the declarations of a literary movement, and it gave an advertising label to the work of new poems appearing in
The Egoist,
where Richard Aldington had become an editor in 1913, and in the United States in
Poetry,
where Harriet Monroe might be responsive, it was hoped, to Pound’s advice. After Pound’s anthology presenting the group,
Des Imagistes
of 1914, what had been a working program in poetry was fully launched as a literary fashion, and the idea of H.D.’s being the most perfect craftsman of the new Perfecti who had received that
consolamentum,
the “one image in a lifetime,” was to be a central tenet. The original proposition of the Image had harkened back to intellectual and emotional overtones of the Symbolist era even as it moved forward toward a functionalism that was in the Modernist aesthetic to be anti-Symbolist. Like Symbolism, Pound’s Imagism had been conceived as a cult of the elect in art. But with the Imagist anthologies of 1915, 1916, and 1917, edited by Amy Lowell, H.D., and Aldington, the Imagist movement became generalized and popularized. The ideas of image, composition by musical phrase, and verbal economy were let go into the lowest common denominators of impressionism,
vers libre,
and everyday speech. By 1937, twenty-five years after the birth of Imagism, all reference to the word
image,
once defined as presenting an intellectual and emotionalcomplex, had been dissipated, and the term had come to indicate whatever in a poem brought a picture to the mind of the reader.
It was not only in “Amygism,” as Pound dubbed the heretical popularization, that the first character of the Image as epiphany was lost, for Pound himself was to take as his project the work of small m modernists whose use of the image was profoundly anti-Imagist. For T. E. Hulme, whose work had already been published by Pound at the end of the volume
Ripostes
in 1912, and often in Eliot’s poems, the image had not been the nexus of an experience but the opportunity of an expression, of a striking figure in the author’s rhetoric. Whatever else they were, the images—in Hulme’s poem “Autumn,” the ruddy moon that may be like a red-faced farmer peering over a hedge, or in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the evening that may be like a patient etherized upon a table—are not mythopoeic in their operation or intent, not deepening our sense of the reality of moon or of evening, but present extension of their author’s wit, personal conceits. In the work of Amy Lowell, the image was imitative of sensory appearances informed by mood, a kind of literary impressionism. The persuasive personal conceit and the sensual personal impression were what most critics and readers readily accepted as the range of the image.
The modern sensibilities of Hulme, Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis excited Pound, and he sought to identify his work with theirs, but as Lewis saw in
Time and Western Man,
Pound was “A Man in Love with the Past,” and for all his efforts to make of
The Cantos
a dynamic ideogram,
The Cantos
remain a post-Symbolist work. For Pound, as for H.D., as for Lawrence or for Williams, the image was not an invention but a numinous event in language, a showing forth of a commanding Reality in the passing personal real. Like James Joyce, they sought epiphanies. “Image,” for Pound, was carefully so set off by quotation marks and spelled with the capital. Although he would disarm us with his reference to “the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart” (the reference to Dr. Bernard Hart, Fellow of University College, London, perhaps to exorcise the thought of Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna, when speaking of the term
complex
), there is, for those readers who are wary of the context of Pound’s thoughtimmersed as it is in the tradition of Poetry and the Spirit of Romance, a beckoning suggestion in the “intellectual and emotional complex” of that Intellect in which man comes close
The Egoist,
where Richard Aldington had become an editor in 1913, and in the United States in
Poetry,
where Harriet Monroe might be responsive, it was hoped, to Pound’s advice. After Pound’s anthology presenting the group,
Des Imagistes
of 1914, what had been a working program in poetry was fully launched as a literary fashion, and the idea of H.D.’s being the most perfect craftsman of the new Perfecti who had received that
consolamentum,
the “one image in a lifetime,” was to be a central tenet. The original proposition of the Image had harkened back to intellectual and emotional overtones of the Symbolist era even as it moved forward toward a functionalism that was in the Modernist aesthetic to be anti-Symbolist. Like Symbolism, Pound’s Imagism had been conceived as a cult of the elect in art. But with the Imagist anthologies of 1915, 1916, and 1917, edited by Amy Lowell, H.D., and Aldington, the Imagist movement became generalized and popularized. The ideas of image, composition by musical phrase, and verbal economy were let go into the lowest common denominators of impressionism,
vers libre,
and everyday speech. By 1937, twenty-five years after the birth of Imagism, all reference to the word
image,
once defined as presenting an intellectual and emotionalcomplex, had been dissipated, and the term had come to indicate whatever in a poem brought a picture to the mind of the reader.
It was not only in “Amygism,” as Pound dubbed the heretical popularization, that the first character of the Image as epiphany was lost, for Pound himself was to take as his project the work of small m modernists whose use of the image was profoundly anti-Imagist. For T. E. Hulme, whose work had already been published by Pound at the end of the volume
Ripostes
in 1912, and often in Eliot’s poems, the image had not been the nexus of an experience but the opportunity of an expression, of a striking figure in the author’s rhetoric. Whatever else they were, the images—in Hulme’s poem “Autumn,” the ruddy moon that may be like a red-faced farmer peering over a hedge, or in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the evening that may be like a patient etherized upon a table—are not mythopoeic in their operation or intent, not deepening our sense of the reality of moon or of evening, but present extension of their author’s wit, personal conceits. In the work of Amy Lowell, the image was imitative of sensory appearances informed by mood, a kind of literary impressionism. The persuasive personal conceit and the sensual personal impression were what most critics and readers readily accepted as the range of the image.
The modern sensibilities of Hulme, Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis excited Pound, and he sought to identify his work with theirs, but as Lewis saw in
Time and Western Man,
Pound was “A Man in Love with the Past,” and for all his efforts to make of
The Cantos
a dynamic ideogram,
The Cantos
remain a post-Symbolist work. For Pound, as for H.D., as for Lawrence or for Williams, the image was not an invention but a numinous event in language, a showing forth of a commanding Reality in the passing personal real. Like James Joyce, they sought epiphanies. “Image,” for Pound, was carefully so set off by quotation marks and spelled with the capital. Although he would disarm us with his reference to “the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart” (the reference to Dr. Bernard Hart, Fellow of University College, London, perhaps to exorcise the thought of Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna, when speaking of the term
complex
), there is, for those readers who are wary of the context of Pound’s thoughtimmersed as it is in the tradition of Poetry and the Spirit of Romance, a beckoning suggestion in the “intellectual and emotional complex” of that Intellect in which man comes close
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