Session 1: Imagism

Run through 'Tips for Poetic Form'.

Imagism: Urban Crowds and 'Luminous Details'

Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry. It has been described as the most influential movement in English poetry since the Pre-Raphaelites. It is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. It had a influential effect on many of the Beat poets (which we’ll look at next month). 

• favoured precision of concrete imagery and clear, precise language
• used non-traditional verse forms
• evolved from Japanese poetry forms such as the tanka and haiku, later combined with an interest in Greek poetic models such as Sappho
• made free verse a discipline and a legitimate poetic form
• poems attempted to isolate a single image to reveal its essence
• the image being an ‘intellectual and emotional complex instant of time’
• image captured through the use of what Ezra Pound called ‘luminous details’
• manifesto stated: ‘to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation’

Poetry's April 1913 issue published what came to be seen as ‘Imagism's enabling text’, the haiku-like poem of Ezra Pound titled ‘In a Station of the Metro’:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

A forerunner of the Imagism movement was poet T. E. Hulme, who died in Flanders in 1917:

From ‘In the City Square’:
In the city square at night, the meeting of the torches.
The start of the great march.
The cries, the cheers, the parting.
Marching in an order
Through the familiar streets,
Through friends for the last time seen.
Marching with torches.

Somewhat unusually for this time, many female poets were key Imagist figures, including H.D (Hilda Doolittle):

From ‘Cities’:
For alas,
he had crowded the city so full
that men could not grasp beauty,
beauty was over them,
through them, about them,
no crevice unpacked with the honey,
rare, measureless.

 The other poems we looked at in pairs were:

• Ezra Pound, 'Salutation'
• Amy Lowell, 'A Lady'
• William Carlos Williams, 'This is Just To Say'
• H.D., 'Hesperides'

Exercise 1: Urban/Rural Environments
Think of a time when you were in a crowded, urban environment. Conduct a free write. After 20 minutes, begin to add in pastoral details (using visual prompts to assist if needed). After another 10 minutes, stop the free write and highlight 'luminous details', and be guided by the rules of Imagists to create a Imagism poem or poem fragments (style model approach).

Exercise 2: Crowds
Go up into the museum and either: a) find paintings/artworks that feature crowded scenes, and use them as the visual stimuli for a new poem(s) in the Imagist style (conduct a free write, pick 'luminous details', then condense), or b) find a spot in the museum to 'people-watch', observe the behaviour, patterns, movements, expressions of crowds and/or individuals in the museum, and use this to inspire an Imagist poem(s).

Exercise 3: Blackout Poetry 
Use pages of prose writing to create blackout poetry. Pick out 'luminous details' to create an Imagist poem.