her I was sorry I missed her lecture on
Imagism the
A related technique in poetry was <IR>
IMAGISM </IR> .
While all those writers associated with
imagism propagandized vigorously for their beliefs, Pound, who had become editor of Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine, published therein a number of manifestoes as well as his own and his friends ' poems.
Upward, an important but largely forgotten figure in early British modernism who helped originate
imagism and who influenced Pound's Cantos,(25) uses images from an advertising poster as the substance of a vaguely imagistic poem.
(1.) "[T]he weakness of
Imagism has been this affectation and feminine self-love, the strength of
Imagism its demand that one actually look." From The Selected Letters of George Oppen, edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 146.
After 1917,
imagism as a movement dissolved, but by then its values were widely established.
An early friend of Ezra Pound, Williams was influenced by
imagism but scorned Pound both for his expatriatism and for his role as aesthete.
We could see in this early poem a debt to
imagism. If, as Pound suggested,
imagism was partly concerned with the appreciation of invisible energies, we might locate the unseen energy in the currents moving so imperceptibly that the boats appear to possess a life of their own.
Ignatow was among the poets who frequented Greenwich Village in the late 1930s and early 1940s and, under the tutelage of William Carlos Williams, espoused the tenets of <IR>
IMAGISM </IR> .
At one time married to the American poet Hilda Doolittle, Aldington was a member of the group that introduced
imagism. He was among those who, after World War I, found England barren and sterile.
The theme of movement is part of the sensuality of her "The Way Through," and its wit of tedium vitae: "The water flies in the halfwit's eye/who didn't move fast enough/'Who do you think I am, a horse?'/but we made it--." The naturalism of this landscape is radically altered by the staggering subjectivity of the end, and its uneconomical luxuries: "Drown us, lose us,/rain, let us loose, so,/to lose ourselves, to career/up the plunge of the hill." The end is unpunctuated ecstasy because the poem has veered so far away from any
imagism a la H.D., which it might superficially resemble.
His verse ranged from exercises in
imagism to espousal of social causes.