Chapter 4 The Modem Period
Part one Modern Poetry
2.Ezra Pound and the Imagist Movement
4. Ezra Pound and the Imagist Movement
Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings are three poets who open the way to modern poetry.
Ezra Pound(1885-1975) was one of the most important poets and critics of his time. He had a profound influence on the generation of British and American writers who launched modern literature after the First World War, Some present-day critics consider Pound's Cantos the best long poem in modern literature.
a. His Works
Poems
Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound
Personae
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
The Cantos
In this giant work, Pound traces the rise and fall of eastern and western empires, the moral and social chaos of the modem world, especially he corruption of America after the heroic time of Jefferson.
Critical Essays
Make It New
Literary Essays
The ABC Reading
Polite Essays
These essays best reflect Pound's appraisals of literary traditions and of modern writing,
Translation
The Translation of Ezra Pound
b. The Imagist Movement (Imagism)
Led by Ezra Pound and flourished from 1909 to 1917, the movement advanced modernism in arts which concentrated on reforming the medium of poetry as opposed to Romanticism, especially Tennyson' s wordiness and high-flown language in poetry. The three principles followed by the Imagists were:
(1) "Direct treatment" The subject of the poem must be expressed in such a way as to resemble it and reproduce it as closely as possible. Simple language must be used to create an " image" which the reader can immediately see in his own imagination. Each word must be used with great exactitude to produce a precise image and nothing more.
(2) "Economy of Expression" NO word must he used which does not contribute directly to the image .The language must be concentrated. There must be no drawing of conclusions, no explanations.
(3) " Rhythm" No unnecessary words may be included in order to make meter or a rhyme. A poem should be composed with the phrasing of music, not a metronome.
Pound s famous one-image poem" In a Station of the Metro" would serve as a typical example if the Imagist ideas.
b. In a Station of Metro
The " Metro" is the underground railway of Paris. Pound has said that he wrote this poem to convey an experience: emerging one day from a train in the subway, he beheld " suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another". Originally he has described his impression in a poem 30 fines long. In this final version of only two line, the little poems contains an image, which like a picture, may take the place of a thousand words. There may be different interpretations of the poem. At an optimistic level, the poem may imply that even in such a seemingly least probable circumstance as a gloomy underground railway station, beauty can still startle people with unusual force.
In this brief poem, Pound uses fewest possible words to convey an accurate image, according to the principles of the " Imagists" . He tries to render exactly his observation of human faces seen in an underground railway station. He sees the faces, turned variously toward light and darkness, like flower petals which are half absorbed by, half resisting, the wet, dark texture of a bough.
The word " apparition", with its double meaning, binds the two aspects of
the observation together:
(1) apparition meaning" appearance", in the sense of something appears, or shows up; something which can be clearly observed.
(2) Apparition meaning something which seems real but perhaps is not real;
something ghostly which cannot be clearly observed.