Imagist Poets
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Imagism was an Anglo-American poetry movement around 1912-1917 that although short lived was influential on modern poetry. Its earliest most famous exponent was Ezra Pound and later Amy Lowell who both outlined the rules for the movement which remain central to current poetry practise and are still imparted to anyone attending poetry workshops. These rules included using only those words that were absolutely necessary, employing the exact word including common speech - not the decorative one, a total freedom of subject matter, making everything concrete - not abstract, creating new rhythms and most important of all was to concentrate everything the poet wished to communicate in a precise image. As Pound said, “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.” Despite this radical departure from the Romantics and the Victorian poets that preceded them, Imagists were also classicists reviving the poetry of Sapho and other ancient Greek and Roman as well as Japanese and Chinese verse and 15th century French poetry which often compressed expression to its very essence. This interest in the ancients might seem conservative but the movement was hugely progressive not least for its inclusion of a number of women writers.
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11th September 1881 in Eastwood, a small mining village in Nottinghamshire, in the English Midlands. Despite ill health as a child and a comparatively disadvantageous position in society, he became a teacher in 1908, and took up a post in a school in Croydon, south of London. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, and from then until his death he wrote feverishly, producing poetry, novels, essays, plays travel books and short stories, while travelling around the world, settling for periods in Italy, New Mexico and Mexico. He married Frieda Weekley in 1914 and died of tuberculosis in 1930.
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Imagist Poets - D. H. Lawrence
Imagist Poets, 1916, An Annual Anthology
Imagism was an Anglo-American poetry movement around 1912-1917 that although short lived was influential on modern poetry. Its earliest most famous exponent was Ezra Pound and later Amy Lowell who both outlined the rules for the movement which remain central to current poetry practise and are still imparted to anyone attending poetry workshops. These rules included using only those words that were absolutely necessary, employing the exact word including common speech - not the decorative one, a total freedom of subject matter, making everything concrete - not abstract, creating new rhythms and most important of all was to concentrate everything the poet wished to communicate in a precise image. As Pound said, It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.
Despite this radical departure from the Romantics and the Victorian poets that preceded them, Imagists were also classicists reviving the poetry of Sapho and other ancient Greek and Roman as well as Japanese and Chinese verse and 15th century French poetry which often compressed expression to its very essence. This interest in the ancients might seem conservative but the movement was hugely progressive not least for its inclusion of a number of women writers.
PREFACE
In bringing the second volume of Some Imagist Poets before the public, the authors wish to express their gratitude for the interest which the 1915 volume aroused. The discussion of it was widespread,
and even those critics out of sympathy with Imagist tenets accorded it much space. In the Preface to that book, we endeavoured to present those tenets in a succinct form. But the very brevity we employed has lead to a great deal of misunderstanding. We have decided, therefore, to explain the laws which govern us a little more fully. A few people may understand, and the rest can merely misunderstand again, a result to which we are quite accustomed.
In the first place Imagism
does not mean merely the presentation of pictures. Imagism
refers to the manner of presentation, not to the subject. It means a clear presentation of whatever the author wishes to convey. Now he may wish to convey a mood of indecision, in which case the poem should be indecisive; he may wish to bring before his reader the constantly shifting and changing lights over a landscape, or the varying attitudes of mind of a person under strong emotion, then his poem must shift and change to present this clearly. The exact
word does not mean the word which exactly describes the object in itself, it means the exact
word which brings the effect of that object before the reader as it presented itself to the poet's mind at the time of writing the poem. Imagists deal but little with similes, although much of their poetry is metaphorical. The reason for this is that while acknowledging the figure to be an integral part of all poetry, they feel that the constant imposing of one figure upon another in the same poem blurs the central effect.
The great French critic,