THE IMAGIST POEM

 

by

 

William Pratt

 

Story Line Press

Ashland, Oregon

 

Paper, 138 pages, $14.95

ISBN 1-58564-009-2

 

 

Marilyn Auer of Bloomsbury Review once granted me the privilege to review Ted Kooser s Local Wonders, essays that that take you in with the poet s kind and generous outlook from the Bohemian Alps in Nebraska. She ran it with a review of Braided Creek, the correspondence of imagistic quatrains and other short poems exchanged between Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison. I probably broke protocol by dropping him a line, admiring his work, and asking if he had been influenced by Rexroth s translation of Chinese poetry. No, he wrote back, but his dog-eared copy of The Imagist Poem was now crumbling at the spine. I remembered now Rexroth took much from Ezra Pound s Chinese translations, a significant component of the imagist movement. Sometime later I used my lunch hour to walk through Lodo to the Tattered Cover to order a copy.

What I didn t know was the influence on the imagists of classical Greek poetry, also French Symbolists. What all shared in common was the story within and behind the image, with concise language, few lines that might run long or short or both, depending on the natural music of the poem itself. The movement began with a small group of English and American poets in London in 1908-09 and for formal models it reached far back into the past and into languages other than English. It is Pratt s opinion that the cross-fertilization from other times and cultures into English caused it to thrive, much as the sonnet and blank verse came from Italian and Latin 400 years ago.

The movement began when a headstrong young Englishman named T.E. Hulme, freshly expelled from Cambridge for participating in a tavern brawl, collected around him a group pf restless young writers who formed a group, dissolved, then reformed into what one of its members, Ezra Pound, called the forgotten School of Images. They discussed vers libre of the French Symbolists, tanka and haiku from the Japanese, a sacred Hebrew form, and Provencal troubadour songs admired by Pound. Hume insisted on absolutely accurate presentation and no verbiage. In 1912, Pound met H.D. who infused the movement with the Greek classical tradition:

H.D s poems were of a higher poetic refinement than Hulme s, combining a notable simplicity of diction with an irregular but distinctly musical cadence that derived from her discipline in the classical Greek lyric. Pound was so struck by the clarity and intensity of these poems, by their hardness, as he liked to call it, that he afterward declared that Imagism had been founded in order to publicize them.

 

I had only heard of H.D. once before when corresponding with Willis Barnstone who referred to her work, which sent me to the library to find what she had written, since it is not otherwise available. While Denver s new library stunned me with its different colored stone outside, its high ceilings, open airy areas, H.D. s poetry seemed to me to consist of too much dense Mediterranean mythology. This, I later learned, was her later work. I did not discover her early work until I read what Pratt had collected. Consider this from Hermes of the Ways:

The hard sand breaks,

And the grains of it

Are clear as wine.

 

Or this from The Pool:

 

Are you alive?

I touch you.

You quiver like a sea fish.

I cover you with my net.

What are you banded one?

 

And this from Storm:

 

You crash over the trees,

You crack the live branch:

the branch is white,

the green crushed,

each leaf is rent like split wood.

 

Pound said an image presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. It provides a sudden liberation, a sense of sudden growth. It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.

If H.D. reached into the world of the ancients, so too did Pound, not only Greek but also Chinese, making it new, as In A Station Of The Metro.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

 

These classical influences fused with the French Symbolists, from Baudelaire to Rimbaud to Valery. But where The Symbolists tried for diffuseness and suggestiveness; the imagists insisted on concentration and directness. Still, a more primal element was at work. Wallace Stevens acutely observed that imagism obeys an instinct and is an ancient phase of poetry. Mary Oliver has more recently showed its fault when image is piled upon image without meaning, a current plague among academic journals. This, too, was foreseen by Wallace Stevens:

The bare image and the image as a symbol are the contrast: the image without meaning and the image as meaning.

 

Ironically, much of Stevens work is dense beyond accessibility. In its purest form, untranslated from any other language, the brief imagistic poem in America may have no equal to Braided Creek by Kooser and Harrison, or The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday. For Kooser the seed came from Pratt s collection from the first imagists, some whom, like H.D., seem lost to us after less than 100 years. While some may still see the shadows of giants in Pound and others, I ll take lines like Richard Aldington s from New Love:

She has new leaves

After her dead flowers

 

Or Amy Lowell s Wind and Silver, where, in moonlight:

. . . fish-ponds shake their backs and

flash their dragon scales

 

Or Archibald MacLeish s Ars Poetica:

 

A poem should be wordless

As the flight of birds

 

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