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The Movement towards Imagism

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Poetry, Painting and Ideas, 1885–1914

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Abstract

Chapter 6 examined the Symbolist beliefs which pervade Pound’s pre-Imagist poetry. My aim in this chapter is to emphasise the essential continuity of these throughout Pound’s Imagist/Vorticist period, despite superficial changes in the vocabulary in which they were expressed. I shall conclude by considering the relationship between Pound’s poetry and that of the other Imagists and adumbrate the future development of Imagism into Objectivist poetry.

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Notes

  1. Pound’s term for them in 1912; see his Shorter Poems, 269.

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  2. See Wallace Martin, ‘The Sources of the Imagist Aesthetic’, PMLA, 85 (1970) 198.

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  3. Ibid., 196, 201–2.

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  4. MSS in Keele University Library; sheets corresponding to FS, 90, 80–1. 5. Théodule Ribot, L’Évolution des idées générales (Paris, 1897) 15.

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  5. Ibid., 127–8.

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  6. Ibid., 147, 253.

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  7. Ibid., 151–4 (quotations from 153); quoted also by Martin, ‘Sources of the Imagist Aesthetic’, PMLA, 85, p. 200.

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  8. Cf. FS, 15–20, 22–3. Martin (PMLA, 85, p. 201) indicates, but gives no account of, Hulme’s interest in Gaultier.

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  9. Jules de Gaultier, Le Bovarysme (1892; 2nd edn, Paris, 1902) 60–2.

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  10. See, for example, ibid., 195–8, 210–12, 245–6.

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  11. Ibid., 272–3, 281–2, 294–8.

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  12. Cf. Spec, 223 §2, 229§2–4, 230 §2. Hulme’s use of ‘solid bank’, ‘pier’, derives from Gaultier’s ‘digue’ in Le Bovarysme, 282. Compare Hulme’s attack on Haldane’s Idealism in FS, 8–9, 12–13.

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  13. Cf. FS, 13–14; and Hulme, ‘The New Philosophy’, New Age, V (1 July 1909) 198. A major source, as yet unnoticed, for Hulme’s argument on the crucial importance of authentic perceptual experience in creating a vivid, original style appears to be Schopenhauer. There are astonishingly close verbal parallels between Hulme’s phraseology and that in WWR, II, 71–3. The whole of Chapter 7, ‘On the Relation of Knowledge of Perception to Abstract Knowledge’ (II, 71–90) is relevant.

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  14. Cf. FS, 46–55. Hulme’s quotations from Laplace and Huxley derive from Bergson’s L’Évolution créatrice (1907), repr. in Œuvres (Paris, 1959) 526–7.

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  15. I disagree therefore with Stanley K. Coffman’s emphasis in Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry (1951; repr. New York, 1972) 58, 81–4.

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  16. See, for example, Michael Roberts, T. E. Hulme (1938); and Alun R. Jones, The Life and Opinions of T. E. Hulme (1960). The best critical accounts of Hulme are those by Wallace Martin in The ‘New Age’ under Orage: Chapters in English Cultural History (Manchester, 1967), and ‘Sources of the Imagist Aesthetic’, PMLA, 85, pp. 196–204. See also J. B. Harmer, Victory in Limbo: Imagism 1908–1917 (1975); and Coffman, Imagism.

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  17. Martin, The ‘New Age’ under Orage, 172.

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  18. Both claim that Hulme was not wholeheartedly impressed by Bergson’s ideas (Roberts, Hulme, 86; Jones, Life and Opinions of Hulme, 62, 65). Jones adds preposterously that ‘Bergson’s philosophy, properly interpreted in terms of literature, leads, inevitably, to the kind of novels written by Proust’ (ibid., 43).

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  19. See FS, 72 (quoted infra, pp. 76–7).

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  20. Hulme never severed the connection completely, however; he, Flint and Pound contributed to The Book of the Poets’ Club at Christmas 1909.

