Transcript Imagism - Your Space

Imagism
But it was a word, the beginning for me, of a
language in colour. I do not mean that I was
unfamiliar with the kindergarten stories about
colours being like tones in music. I think that sort
of thing is nonsense. If you try to make notes
permanently correspond with particular colours, it
is like tying narrow meanings to symbols.
Ezra Pound
Vortex:
Every concept, every emotion, presents itself to
the vivid consciousness in some primary form. It
belongs to the art of this form
I once saw a small child go to an electric light
switch and say, “Mamma, can I “open” the light?”
She was us9ing the age-old language of
exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of
metaphor, but she was not using it as
ornamentation.
The Imagist Movement in Literature
• Started 1912 in the British Museum Tea Room.
• The Image: “that which presents an intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant of time.”
• Practitioners: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Richard Aldington, H.D., William
Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Allen Upward, F.S.
Flint, Amy Lowell, the later William Butler Yeats.
• Caught fire throughout Europe and America
A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste (1913)
1.Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or
objective
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the
presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical
phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.
In a Station of the Metro (1913)
The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black, bough
Pound: “In a poem of this sort, one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms
itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.”
Edmund Gustav Husserl, starts “School of Phenomenology”:
1913: Ideas Pertaining to the Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy
1928: On Phenomenology
“Whatness” or “Quidditas”
The Red Wheel Barrow
William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens