapted Hulme’s ideas on poetry for his imagist movement, which began in earnest in 1912,
when he first introduced the term into the literary lexicon during a meeting with Hilda Doolittle. After
reading her poem “Hermes of the Ways,” Pound suggested some revisions and signed the poem “H. D.,
Imagiste” before sending it to Poetry magazine in October of that year. That November, Pound himself
used the term “Imagiste” in print for the first time when he published Hulme’s Complete Poetical Works.

A strand of modernism, imagism aimed to replace abstractions with concrete details that could be
further expounded upon through the use of figuration. These typically short, free verse poems—which
had clear precursors in the concise, image-focused poems of ancient Greek lyricists and Japanese haiku
poets—moved away from fixed meters and moral reflections, subordinating everything to what Hulme
once called the “hard, dry image.”

Pound’s definition of the image was “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an
instant of time.” He said, “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 presence of the greatest works of art.” In March 1913,
Poetry published “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” In it, imagist poet F. S. Flint, quoting Pound, defined the
tenets of imagist poetry:

I. Direct treatment of the “thing," whether subjective or objective.

II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

III. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the
metronome.

In 1914, Des Imagistes (A. and C. Boni), an anthology assembled and edited by Pound, was published; it
collected work by William Carlos Williams, Richard Aldington, James Joyce, and H. D., among others. By
the spring of that year, however, disputes had begun to brew among the movement regarding leadership
and control of the group. Amy Lowell, who criticized Pound for what she thought was a too-myopic view
of poetry, assumed leadership of the movement and from 1915 to 1917 published three anthologies, all
called Some Imagist Poets, but by then Pound had dissociated himself from imagism, derisively calling it
“Amygism”; Pound instead appropriated his imagism into a new philosophy, vorticism, claiming that “the
image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; … a VORTEX.”

By 1917, even Lowell began to distance herself from the movement, the tenets of which eventually
became absorbed into the broader modernist movement and continued to influence poets throughout
the twentieth century.

Imagism, Modernism, and Postmodernism

Imagism

Imagism was a sub-genre of Modernism concerned with creating clear imagery with sharp language. The
essential idea was to re-create the physical experience of an object through words. As with all of
Modernism, Imagism implicitly rejected Victorian poetry, which tended toward narrative. In this way,
Imagist poetry is similar to the Japanese Haiku; they are brief renderings of some sort of poetic scene.

Pound argued that the appearance of the characters for “man,” “tree,” and “sun” each reflected their
meaning.

Ezra Pound, an American-born cosmopolitan poet, was a towering figure of Modernism and a great
propagator of Imagism. Pound defined an image as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant
of time.” An Imagist poem encapsulates a poetic impulse in the most time-and-space-efficient way
possible; it is a kernel of poetry. Pound himself was influenced by Chinese poetry thanks to Ernest
Fenollosa’s Essay on the Chinese Written Character. Fenollosa observed that certain Chinese characters
looked like the idea they expressed (Pound 19). For Pound, likewise, the words of the poet should evoke
the very physical object his was writing

about. In an interview in Poetry magazine published in 1913, Pound delineated the following principles
of Imagism:

Direct treatment of “thing,” whether subjective or objective.

To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the
metronome. (qtd. in Hamilton)

He later expanded on these principles in the preface to Des Imagistes (an anthology of Imagist poetry)
listing what he called “essentials” of Imagism:

(1) To use the language of common speech, but always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, not the
merely decorative word.

(2) To create new rhythms–as the expression of new moods–and not to copy old rhythms, which merely
echo old moods. We do not insist upon “free-verse” as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it
as a principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-
verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.

(3) To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject. It is not good art to write badly about aeroplanes
and automobiles; nor is it necessarily bad art to write well about the past. We believe passionately in the
artistic value of modern life, but we wish to point out that there is nothing so uninspiring nor so old-
fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 1911.

(4) To present an image (hence the name: “Imagist”). We are not a school of painters, but we believe
that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent
and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real
difficulties of his art.

(5) To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.

(6) Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry. (qtd. in Hamilton)

"Pedals on a wet, black bough"

“Pedals on a wet, black bough”

An often-anthologized example of a short Imagist poem is Pound’s “In the Station of the Metro”:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Pedals on a wet, black bough.

Through these fleeting two lines, the poet creates the image in the reader’s mind of myriad travelers in a
Metro station. He then juxtaposes the faces of these travelers with delicate pedals on a black surface.
Pound melds a frenetic urban center with a serene floral image, which both inspires a longing to escape
busy city life and recognizes natural beauty in one of the most industrialized of places.

