The Imagist Movement in English Poetry

Sibaprasad Dutta
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The anti-romantic opinions of Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883-1917) provided a theoretical basis for
Imagism. Although he himself wrote only five short poems ( thirty three lines in all), published
in 1912 by Ezra Pound, he has exercised a profound influence on English poetry. Imagism was
practically a revolt against the Georgian poetry much of which appeared in the five volumes of
Georgian Poetry published between 1912 and 1922 from The Poetry Bookshop of Harold
Monro. These collections included poems by Rupert Brooke, Edmund Blunden, W. H. Davies,
Walter de la Mare, Lascelles Abercrombie, Gordon Bottomley (1874-1948), John
Drinkwater (1882-1937), James Elroy Flecker (1184-1915), John Freeman (1880-1929), W.
W. Gibson (1878-1963), Ralph Hodgson ( 1871-1962), Edmund Shanks (1892-1953) and Sir
John Squire (1884-1958). Georgian poetry resulted from the search for a natural type of verse as
against the decadent conception of poetry which was unhealthy and which remarkably suffered
from a lack of vitality. These poets, in spite of their recognizable individual quality, were united
in their rejection of the ideas of the decadents, in their quest for simplicity and reality, in their
love of natural beauty as found in the English landscape, and in their loyalty to the forms and
techniques of the main traditions of English poetry. In their own way, they were escapist, and for
the most part , they kept aloof from the industrial world around them. Their poetry, however, was
often marked by an obvious facility of technique and shallowness of feeling. Like any movement,
the Georgians left their mark on English poetry, but the movement did not last long.

Hulme reacted against this facility and looseness of texture of much of the Georgian poetry and
insisted that poetry should confine itself to the world perceived by the senses, and to the
presentation of themes in a succession of concise, clearly visualized, concrete images, accurate in
detail and precise in significance. He also emphasized vers libre ( liberalism in poetry ) with
cadences governed by breath pauses instead of regular metres following the beat of the
metronome. Imagism owed something to Whitman and Henley, and much to the French
symbolists. It was also deeply influenced by the tiny poetic forms from Japan. The Imagist
movement, for all practical purposes, was not limited to English poets and was Anglo-American.
We should be careful that Imagism was simply not a matter of prosody ; an Imagist poem might
have been written in regular metres or even in rhyme. Substantially it aimed at a “hard and dry”
clarity and precision in the rendering of natural objects and of ideas, and it was opposed to
exuberance, sentiment, and cloudily romantic lushness. The “tree of language” was, as Osbert
Sitwell put it, to be pruned of its “dead fruit”. Summarily, the imagists believed that a hard, clear
image was essential to verse. They too believed that poetry should use the language of everyday
speech and have complete freedom in subject matter ( vers libre). In 1912, the year in which the
five poems of Hulme were published by Ezra Pound, some early Imagist poetry appeared in
America. Hulme's ideas were quickly taken up, particularly by the Americans, H.D. (Hilda
Doolittle) and Ezra Pound who coined the word ‘Imagism’ for this movement. Its organ The
Egoist appeared in 1914 and in the same year, Pound edited Des Imagistes : An Anthology. This
work contained a statement of the ideals of imagism ( or ‘amogysm’ as it was called). Its
contributors were all followers of the school. After Pound had withdrawn from the movement,
another American poet, Amy Lowell, brought out three more collections under the title, Some
Imagist Poets, in 1915, 1916, 1917.

Among the English members of the group was Frank Stewart Flint (1885-1960) whose one
significant volume is Cadences (1915). After 1920, the year in which appeared T. S. Eliot’s great
work, The Waste Land, Flint abandoned poetry in favour of work as a translator. Richard
Aldington (1892-1962), and his wife, the American poet, H.D. , were the most expert among
the Imagists. The exquisite purity, clarity and restraint of some of H.D.’s poems inspired by
Greek subjects show Imagism at its finest. Aldington’s Images (1915), Images of War (1919)
and Images of Desire (1919) are the fruits of his search for new cadences in vers libre with
care for exclusion of every word that does not contribute to the presentation of the subject. Later
on, Aldington loosened his ties with the Imagist theory, developed a talent for satire, and made
odd but effective use of colloquialisms in verse. In a sense, the Imagists believed in
Wordsworth’s principle of avoiding ‘gaudy and inane phraseology’ and adopting the lively
everyday speech. The final Imagist Anthology appeared in 1930. T. E. Hulme’s Above the
Dock is a good example of a poem in the imagist manner:

Above the quiet dock in midnight,

Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height,
Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away
Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.

The imagists did not hold together long. The pursuit of the sequence of very concise images and
the use of vers libre often led to obscurity and license, and the movement was confronted with
strong criticism. Yet while the movement was in force, it helped to cleanse and discipline poetic
diction and cadence, and its indirect influence, particularly in respect of the conception of clearly
visualized and concrete image-making, was considerable upon T. S. Eliot and the poets of the
thirties. Equal influence the movement had exercised upon the impressionistic technique of the
stream of consciousness novelists.

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