Revolt Against Victorian Romantic Tradition
The Imagists were a group of poets who initiated the first significant revolt against the Victorian Romantic poetic tradition. Their influence spanned approximately a decade, from 1912 to 1922.
They believed that Georgian poetry lacked new vitality and often modified or delimited the poetic inheritance of the nineteenth century rather than abandoning it for a radically different approach.
Key Figures and Their Limitations
Neither Masefield, whose poetry is realistic in subject and vocabulary, nor De la Mare, considered the last true romantic poet of England, pointed toward new directions in English poetry.
The poetic revolution initiated by the Imagists, beginning just before the First World War and further encouraged by The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, favored an older tradition in English poetry over the Victorian Romantic tradition.
Imagist Beliefs and Techniques
The Romantic and Victorian poets saw poetry as a means of self-expression, appealing to the cultivated sensibility of their readers. Their themes often dealt with personal hopes and fears, indulging in nostalgia and self-pity, which gave Victorian poetry a tendency toward elegy.
In contrast, the Imagists believed that the function of poetry was not self-expression but the precise fusion of meaning in language. Poems, to them, were works of art rather than emotional autobiographies or rhetorical prophecies.
Imagist Principles
Imagist poetry emphasized the precise and passionate exploration of experience. The poets strove for poetic statements that were both deeply felt and desperately accurate, even if it required twisting the language into new shapes.
They sought the fusion of thought and emotion found among the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century.
Role of the Poet
The Imagists did not view the poet as a sweet singer whose function was to render personal emotions in sweet verse and conventional imagery. Instead, they saw the poet as an explorer of experience.
Therefore, the poet must use language to build rich patterns of meaning that require close attention before they are communicated.
The rebels were conscious that the poetry of their time represented the final ebb of the Victorian Romantic tradition, and they believed the time was ripe to give a new direction to English poetry.
New Movement and Its Goals
The new movement began with a revolt against every kind of sweet verbal impression and romantic egotism that persisted throughout the nineteenth century.
Its originator, T. E. Hulme, who was killed in war in 1917, declared his preference for precise and disciplined classicism over sloppy romanticism. He advocated for hardness and precision of imagery to capture the exact curve of the thing, along with subtler and more flexible rhythms.
With the help of Ezra Pound, who came from America, Hulme founded the movement called Imagism.
Imagist Rules
Defining the Imagists, Pound wrote in 1912: "They are in opposition to the numerous and unassembled writers who busy themselves with dull and interminable effusions, and who seem to think that a man can write a good long poem before he learns to write a good short one, or even before he learns to produce a good single line."
Giving a fuller statement of the aims of the Imagist movement, F. S. Flint pointed out in 1913 that the three rules the Imagists observed were:
- Direct treatment of the "thing"
- To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation
- To compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome
Pound emphasized that the Imagists should "use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something," and that they should avoid abstraction.
Influence and Spread
The Imagist movement spread in England and America, helped by the seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry and nineteenth-century symbolists, who contributed their techniques and attitudes to the revolution.
Key Figures and Their Contributions
The leader of the Imagists was Ezra Pound. Other poets included in this group were F. S. Flint, Richard Aldington, F. M. Hueffer, James Joyce, Allan Upward, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams.
Instead of imitating the English romantics like the Georgians, the Imagists aimed to reproduce the qualities of Ancient Greek and Chinese poetry. They aimed for hard, clear, and brilliant effects instead of the soft, dreamy vagueness of the English nineteenth century.
Imagist Aims
The aims of the Imagists, expressed in the introduction to Some Imagist Poets (1915), can be summarized as follows:
- To use the language of common speech but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly exact, nor the merely decorative word
- To produce poetry that is hard and clear, and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous
- To create new rhythms and not to copy old rhythms which merely echo old ones
Influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Imagists were greatly influenced by the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which appeared in 1918, thirty years after the poet's death. Hopkins' poetry's absence of laxness, clear use of words and rhythms, and control by the poet to produce the desired effect made an immediate appeal to the new poets.
Subject Matter and Modern Consciousness
Regarding the subject matter of poetry, the Imagists believed there was no longer a general public of poetry lovers and focused on expressing the modern consciousness for their own satisfaction and that of their friends.
They gave up the old pretence that humanity was steadily progressing towards a millennium. Instead, they recognized that in the new dark age of barbarism and vulgarity, it is the duty of the enlightened few to protect culture and escape the spiritual degradation of a commercialized world.
Unlike the aesthetes of the last decade of the nineteenth century, who withdrew into an ivory tower, the Imagists faced new problems and tried to create a precise and concentrated expression, a new sort of consciousness because the traditional poetic techniques were inadequate for that purpose.
Opposed to the romantic view of man as "an infinite reservoir of possibilities," they looked upon him as a very imperfect creature "intrinsically limited but disciplined by order."
Challenges and Limitations
The Imagists could not adequately tackle contemporary problems because they lived too much among books, were rather irresponsible in their conduct, lacked sharp intellect, and were not in close contact with actualities.
As a result, their poetry is as nerveless and artificial as the neo-romantic poetry of the Georgians. However, they deserve credit for showing that English poetry needed a new technique and that unnecessary rules and a burdensome mass of dead associations must be removed.
Legacy and Contribution
The poets belonging to the Imagist group did not produce great poetry for the reasons stated above. Ezra Pound is a poet of real originality, but his extensive and rather undigested learning makes his poems difficult to understand and gives them an air of pedantry.
His greatest contribution to modern poetry is his development of an unrhymed free verse and other metrical experiments, which influenced T. S. Eliot.
David Herbert Lawrence
The most important writer directly connected with the Imagists, though not a regular member of their group, was David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930). He contributed to both Georgian poetry and the Imagist anthologies.
Most of his mature poetry deals with the theme of the duel of sex, a conflict of love and hate between man and wife, and expresses an annihilation of the ego and a sort of mystical rebirth or regeneration.
His most remarkable poem Manifesto ends with a beautiful description of the universe where all human beings have completely realized their individualities.
In the last year of his life, when he was dying of consumption, Lawrence's poems dealt with the themes of death and eternity.
Lawrence significantly contributed to rebuilding English poetry, and as a critic, he set before the English poets an ideal that has greatly influenced modern English poets.
Lawrence's Ideal for Poetry
As a critic, David Herbert Lawrence set an ideal for poetry in the age of stark, unlovely actualities: a stark directness, without any shadow of a lie or deflection anywhere.
He emphasized that everything could go, but this stark, bare, rocky directness of statement alone makes poetry today.
Conclusion
The Imagists, through their revolt against Victorian Romantic traditions and their emphasis on precise language, clear imagery, and new rhythms, laid the foundation for modernist poetry in the twentieth century.
While they faced challenges and did not always achieve greatness in their own works, their influence on poets like Ezra Pound and their contributions to poetic theory and technique are enduring.
Their rejection of sentimentalism and their focus on the exploration of experience and precise expression continue to resonate in modern poetry.
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