The Little Review, July 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 5)

"DES IMAGISTES"

CHARLES ASHLEIGH

A new and well born recruit has been added to the ranks of the Insurgents. It is true he appeared before we did, but we welcome him before he welcomes us, and thus are things evened. The Little Review, The Masses, Poetry, The International—all bearers of the sacred fire,—and now cometh The Glebe, heralding his approach with the chanting of many-colored strains. And, among the good things which The Glebe has put forth, is a book of portent: Des Imagistes.

The Imagistes form one of the latest schools, and it is meet that, before we read their work, we get some idea of their doctrine. Therefore I transcribe here some statements of representative Imagiste poets, which I have culled from Poetry, The Egotist, and other sources. Richard Aldington gives the following rules:

I. Direct treatment of subject. We convey an emotion by presenting the object and circumstance of the emotion without comment. For example, we do not say, “O how I admire that exquisite, that beautiful, that—25 more adjectives—woman.” But we present that woman, we make an “Image” of her, we make the scene convey the emotion....

II. As few adjectives as possible.

III. A hardness as of cut stone. No slop, no sentimentality. When people say the Imagiste poems are “too hard” ... we know we have done something good.

IV. Individuality of rhythm. We make new fashions instead of cutting our clothes on the old models.

V. The exact word. We make quite a heavy stress on that. It is most important. All great poetry is exact. All the dreariness of nineteenth century poetry comes from their not quite knowing what they wanted to say and filling up the gaps with portentous adjectives and idiotic similes.

Here is a definition by Ezra Pound which helps us: “An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”

The book, Des Imagistes, is an anthology, presumably of Imagist (let us, once for all, Anglicize the French word and have done with it) poetry. Yet, one of the foremost imagists, Richard Aldington, in a critique of this book,—comparatively modest, owing to the fact that his own poems formed a sumptuous fraction of the volume,—says that five of those whose poems are there included are not true Imagists. These are Cournos, Hueffer, Upward, Joyce, and Cannell. Mr. Aldington says he doesn’t mean that these poems are not beautiful—on the contrary, he admires them immensely—but they are not, “strictly speaking,” Imagist poems.

I agree that the poems of these five men are beautiful, especially the I hear an army of James Joyce and the Nocturnes of Skipwith Cannell; and I also maintain that, all unconsciously, the publishers of The Glebe have dealt a deadly blow to sectarian Imagism by including these non-Imagist poems in their anthology. Because, unless a school can prove that it alone has that unnameable wonder which excites us to deepest emotional turmoil, and which we call poetry, it has but little right to isolate itself or to separate its adepts from the bulk of poets. This may sound sententious, but is, nevertheless, true. Speak you in whatever mode or meter you will, if you arouse me to exultation, or to horror, or to the high pitch of any feeling,—if in me there is that responsive vibration that only true art can produce—then are you a poet.

Whitman does it to me. Poe does it to me. Baudelaire and Henley do it. To all of these there is in me a response. I’m awfully sorry, but that’s how it is. I think them all poets.

The Imagists believe in the direct presentation of emotion, preferably in terms of objectivity. They abhor an excess of adjectives, and, after a satiety of the pompous Victorian stuff, I am much inclined to sympathize with that tenet of their faith.

I wish, however, to make clear my own position, which is the one that most counts when I am writing. I am an anarchist in poetry: I recognize no rules, no exclusions.

If the expression of a certain thought, vision, or what not, requires twenty adjectives, then let us have them. If it be better expressed without adjectives, then let us abjure them—temporarily.

I am myself a poet (whether performance equals desire is doubtful). My object as a poet is to express the things which are closest to me. This sounds banal, but is better than rhetoric; words exist not with which to define with superclarity the poet’s function, source, and performance.

In the true expression of myself I might write Images which would be worshipped for their perfection by the Imagists. A moment after, I might gloat and wallow in the joy of my cosmic oneness (anathema to Imagists!) and, perhaps recall Whitman. The next minute, chronicling some shadowy episode of my variegated past, I may out-decay the decadent Baudelaire. But, this is always poetry if, by the magic of its words and the music of its arrangement, it speaks directly and beautifully to you, giving you that indescribable but unmistakeable sense of liberation and soul-expansion which comes on the contemplation of true art.

I think I have made myself clear. There is no quarrel with the Imagists, who have done some beautiful work, as such. But, if they claim monopoly of inspiration or art, as some of them appear to do, then—! Therefore, as a restricted and doctrinaire school, “a bas les Imagistes!” But, as an envigored company of the grand army of poets, “Vivent les Imagistes!”

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