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  21. My discussion is confined to Hulme and Flint. The work of the others does not repay investigation; for an account see Harmer, Victory in Limbo.

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  22. On the question of indebtedness and who influenced whom (or Hulme?) see Martin’s wise comments in The ‘New Age’ under Orage, 149–50, and A Catalogue of the Imagist Poets, ed. J. H. Woolmer (New York, 1966) 11; Christopher Middleton’s cogent ‘Documents on Imagism from the Papers of F. S. Flint’, Review, XV (Apr 1965) 33–51; and the rather sterile discussion in Cyrena Pondrom’s ‘Hulme’s “A Lecture on Modern Poetry” and The Birth of Imagism’, Papers on Language and Literature, V (1969) 465–70.

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  23. Alun Jones, ‘Imagism: a Unity of Gesture’, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies: 7. American Poetry (1965) 120. Hulme-paraphrases Cézanne’s remark, recorded by Denis: ‘something solid and durable, like the art of the museums’.

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  24. Spec, 125. Hulme could admittedly have first read Denis’s article on Cézanne in L’Occident, Sep. 1907, or, more accessibly, in Roger Fry’s translation in the Burlington Magazine, XVI (Jan, Feb 1910) 207–19, 275–80. There is, however, no evidence in Hulme’s writings prior to 1912 to suggest an awareness of developments in contemporary European art.

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  25. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du Cubisme (Paris, 1912); English trs., Cubism (1913), referred to in Spec, 103.

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  26. Jones: ‘Imagism’, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies: 7, 126; and Life and Opinions of Hulme, 93.

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  27. Jones, ‘Imagism’, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies: 7, 127.

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  28. See Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age, 2 vols (London, Berkeley Calif., and Los Angeles, 1976) 165ff., 172–6, 454–82.

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  29. Jones, Life and Opinions of Hulme, 104.

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  30. See William C. Wees, ‘England’s Avant-Garde: The Futurist-Vorticist Phase’, Western Humanities Review, XXI (1967) 121; and Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art, 139. Cf. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1908), 3rd edn (Munich, 1910), trs. Michael Bullock as Abstraction and Empathy (1953).

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  31. Cf. TLS from Hulme to Flint, postmarked 21 Feb 1913, HRC, Texas. Against D. L. Murray’s chronologically dubious recollection (quoted in Jones, Life and Opinions of Hulme, 92) that as early as autumn 1911 Hulme was inspired by the ‘non-humanistic’ plastique of the Diaghilev Ballet should be set the contemporary evidence of Hulme’s ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ (Nov–Dec 1911), where he cites approvingly Berenson’s empathetic aesthetics, which is completely congruent with the views of Bergson and Lipps. Cf. Spec, 168, with Bernhard Berenson, The Florentine Painters (1896), repr. in The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (1960) 55–6, and Theodor Lipps, Ästhetik: Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst, 2 vols (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1903–6) I, 140.

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  32. Cf., for example, Bergson, Œuvres, 74–80, 755–60, 1377–92, 1410–16.

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  33. Ibid., 36–9.

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  34. Ibid., 80–92, 495–578, 747–807.

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  35. Ibid., 319–21, 460, 630–2.

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  36. Ibid., 86–7. Nietzsche had commented incisively on language’s ineluctable glossing over of individual qualities in the interests of generally intelligible communication, and on the blurring of perceptual clarity in linguistic abstraction and conceptualisation in ‘Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinn’ (1873), WdB, III, 309–22. See particularly 313ff.

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  37. Bergson, Œuvres, 103–14, 277.

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  38. Ibid., 85.

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  39. Cf. WWR, I, 176–8; II, 283–92. Schopenhauer’s explanation of this state of affairs is, however, given a more élitist and sociological cast.

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  40. Bergson, Œuvres, 458–62. 1370–3.

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  41. Ibid., 1373.

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  42. Ibid., 1360–5.

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  43. Ibid., 1394, 1395. Cf. 645 and 784–5, where ‘intuition’ is again defined as ‘sympathie’.

