Modernism (The Imagists and more)

As you have seen with some of this initial reading, Modernism ushers in a style of poetry and thinking that sought, actively in some cases, to erase or turn a back on many of the main philosophies of the Romantic Tradition. This can be evidenced in the Ezra Pound poem "The Pact," which was written to Walt Whitman, whom Pound often criticized. Pound along with others (H. D. among them) championed a "school" of poetry known as imagism. The following excerpt from some of Pound's essays dictates three of the main philosophies of imagism (see bolded portion of the essay). Pound, as well as being a strong poet, was a figure that was not only important in scholarship/criticism, and for championing a poetic style/"school", but he was also responsible for discovering poets and helping gain them noteriety and furthering their careers. Famously, Pound severely edited T. S. Eliot's "The wasteland," a poem that has become "THE" poem that is associated with Modernism as a movement - it is the public face of Modernism, as it were.

The Modern period was also known as being a period in which radical experimentation takes place, with kanguage, syntax, the primacy of the self as represented by the poet's various speakers'. Think of the vast array of styles we've seen, just in the last week--from WCW's "no ideas but in things," to Stein's language object experiments, to Pound and Eliot's highly and densely Allusive collage-style poems, to Pound's one-image poem "In a Station of the Metro." And this is just the beginning; we'll see more variances as we stay with the Moderns for a couple more weeks.


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Ezra Pound - "A Retrospect"

[A group of early essays and notes which appeared under this title in Pavannes and Divagations (1918). 'A Few Don'ts' was first printed in Poetry, I, 6 (March 1913).

There has been so much scribbling about a new fashion in poetry, that I may perhaps be pardoned this brief recapitulation and retrospect.

In the spring or early summer of 1912, 'H.D.', Richard Aldington and myself decided that we were agreed upon the three principles following:

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.

Upon many points of taste and of predilection we differed, but agreeing upon these three positions we thought we had as much right to a group name, at least as much right, as a number of French 'schools' proclaimed by Mr Flint in the August number of Harold Monro's magazine for 1911.

This school has since been 'joined' or 'followed' by numerous people who, whatever their merits, do not show any signs of agreeing with the second specification. Indeed vers libre has become as prolix and as verbose as any of the flaccid varieties that preceded it. It has brought faults of its own. The actual language and phrasing is often as bad as that of our elders without even the excuse that the words are shovelled in to fill a metric pattern or to complete the noise of a rhyme-sound. Whether or no the phrases followed by the followers are musical must be left to the reader's decision. At times I can find a marked metre in 'vers libres', as stale and hackneyed as any pseudo-Swinburnian, at times the writers seem to follow no musical structure whatever. But it is, on the whole, good that the field should be ploughed. Perhaps a few good poems have come from the new method, and if so it is justified.

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As to Twentieth century poetry, and the poetry which I expect to see written during the next decade or so, it will, I think, move against poppy-cock, it will be harder and saner, it will be what Mr Hewlett calls 'nearer the bone'. It will be as much like granite as it can be, its force will lie in its truth, its interpretative power (of course, poetic force does always rest there); I mean it will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it. At least for myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither.

What is there now, in 1917, to be added?