How could the Imagists support clear imagery and precise statement

Imagism was a rebellion against romantisism as romantisism was a rebellion against enlightenment.
Imagists replaced superfluous, abstract and emotional terms with concrete, precise and direct details.
The romantics used traditional poetic forms while the imagists experimented with form.

>>9422946
why did he give up on imagism later in his life? I'm halfway through his cantos, and while there are occasional flashes of imagism, most of it just seems like historical rambling. Still the most beautiful writing I have read, though (some of it).

>>9424411
gave up isn't quite the right word, imagism is really hard to get down properly (as opposed to something like expressionism) that was constatnly in flux with figures such as Pound and Yates in the mix.

I'll post something I posed the last time i saw a pound thread:

Pound is probably one of the most powerful forces in 20th century literature. Virtually everyone associated with modernism--and I use this word here sort of vaguely to also include more subtle precursors to modernism as well as works that can be fit into a narrative of 'modernity' even if they are not traditionally 'modernistic' persay--was associated with Pound in some way. The main issue with approaching his work is that I feel it is necessary to have at least a basic understanding of his philosophy in order to see exactly what his poetry is trying to accomplish. This is in contrast to figures such as Eliot, who although still having dense allusive qualities (or intertextual? I've seen that this word has been more popular as critics try more and more to divorce the author from the text) is also distinctly more accessible than segments of the Cantos. There are however many deserving parts that are devastating all on their own though:


But a part of himself talked to himself
and not to its center
and his shade grew grayer
Until another note of the scale
came from the hollow emptiness"

(Cantos LXXII)

The seminal piece on untangling all the imagistic/vorticist elements of modernism would be Kenner's "The Pound Era" which is an interesting book in that it's a very personable book (Kenner had a pretty great relationship with Pound and he has a way of showing his analysis almost as if he's delivering an opinion). Kenner is also great just for really trying to rip apart the Cantos and it'll start you on the right track as far as sources are concerned. Other books that come to mind are Bradbury and McFarlane's little compilation of Modernistic essays; they work well as a companion piece to some of the more canonical or central works of criticism, of which I would recommend getting a collection of Pound's essays. Soon you'll start to see how despite it's experimental nature, there is a very distinct feeling or gestalt or whatever underlying early 20th century thought. This also connects to concepts such as Russian futurism--which is deeply interwoven with marxist utopianism (which is implies that there is any utopianism idealism that isn't Marxist, a claim I'm a little skeptical of) as well as German expressionism, which is sort of another useless term but does have at least some connection to Romantic aestheticism/humanism. I'm rambling now but if anyone has any questions that I might be able to answer shoot away

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>>9424411
because ONE luminous talent shined so brightly that Pound wanted to found his entire work around it (and call her part of his movement)
Vorticism was his attempt to hash out for himself and it was a failure.

>>9422870
Pound said Wordsworth was 'so busied about the ordinary word that he never found time to think about le mot juste.' That's probably the most succinct way to describe the difference in their poetics.

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>>9424428
>persay

>>9424444
Hilarious coming from Pound, considering how much of his work is marred by hackneyed archaism

>>9424451
yeah yeah, if you look even harder you'll find some more atrocious typos

>>9424459
Persay is not a fucking typo, it's stupidity.

>>9424433
I've seen you post a couple of times, and it's always in Pound threads, always saying that Pound wanted to prevent HD from becoming a great poet or something like that.

For once tell me more about that.

>>9424457
There's no contradiction here. What are you on about

The best criticism of the Cantos is from Pound himself. In his old age he sort of realized that his work failed to accomplish what he was trying to do.

>I knew too little about so many things, I picked out this and that thing that interested me, then jumbled them into a bag. But that's not the way . . . to make a work of art.

The Cantos and Personae are a junk shop of poems that are nonsensical at worst and mediocre at best. I'm honestly amazed that a poet who loved to talk about the importance of music was so tin-eared, how he championed "precision" despite most of his verse being abstract and vague. They're above average as metrical exercises, but Pound never really developed an independent artistic self. All of his works are from the perspective of someone else, and most of them are translations, imitations, or adaptations. I suspect that Pound himself really had nothing to say as a poet.

The real great poets of the 20th century were Yeats, Frost, and Stevens. Pound and Eliot are only worth reading for historical reasons.

>>9424522
>he real great poets of the 20th century were Yeats, Frost, and Stevens.
Well you got one right I guess

>>9424503
>In HERmione, H.D. wrote about feeling “smothered,” “smudged out” by Pound, whose kisses presaged a suffocation of the spirit in which she feared that she would become the object of his poem rather than the poet. “You are a poem, though your poem’s naught,” Pound apparently told her. In End to Torment, H.D. wrote that “Ezra would have destroyed me and the center they call ‘Air and Crystal’ of my poetry.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/h-d

Helen in Egypt can also clue you in to how she felt.

>>9424553
I see, thanks for the reply.

>>9424567
no problem, Pound did that a bit with people he didn't fuck. He convinced Eliot to cut entire section(s?) of The Waste Land and I'm not sure he improved it, frankly.
Stein was a much better patron than him. She really believed in her pet projects.

>>9424522
>I picked out this and that thing that interested me, then jumbled them into a bag.
funny thats exactly what they read like

>>9424584
>He convinced Eliot to cut entire section(s?) of The Waste Land and I'm not sure he improved it, frankly.

He actually helped to improve "The Waste Land". Eliot said so himself, and I can vouch for that, having read Eliot's original, Pound's corrections and the final poem. It's not like Eliot took all of Pound's suggestions by heart either.

>>9424629
Yeah, I'm gonna take back what I said about him not helping, for some reason I though the original lines weren't available. Those couplets are actually pretty bad.

>>9424428
excellent post, thanks for the response. The biography I read on Pound focused more on his politics than his poetry. I followed along the Cantos with the Terrel companion book until I had to return it, and since then I've still been following along, which might be half pointless because I have very little understanding of the historical context of what he is talking about, especially when he starts to introduce chinese symbols. But still there is an immersive, atmospheric feeling to them, with flashes of brilliance, like:

And past them, the criminal
lying in blue lakes of acid
The road between the two hills, upward
slowly,
The flames patterned in lacquer, crimen est actio,
The limbo of chopped ice and saw-dust,
And I bathed myself with the acid to free myself
of the hell ticks,
Scales, fallen louse eggs.
palux Laerna,
the lake of bodies, aqua morta,
of limbs fluid, and mingled, like fish heaped in a bin,
and here an arm upward, clutching a fragment of marble,
And the embryos, in flux,
new inflow, submerging,
Here an arm upward, trout, submerged by the eels;
and from the bank, the stiff herbage,
the dry nobbled path, saw many known, and unknown,
for an instant;
submerging,
The face gone, generation . . .
( Canto XVI)

>>9424411

I think Amy Lowell had something to do with it.

>>9425588
She sponsored anthologies that she called imagism which pound did not think met his standards (he called them Amygism). He subsequently wanted to distance himself from the movement.

Alternatively he was buttmad that he wasn't the sole leader of the movement as Lowell was seen as the primary imagist by that time.

>>9424433
H.D. is inspiring. I can imagine her work would affect me in similar ways.