English Literature and later world literature have gone through a series of movements to add something new to this field with every coming era.
All these movements have had characteristics that are difficult to remember in such a vast field. Therefore literature students may sometimes require assignment help with such topics.
Among all the other English literature movements, Imagism had a significant impact on literary works of all types and even the visual arts.
The modern era had these various ‘isms’ that impacted the writings in this era. One of them was Imagism. There are some professional homework writing sites like study help me that can help in this topic more.
The reason behind all these ‘isms’ was the experimental writings at which all the writers of this era tried their hands. Modern writers deviated from the traditional mode of writing. Rather, they adopted a different and experimental mode of writing.
This gave way to a new perspective on literature. Moreover, in addition to this, these various ‘isms’ like symbolism, realism, Imagism, and the like added to the beauty of the work.
symbolism, realism, Imagism
Imagism flourished in England and America between 1912 and 1917 and was essentially a poetic movement. The movement gained more impetus in America and was later exemplified at the hand of the English and American writers in London.
Imagism originated as a reactionary movement to Romanticism, the Victorian age writing, and briefly emphasized the clarity of expression, simplicity of language, and thought and precision through the use of exact images portrayed through words.
Although its origin can be credited to Ezra Pound, its ideas were based on the thoughts of the English poet and philosopher T. E. Hulme.
Hulme focused on presenting the subject of poetry in the manner of words- fewer words and more essence, words that convey the exact image.
In his essay, Romanticism, and Classicism, Hulme said that the language of poetry is a concrete one in the form of images and these images contain the entire essence of the poem. Later, Ezra Pound adopted these ideas and gave impetus to the movement in 1912.
He first introduced the term while reading Hilda Doolittle’s poem Hermes of the Ways. In this poem, he recommended a few corrections and later signed it as ‘H. D. Imagiste.’ Later he too used the term while publishing Hulme’s collection of poems.
When given a brief look, these poems are usually short ones with a smaller number of words, words that convey the poet’s image properly. Thus, they can be said to be the successors of ancient Greek lyricists and Japanese Haiku poems.
These poems moved away from the moral reflections and fixed meters and subordinated everything to ‘hard, dry image’ as Hulme called it.
Pound said that the imagist poetry conveyed the intellectual and emotional complex at the very moment. In the research paper writing, A Few Don’ts by an Imagist, the imagist poet F.S. Flint defined the tenets of imagist poetry:
tenets of imagist poetry
- Whether a “thing” is subjective or objective, it must be render an immediate treatment.
- Non Usage of words that do not contribute to the presentation of the poem.
- For rhythm, he said that it must be compose in the sequence of the musical phrase and not in the sequence of a metronome.
The year 1914 saw the publication of an anthology on the Imagist poets. The anthology was name Des Imagists and edit by Ezra Pound. It contained the works of the poets like William Carlos Williams, Richard Aldington, James Joyce, and Hilda Dolittle.
Soon after the publication, there arose a dispute among the poets as to who would assume the movement’s leadership.
Amy Lowell took charge in her hand, describing Pound’s vision of poetry as a myopic one, and thus from 1915 to 1917, Lowell was the leader of the movement. On the other hand, Pound calls her poems blurry and sentimental and calls the movement led by Lowell “Imagism.”
During this time, Lowell published her anthology known as Some Imagist Poets,
in which she said that the imagist proposals were for the poems
which abandon conventional limits on poetry and are free to choose any subject
and to create their rhythm, add everyday speech, and present a complex, concentrated and clear image of an object.
imagist poems
The typical imagist poems are write in free verse and try to render the writer’s visual object or scene precisely and accurate. This is often done either using metaphors or juxtaposition without indicating a relationship between the two objects.
In a Station of Metro by Ezra Pound is a prominent example of this technique
where, in very few words, the poet has conveyed a lot to the readers.
As early as 1917, Amy Lowell began distancing herself from the imagist poetry or specifically the movement.
Various research paper writing have suggested that Imagism itself was too restrictive to endure long as a movement. Therefore, it soon merged with modernism or, instead, a distinctive feature of modernist poetry.
After that, almost every modernist poet use the tenets of this movement to present a clear and precise image,
images that are juxtapose without establish any relationship with each other.
The poetry of Ezra Pound most impacted T. S. Eliot. Eliot’s poems such as the Wasteland,
The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, and The Hollowmen, among others,
are prominent examples of Eliot’s employment of the tenets of the imagist movement, particularly those of Pound’s.
William Butler Yeats too employed the technique in his poetry, and after that,
after merging with modernist poetry, imagist poetry kept on influencing poets till the middle of the 20th century.
Therefore, this was all one needed to know about imagist poetry and Imagism at large. The leading proponents of this movement had come with various famous works that left a mark in the field.
Those works can be further studied for further assignment help usa to students for this topic.