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  44. Lipps, Ästhetik, I, 91–4. (All translations mine.)

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  45. Ibid., 106–7.

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  46. Ibid., 140; II, 28–32.

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  47. Ibid., 25.

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  48. Ibid., I, 120; cf. I 192.

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  49. Ibid., II, 88; cf. I, 122–5, 173.

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  50. His potted history of French developments derives often verbatim from André Beaunier, La Poésie nouvelle, 2nd edn (Paris, 1902) 10–11, 31–2, 44. For his debt to Gustave Kahn, see Wallace Martin, The ‘New Age’ under Orage, 157–8.

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  51. FS, 68, 70–2; quotations from 68, 72, 71. Tom Gibbons, Rooms in the Darwin Hotel (Nedlands, Western Australia, 1973) 74–6, 96–7, also remarks on the similarity with Symons.

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  52. FS, 70, 71–2. For Symons’s suspicion of vers libre see his review of Verlaine’s Bonheur, Academy, XXXIX (18 Apr 1891) 362; and ‘Mr Henley’s Poetry’, Fortnightly Review, n.s., LII (Aug 1892) 192.

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  53. Martin, ‘Sources of the Imagist Aesthetic’, PMLA, 85, pp. 199, 200–1, has noted Hulme’s reading of Ribot’s Essai sur l’imagination créatrice but argues for an extended influence only in Pound’s case. Hulme’s indebtedness is, I believe, much clearer and more important.

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  54. Théodule Ribot, Essai sur l’imagination créatrice (1900), 6th edn (Paris, 1921) 169.

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  55. Ibid., 164.

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  56. Ibid., 153–4.

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  57. Bergson, Œuvres, 1401–2.

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  58. Ibid., 15–16.

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  59. Ibid., 14 (emphasis added).

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  60. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, 159, 163.

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  61. Alan Robinson, ‘New Sources for Imagism’, Notes and Queries, n.s., XXVII (1980) 238–40. For further instances of Hulme’s application of the ‘counter’ approach, see FS, 77–9, 81, 9–11; Spec, 134–5, 151–2, 165–6.

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  62. For discussion of this point see Robinson, ‘New Sources for Imagism’, Notes and Queries, n.s., XXVII, 238–40.

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  63. On the dustjacket of Pound’s Ripostes (Oct 1912), in which Hulme’s ‘Complete Poetical Works’ were reprinted from the New Age, 25 Jan 1912, Hulme is termed a ‘metaphysician’.

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  64. Cf. Spec, 154, with Bergson, Œuvres, 461.

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  65. Cf. his remarks on the ‘classical style’ (Spec, 120) and on ‘modern’ style (FS, 73). Another possible influence on Hulme’s tone is the Japanese haikai, light or humorous linked-verse, discussed by the ‘forgotten school’ (cf. n. 81).

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  66. See Jones, Life and Opinions of Hulme, 177, 178.

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  67. MS loose sheet in Keele University Library.

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  68. See Jones, Life and Opinions of Hulme, 176; Spec, 267; FS, 217.

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  69. FS, 216, 214; cf. Some Imagist Poets: An Anthology (Boston, Mass., and New York, 1915) 28.

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  70. FS, 217; Jones, Life and Opinions of Hulme, 179, corrected by MS reading at Keele; FS, 218.

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  71. TS with A additions in HRC, Texas. Dated by references to two poems, ‘To the Winds’ (9 Apr 1907) and ‘Limitations’ (12 Apr 1907), there implied to be recently composed.

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  72. The passage beginning ‘La contemplation des objets’, ending with ‘déchiffrements’, in Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris, [1951]) 869. Flint selects another passage from Mallarmé’s interview with Huret as the epigraph to ‘Recent Verse’, New Age, III (15 Aug 1908) 312–13; cf. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, 867.

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  73. Pound, ‘A Few Don’ts’ (1913), repr. in Literary Essays 5.

