Review of Imagist Poetry Edited by Peter Jones
By: Michael A. Arnold
Penguin has published a large number of books with many different aims. This is especially true of its Penguin Classics and Modern Classics series. Sometimes it is only to reprint an old book for modern readers, with a good introduction to contextualize things and explain more obscure aspects - so people can finish it with a better understanding of both what they have read and literature more generally. Sometimes, like with the collection Imagist Poetry edited by Peter Jones, it is to keep the memory of something in print that is now (perhaps) being obscured. Or, more cynically, they are books specifically for students - something you would only buy if you were studying literature at a university.
Imagist Poetry does not get talked about very much anymore, and few are going to be familiar with names like Amy Lowell, Richard Adlington, or H.D. Aside from D.H. Lawrence the most famous name here is Ezra Pound, who is not likely to be read by the general public - only those who have been through the ivied tower of higher education will have probably heard much about him. In a sense this book is an advertisement for writers like that, as well as for Imagism as a method for writing poetry.
This book is very short, and really does not feel the 180 pages it boasts. This is because there is a lot of other information in the appendices, which we will return to, and because the book is split into different sections, including a 'Pre-imagist phase,' a 'golden age' where most of the book's filling is, and a 'after Imagism' which is less than 20 pages long. As such, this book is a very easy and quick read.
When this was first published in 1972 this book gave the Imagist movement a kind of important imprimatur, but a lot of things have happened since then and a lot of other books have been published. Why keep publishing this collection, of an increasingly obscure movement that most contributors to were not emblematic of, and was only really active for about ten years? Was Imagist Poetry so good it needs to be kept around?
Kind of. There are probably two things that make Imagism still worth taking a look at and they are the goals of the movement and the method. It was a break away from the bland aesthetics of the Edwardian period, which had a lot of really bad poetry, Imagism was intensely interested in the poem as a visual thing, written in a direct haiku-like form of presentation. This was at the time revolutionary. And some of the imagist poems and poets were really good, worth reading if you are interested in poetry. But, as the introduction to this book admits, there was also bad Imagist poets too - but they will not be found here.
The best Imagist of the Imagist poets in this book is probably H.D. Her poems are sensual, even sexual, and written to look like the fragments of Sappho, another erotic poet but one from about 3,000 years ago – there's a good reason Sappho's work is so fragmented, most of it is lost. But using free verse in this way, in the 1910s, was very new and very clever. This is not the long, thought-filled lines of free verse like that found in Whitman or T.S. Eliot, this is a very different kind of writing. It is much more intimate. Here is an example of one of H. D's poems:
A lover being like a fish who could easily slip out of a fisherman's hand is perfect, and this selection is full of poems like this. In a way, even though there is some bad Imagist Poetry, the fact that this collection is only content with showing the good stuff is criticisable. This might not sound like a damning criticism, but this collection is not trying to deal with the movement broadly, show its warts. This is Imagism's best representation to a modern audience, or student.
There is obviously an amount of subjectivity in what is considered a good or bad poem, I have read criticisms of the poet Amy Lowell, who does appear frequently in this collection and was the de facto leader of the Imagist movement toward its end, after the movement's founder Ezra Pound abandoned it to move on to other things. She was even criticized for her approach to Imagism by Pound himself. Here is an example of one of her poems in the collection:
Readers are free to like this poem or not, but it is not strictly in tune with the rules of Imagist Poetry found in the appendixes. A reader will probably only care about a poem adhering to the 'rules' of Imagism if they are a student studying Imagism, and to other people it will not be at all meaningful to say this. But this suggests a criticism of this collection: it is very narrow in its actual focus.
To be honest, the appendixes are probably the focal point of this book, with the collection of poetry acting as a kind of evidence. In the appendixes (usually they are essays written by Ezra Pound) it is stressed that the imagist poem should be concise, with absolutely no wasted words, and have a certain musicality to it. In the above poem 'That settles softly down upon the water' is not particularly concise. Unless there is something to the slight contradiction between 'down' and 'UPon' (capitals are mine) that is necessary for the poem, it could be more concisely written - 'settling softly on the water' or something like that.
But this is also showcasing that those 'principles' that Pound was often so fond of were actually flexible, and Imagism meant different things to different people. Some of the great poets and writers that appear in this collection, like H.D., William Carlos Williams, and even D.H. Lawrence (who is not fantastically well known as a poet) probably did not try to slavishly follow Pound wherever he went. Knowing Pound, and his many bizarre whims, that was probably right to do. But Lowell's poem is concise on the whole because of its short length, and not all Imagist poems are only a couple lines long, and 'Autumn Haze' does follow to the other 'rules' or goals of the movement more closely.
I have used Lowell's poem as an example of how elastic literary regulations can be, and perhaps should be. The imagists, as Pound said in the preface to an anthology called 'Some Imagist Poets' in 1916 (this preface is included in the appendixes) that Imagist Poetry is an attempt to break away from the poetical trends that the English-speaking world had had up to that point. It was, in a literary sense, a revolution. This is probably why it is still studied in universities to this day.
Ultimately this book is in some ways strange, but I suppose that is just like the Imagists themselves, in a weird way. The book very short just like the length of the imagist movement, but there is some very good and interesting things here that makes it worth reading if you are interested in poetry, especially if you are a poet, or you are a student and want something handy for a seminar (those huge Norton/Blackwell's collections can be such a pain to carry around). But I honestly do not think this book will attract much attention outside of those two groups, writers, or students, and that is a shame.
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?Autumn Haze
Is it a dragonfly or a maple leaf
That settles softly down upon the water