A Few Thoughts on Imagism per se

It’s interesting how few of the original Imagist poets of the early 20th century actually uphold Imagist principles in their poems of the time.  Ezra Pound summed these principles up in his essay “A Retrospect” (1918), which recapitulates his “A Few Don’ts” (1913).  The original principles stretch back to 1912, formulated by Pound, H.D., and Richard Aldington:

1. Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

They indicate a minimalist free-verse style (nos. 2-3) where the concrete “thing” itself is brought across without — one would think — figurative language like metaphor.  Because metaphor inherently treats the “thing” as if it were something other than itself, and therefore cannot be considered as “direct treatment.”  Pound himself emphasizes this later in the essay when he writes,

Don’t use such an expression as “dim lands of peace.” It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.

Go in fear of abstractions.

In other words, the dim land is just the dim land; it’s not a metaphor for peace, which makes the dim land into an abstraction, instead of the “thing” itself.  Why it should still function as a symbol, however, seems to muddy the waters, and Pound’s own most famous short Imagist poem, “In a Station of the Metro” goes on to violate principle no. 1:

The apparition      of these faces      in the crowd   :
Petals      on a wet, black      bough   .

              [with Pound’s original spacing and punctuation]

Of course, the poem has been analyzed a million times already, so I’ll just point out that line one, describing the faces as an “apparition,” makes the “thing” an abstract idea — they are the apparition of something rather than the concrete description of actual faces.  Then, in line two we get what seems like the stronger, actual image, except that there is no actual flowering tree-branch in the Metro station.  It is an analogue, a metaphor for the faces appearing out of the haze, which are each like flower petals.  The colon (elsewhere rendered as a semi-colon) creates the metaphoric connection, or, if the punctuation can even be thought of as standing in for the word “like,” then a simile.  Thus, there is no “direct treatment of the ‘thing’” here; instead an abstract comparison.

It is H.D.’s poem “Evening” that I think maybe most comes close to exhibiting true Imagism, which can be further described in Pound’s additional assertion in “A Few Don’ts” that “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”  I suspect H.D. was probably more instrumental in formulating these ideas than many now imagine, because it is her poems that often most embody their intent (but of course, it was Pound who was the famous self-promoter).  In “Evening,” H.D. gives us not quite an instant in time, but rather a few hours perhaps in the late evening as the sun goes down and the shadows lengthen, and nothing else (yet so much more in her poem as poem).  The curling flower petals and darkening night need not be seen as metaphoric or symbolic of anything, though they could secondarily be read that way.

F. S. Flint’s Imagist poems similarly come close to true Imagism, for example much of his “Four Poems in Unrhymed Cadence” (1913).  No. I begins,

London, my beautiful,
it is not the sunset
nor the pale green sky
shimmering through the curtain
of the silver birch. . .

Here, aside from the use of apostrophe (the address to London), this first unrhymed poem not only gives us “the sequence of the musical phrase, [rather than the] sequence of a metronome,” but it is loaded with real images.  Sometimes they connect with the speaker’s internal feelings, but they are not metaphors for them.

But, when you get to the other early Imagists, there’s metaphor practically everywhere you look.  One would think Richard Aldington’s sequence “Images” (1915) would contain just what it says, but it’s metaphor and simile, simile and metaphor and symbol.  No. I, immediately, is a simile rather than an image due to its opening on the word “like”:

Like a gondola of green scented fruits     
Drifting along the dank canals of Venice,     
You, O exquisite one,     
Have entered into my desolate city.

In other words, there is no actual drifting gondola here; it’s simply an abstract comparison to the arrival of the addressed lover.  Similarly, to pick just one further example (though any number of them would do), no. V reads:

The red deer are high on the mountain,     
They are beyond the last pine trees.     
And my desires have run with them.

So far so good in the first two lines, anyway — there’s a true image there of deer congregating near mountain pines trees.  But then the speaker fancies that his “desires” have the same ability to run with the deer, which of course they do not, and here we are back in the abstract: metaphor, or really personification.

What of that other original Imagist, T. E. Hulme?  Pound wrote in “A Retrospect,” “The first use of the word ‘Imagiste’ was in my note to T. E. Hulme’s five poems, printed at the end of my Ripostes in the autumn of 1912.”  The first Hulme poem there is “Autumn,” which again serves as a good example, because the same thing is going on in all five.  The first three lines of “Autumn” read:

A touch of cold in the Autumn night—
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge

If it stopped there, we would almost have a clear image of the moon in the cold sky, except for the personification of it intentionally leaning.  But, from the next line we see that that was Hulme’s intent all along, as the poem continues:

Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

So the moon is not the moon (is not the direct treatment of the thing) but is like a farmer leaning, and then there are stars that have the faces of children.  A simile in the first instance and a metaphor in the second, with personification mixed in throughout.

None of this is to say that any of these Hulme pieces or any of the above are bad poems.  Nor is it to say that metaphor or figurative language is a bad thing — indeed, where would poetry be without it.  But it’s funny how rarely the original Imagists actually wrote true images.  Even H.D.’s “Sea Poppies,” which mostly does brilliantly just describe the sea poppies themselves, calls them “treasure” as they lie on the shore and likens their bright color to “fire upon leaf.”  Is imagism really the goal?  It doesn’t have to be, though there is something to be said for the principles that H.D., Aldington, and Pound formulated in 1912, in regard to direct, sensory, concrete description that avoids metaphor, simile, personification, or apostrophe.  And it’s a lot harder to do than it initially seems.  But there’s also something static about the image, even if ideally it embeds within itself a whole “complex” —  and H.D.’s “Evening” demonstrates how to graph movement imagistically (rather than staying stuck in the “instant”).  We can also think of the directions in which William Carlos Williams took the thing, the ways in which Lorine Niedecker makes imagism kinetic, or how imagism shows up in the work of a contemporary poet like Harryette Mullen (e.g., in her tankas).

Once learned (true imagism), who wants to stay static, but it is still a poetic skill worth learning.  It connects us to the world, to the environment, to non-human animals, to plant life, or even to the concrete concrete of a city.  Connecting us to the world, it breaks us out of ego, out of our own heads and feelings, which is sometimes a good thing to do.  It is a mode we can return to and maybe interlayer with other poetic modes as our deepening compositional experience enables.  Okay, poetics class over — now go do whatever you want.