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  74. F. S. Flint, ‘Recent Verse’, New Age, III (29 Aug 1908) 352–3.

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  75. Flint alludes to Yeats’s ‘Magic’, repr. in Essays and Introductions, 48, and cites ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’, repr. ibid., 155, and The Countess Cathleen, ll. 946–8, Variorum Plays, 169. He had castigated ‘concrete’ symbolism earlier in ‘Of the thing called “symbolism”’, [3] and [4].

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  76. Flint, ‘Recent Verse’, New Age, III, 352–3. On his distrust of hermetic symbolism, see ‘Verse’, New Age, V (30 Sep 1909) 412.

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  77. Flint, ‘Recent Verse’, New Age, III, 352. Flint is alluding also to Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poetry’; see English Critical Essays: Nineteenth Centuy, ed. Edmund D. Jones (1971) 110.

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  78. Flint, ‘Recent Verse’, New Age, III, 353.

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  79. Cf. for example his remarks on H. B. Binn’s The Good Companions, Rhys’s The Masque of the Grail, and a Miss Skovgaard-Pedersen’s Sea-Dreams, and Others, in ‘Recent Verse’, New Age, III (15, 29 Aug 1908) 313, 353, and IV (24 Dec 1908) 186. For Flint’s defence contra Ford of escapism see his ‘Verse’, New Age; VI (6 Jan 1910) 234.

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  80. This was apparently the forgotten school’s principal area of activity. Experiments in vers libre accompanied those in the Japanese tanka and haikai forms, ‘poems in a sacred Hebrew form, of which “This is the House that Jack Built” is a perfect model’ and ‘rhymeless poems like Hulme’s “Autumn”’; see F. S. Flint, ‘The History of Imagism’, Egoist, II (1 May 1915) 71.

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  81. F. S. Flint, ‘Recent Verse’, New Age, III (11 July 1908) 212–13.

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  82. Flint, ‘Recent Verse’, New Age, III, 312. Cf. his ‘Recent Verse’, New Age, IV (26 Nov. 1908) 95; ‘Verse’, New Age, V (30 Sep 1909) 412, and VI, 234. His survey of French poets — ‘Contemporary French Poetry’, Poetry Review, I (1912) 355–414 — is essentially a study of how they use vers libre.

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  83. F. S. Flint, In the Net of the Stars (1909) 61–2.

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  84. Ibid., 14–15. For other examples of the theme ofescapist vision, see ‘As I Paced the Streets’, ‘Sunday in London’ and ‘The Heart’s Hunger’: ibid., 11–12, 13, 15–16.

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  85. See ‘Foreword’, ibid., 43.

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  86. Ibid., 30–1; cf. Pound, ‘Apparuit’, in Early Poems, 182–3.

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  87. Flint, In the Net, 43–56; cf. Pound, Early Poems, 117–20. The derivativeness is exacerbated by an obvious debt in the diction of the more sensual poems to the Song of Solomon, although this is tempered by the chaster imagery of Symbolist art.

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  88. See Flint, In the Net, 46–7, 45–6.

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  89. See, for example, Verlaine’s ‘Promenade sentimentale’ in his Œuvres poétiques, ed. Jacques Robichez (Paris, 1976) 37.

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  90. Flint, In the Net, 17.

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  91. See, for example, Pound’s ‘Grace Before Song’ and ‘Anima Sola’ in Early Poems, 7, 19–21; cf. Flint, In the Net, 24.

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  92. Ibid., 29–30. Compare the use of hair in ‘The Forest of Vision’ (67–8) as the locus of a world of imaginative release and emotional security — although here the conception, rather than the idiom, may also be coloured by recollections of the similar functions of Baudelairian ‘chevelure’.

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  93. Ibid., 30.

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  94. Ibid., 35–8.

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  95. Ibid., 66.

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© 1985 Alan David Robinson

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Robinson, A. (1985). The Movement towards Imagism. In: Poetry, Painting and Ideas, 1885–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07190-6_3

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