![]() Modernism is further characterized by a systematic rejection of social and literary norm. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. 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. 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 was the time when writers synonymous with Modernism, such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. ![]() The most exemplified phase of Modernism, referred to as “High Modernism,” occurred during the inter-war years (1918-1939). 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. ModernismĪlthough Queen Victoria died in 1901, Modernism can be said to have been born from contrarian attitudes of the previous centuries. 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. He then juxtaposes the faces of these travelers with delicate pedals on a black surface. Through these fleeting two lines, the poet creates the image in the reader’s mind of myriad travelers in a Metro station. The apparition of these faces in the crowd in Hamilton)Īn often-anthologized example of a short Imagist poem is Pound’s “In the Station of the Metro”: (6) Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry. (5) To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art. 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. (4) To present an image (hence the name: “Imagist”). 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. It is not good art to write badly about aeroplanes and automobiles nor is it necessarily bad art to write well about the past. (3) To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject. ![]() In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. We fight for it as a principle of liberty. We do not insist upon “free-verse” as the only method of writing poetry. (2) To create new rhythms–as the expression of new moods–and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. (1) To use the language of common speech, but always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, not the merely decorative word. He later expanded on these principles in the preface to Des Imagistes (an anthology of Imagist poetry) listing what he called “essentials” of Imagism: As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.Direct treatment of “thing,” whether subjective or objective.In an interview in Poetry magazine published in 1913, Pound delineated the following principles of Imagism: For Pound, likewise, the words of the poet should evoke the very physical object his was writingĪbout. Fenollosa observed that certain Chinese characters looked like the idea they expressed (Pound 19). Pound himself was influenced by Chinese poetry thanks to Ernest Fenollosa’s Essay on the Chinese Written Character. 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 argued that the appearance of the characters for “man,” “tree,” and “sun” each reflected their meaning.Įzra Pound, an American-born cosmopolitan poet, was a towering figure of Modernism and a great propagator of Imagism. In this way, Imagist poetry is similar to the Japanese Haiku they are brief renderings of some sort of poetic scene. ![]() As with all of Modernism, Imagism implicitly rejected Victorian poetry, which tended toward narrative. The essential idea was to re-create the physical experience of an object through words. Imagism was a sub-genre of Modernism concerned with creating clear imagery with sharp language.
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