Les Imagistes

Ezra Pound’s anthology

Des Imagistes: An Anthology, edited by Ezra Pound

When defining a new movement, I suppose it’s useful to have precedents in mind. The Imagists (or Imagistes, as they appear to have called themselves in this, a very early anthology), knew who their precedents were. Richard Aldington and H.D. (the latter short for Hilda Doolittle), both, thought their precedents were Greek.

Aldington wrote with a Grecian tragic view of life and soon-arriving death. The pitiable state of man. His poem ‘Choricos’ is about eternal rest. And it is good, effective, quietly strong. Perhaps Aldington’s own contemporaries thought this cool reflection on the inevitable somehow without polish or poise; they may even have considered it adolescent or somehow illiterate for its calm artlessness. I cannot say, given the hundred and ten years that have passed since it was written, that it strikes me as novel and fascinating. But I may tell you that it reads well, does not waste many words or much time.

Other Grecian efforts from Aldington take in Lesbos and some of the ancient poets. Their fragments; their remainders. He wears his influences heavily. His style is precise and almost succeeds in pretending to be unemotional, the effect of making passionate looks and glowers and stares, but only through one’s eyelashes.

To H.D., too, some of the same effects recur. Her poems are Grecian also (and William Carlos Williams makes the same gestures later). H.D.’s works, my favourite in many anthologies, are more direct than Aldington’s; they’re more violent. They are full not of concepts but of concrete things. Bursts of movement. Activity, life.

Here, as everywhere, she succeeds. I like her poetry very much.

F. S. Flint, perhaps most surprisingly of all, impressed me in this anthology. His poems produced and well-contained and did not waste some fine ideas. I like the idea of waking in the middle of the night, a very old dream — an ancient vision — in your head. You move towards the window. Your wife moves slowly by your side as you sit up, unwaking. Her presence does not dissuade you. What is it out there? You must go and see. The baby, in the same small room, rocks from side to side in some nightly disquiet. You ought to stop. To feed the little one, to give it some comforting. And yet you move on, ever on, towards the window. To what is out there. In pursuance of a long-forgotten dream.

That, I’m sure you’ll agree, is poetry.

And so too is Flint’s idea of London. It’s expressed perfectly fine in his other poems. But here the city simply is. Not a place filled with streams of almost inanimate people, people propelled from place to place as if on motorised walkways, but a real city. In an earlier essay, reviewing a later Imagist anthology, I suggested that Flint’s poems could still use some work. It seems he knew how to work on them all the while; it’s just that they were better in an earlier collection.

‘In a Garden’ is an interesting poem by Amy Lowell: it has some of Maugham’s stories, Noel Coward’s plays. The party-going of Vile Bodies and Anthony Powell and Henry Green. Although all it is about, really about, is a garden. A garden and a swimming pool. A pool in which the poet would like ‘you,’ whoever that is, to swim, to swim while palely white.

An interlude: I like this line of James Joyce’s ‘I Hear an Army’, also included: ‘My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?’

I also liked a fairly minor effort by Ford Madox Ford, writing here under his natal name of Ford Madox Hueffer. I liked the unhurried nature of what Ford wrote. I liked his willingness to allude to things that later Imagists would consider impure and pointless and a distraction. Rhyme and half-rhyme. Verse forms. They are not in keeping with the style, I think, with the tendency.

And this is not the best Ford ever did, by no means. But I like it still.

Ezra Pound here, dense as his poems always are are with adjectives, refers mostly not to images but to other ideas. Many of his lyrics in this book are very brief sketches. They are influenced mostly by the East. This was when Pound pretended (and pretended successfully, and to his profit) to speak and thus translate Chinese. These poems are interesting, momentarily arresting, but not of great lingering interest.

The same may be said for Allen Upward (a fine poet), whose collection of epigrams ‘Scented Leaves from a Chinese Jar’ is very much like something many of us have, at one or other time, tried to write. Little vignettes, pieces of flash fiction, with a vaguely exotic setting. Some of Upward’s succeed. For instance: ‘The sailor boy who leant over the side of the Junk of Many Pearls, and combed the green tresses of the sea with his ivory fingers, believing that he had heard the voice of a mermaid, cast his body down between the waves.’

But not all of them.

The Documents at the end of the book are very weak stuff. They’re poems, too long and rough and absurd, comical without being funny, full of ridiculous attempts at vernacular (‘Yes, God, you rotten Roman Catholic’) which come off as forced and fake. This is not the best of Imagism. It’s not the point of Imagism, one may say. (Although who better to define it than its own adherents?)

They thought they were making, inaugurating, a movement. A transformation of poetry as it stood from what it ought not have been. No wonder they were full of themselves. And no wonder, too, that the clique split and broke up (at least as far as anthology production was concerned) less than a year later.

Poets. They are not politicians.