Imagism Essay

6007 Words25 Pages
Imagism: Its Origins and History What is Imagism is definitely not an easy question to answer. Critics have been trying to understand the movement ever since it emergence. For example, for John Fuller, although “Imagism seems absurdly provincial, its aims were at the centre of the whole modernist programme in poetry” (Fuller 72). Likewise, David Perkins calls Imagism “the grammar school of modern poetry” (Perkins 329), while Jacob Korg sees Imagism as a “corrective” to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poetry (Korg 127). Another critic, Joseph Frank argues that Imagism “opened the way for later developments by its clear break with sentimental Victorian verbiage” (Frank 10-11). On account of the fact that Imagism is preceded by Symbolism and followed by Surrealism it marks the emergence of “classical” literary modernism (Zach 229) which is the reason why literary histories regard Imagism as “the beginning of modern literature in English” (Pratt 75). Taking into consideration the number of critics interested in the movement, we tend to perceive Imagism as an influential and, indeed, important movement in the development of the literary history of the English language. To fully understand what Imagism is, one needs to realize that nothing is as new as it at first appears to be. With this in mind, one should search for the origins of those poetic ideals which culminated in this Anglo-American movement. Nearly all movements in poetry were a reaction against the poetry of the preceding epoch, and Imagism is no exception since it was a reaction against the sentiment and discursiveness of much of Romantic and Victorian poetry. Imagism has two main sources of inspiration: ancient (Greek, Latin, Chinese and Japanese), and modern (mainly French) (Hughes 3). It may seem that the diverse origins of Imagism made it eclectic, but quite the contrary. The diversity was
Open Document