Modernism

Although Queen Victoria died in 1901, Modernism can be said to have been born from contrarian
attitudes of the previous centuries. Novels like Tristram Shandy (1759), which lacks a clear plot and in
which the protagonists narrates his own birth, and Jude the Obscure (1895), a bleak novel that savagely
critiqued Victorian customs, can be seem as forerunners to a period that extolled the divergent and
experimental. The most exemplified phase of Modernism, referred to as “High Modernism,” occurred
during the inter-war years (1918-1939). This was the time when writers synonymous with Modernism,
such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence, thrived. While Victorians typically
concerned themselves with rendering reality as they understood it into fiction, Modernists recognized
that reality was subjective, and instead strove to represent human psychology in fiction. This is
evidenced in the stream-of-consciousness narrative of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and
Ulysses, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Modernism is further characterized by a systematic rejection of social and literary norm. In light of the
widespread human suffering of the early 20th century, modernists oppose all major ideals and
conventions with unrelenting pessimism directly contradicting the social optimism of the Victorian Era.
Modernists claim that past movements and ideologies are disconnected from the reality of the human
condition. Through abundant literary experimentation, modernists attempt to convey the complexity of
a world apparently on the brink of deflagragation. Accordingly, modernists, by their copious
experimentation with literary form and style, risk literary incoherence to express the perceived
fragmentation and incoherence of the modern world–a feeling rooted in the cosmopolitan origins of the
majority of modernist literature. The emergence of a hectic city life coupled with the sense of human
decay drove modernists to seek a unifying philosophy. Thus, culture became politically important since it
was perceived as the only universal source of identity and social reference (Modernism).

In successful modernist literature, the result of these characteristics is a more complex and nuanced
analysis of the world than anything ever produced. Archetypes are rarely reinforced, and no clear
interpretation of a subject is commonly found. Not only is the structure of both writing and the world
analyzed, but the meaning of words, patterns, and occurrences is subjected to the literary lens with the
express intent of avoiding oversimplification. Disorder is observed. As a result, an unprecedented level of
literary criticism emerges. In fact, notable modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats were also
accomplished literary critics (Modernism).

Some of the resulting structural and formal characteristics of modernism include:

Open Form

Free Verse

Discontinuous Narrative

Intertextuality

Classical Allusions

Fragmentation

Multiple Narrative points of view (parallax)

Meta-narrative

Unconventional use of metaphor

Borrowings from cultures and languages

Juxtaposition of incongruent objects, themes, narratives, etc…

Analogous thematic characteristics of the movement include (Modernism):

Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties

Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal context

Valorization of the despairing individual in the face of an unmanageable future

Disillusionment

Rejection of history and the substitution of a mythical past, borrowed without chronology

Product of the metropolis, of cities and urban scapes

Stream of consciousness: Presentation of the raw, unprocessed human psyche of interest to Freudian
analysis

Overwhelming technological changes of the 20th Century

Lack of power and loss of faith in democracy and freedom

From an Imagist manifesto:

1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the
merely decorative word.

2. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free verse than in
conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.

3. Absolute freedom in the choice of subject.

4. To present an image. We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render
particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this
reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art.

5. To produce a poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.

6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.

The Rules of Imagism

Ezra Pound, one of the founders of Imagism, said that there were three tenets, or rules, to writing
Imagist poetry.

Direct treatment of the subject. That is, the poem should deal directly with what's being talked about,
not try to use fancy words and phrases to talk about it.

Use no word that does not contribute to the presentation. Use as few words as possible.

Compose in the rhythm of the musical phrase, not in the rhythm of the metronome. In other words,
create new rhythms instead of relying on the old, boring ones.
What are the characteristics of imagism?

Imagism is an early 20th Century poetry movement started by Ezra Pound and a few other
contemporaries in Europe.

The poets involved actually met and wrote papers about this movement and came up with three primary
characteristics:

The poet must "simply present" an image

The poet "does not comment"

The poet should use the words necessary to paint the image, not to fit some type of rhythmic pattern
(free verse)

Perhaps the best way to think of Imagism is to this of a photograph. The photographer captures a single,
still moment in life. Is the photo saying something? Maybe. But it says something according to how the
viewer looks at it and the meaning he or she puts behind it, not because there is a secret message in
there from the photographer.

The best way to discuss these characteristics is to look at Pound's quintessential imagist poem "In a
Station on the Metro":

The apparition of the wet faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough

This poem does not instruct. It does not force the reader to conjure up some moral lesson. It sounds just
like ordinary language. This is Imagism.

However, before anyone thinks Imagist poetry is simple, a deeper look into "In a Station on the Metro" is
warranted. This 15-word poem creates a perfect snapshot of this moment while calling to mind certain
themes, including, possibly, the temporariness of human life. The word "apparition" conjures up many
ideas about ghosts and temporariness. Then he compares the "faces in the crowd" to "Petals on a wet,
black bough," again suggesting death at its most dramatic and temporariness at the minimum. Where do
petals from a tree usual end up after a rain storm? On the ground.

Pound, although one of the movement's founders, left the Imagist movement after it became too
sentimental. Still, Imagism is considered highly influential as it provides the foundation for much
Modernist poetry.