The Imagistes form one of the latest schools, and it is meet that, before we read their work, we get some idea of their doctrine. Therefore I transcribe here some statements of representative Imagiste poets, which I have culled from Poetry, The Egotist, and other sources. Richard Aldington gives the following rules:
I. Direct treatment of subject. We convey an emotion by presenting the object and circumstance of the emotion without comment. For example, we do not say, “O how I admire that exquisite, that beautiful, that—25 more adjectives—woman.” But we present that woman, we make an “Image” of her, we make the scene convey the emotion....
II. As few adjectives as possible.
III. A hardness as of cut stone. No slop, no sentimentality. When people say the Imagiste poems are “too hard” ... we know we have done something good.
IV. Individuality of rhythm. We make new fashions instead of cutting our clothes on the old models.
V. The exact word. We make quite a heavy stress on that. It is most important. All great poetry is exact. All the dreariness of nineteenth century poetry comes from their not quite knowing what they wanted to say and filling up the gaps with portentous adjectives and idiotic similes.
Here is a definition by Ezra Pound which helps us: “An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”
The book, Des Imagistes, is an anthology, presumably of Imagist (let us, once for all, Anglicize the French word and have done with it) poetry. Yet, one of the foremost imagists, Richard Aldington, in a critique of this book,—comparatively modest, owing to the fact that his own poems formed a sumptuous fraction of the volume,—says that five of those whose poems are there included are not true Imagists. These are Cournos, Hueffer, Upward, Joyce, and Cannell. Mr. Aldington says he doesn’t mean that these poems are not beautiful—on the contrary, he admires them immensely—but they are not, “strictly speaking,” Imagist poems.
I agree that the poems of these five men are beautiful, especially the I hear an army of James Joyce and the Nocturnes of Skipwith Cannell; and I also maintain that, all unconsciously, the publishers of The Glebe have dealt a deadly blow to sectarian Imagism by including these non-Imagist poems in their anthology. Because, unless a school can prove that it alone has that unnameable wonder which excites us to deepest emotional turmoil, and which we call poetry, it has but little right to isolate itself or to separate its adepts from the bulk of poets. This may sound sententious, but is, nevertheless, true. Speak you in whatever mode or meter you will, if you arouse me to exultation, or to horror, or to the high pitch of any feeling,—if in me there is that responsive vibration that only true art can produce—then are you a poet.
Whitman does it to me. Poe does it to me. Baudelaire and Henley do it. To all of these there is in me a response. I’m awfully sorry, but that’s how it is. I think them all poets.