imagism. Leaders of this London-born movement advocated clear and immediate images, exact and efficient diction, inventive and musical rhythms. The imagist poem was to be brief and stripped down, presenting an image in as few words as possible without commenting on it. In his lecture 'Bomanticism and Classicism' Hulme said the poet must render 'the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind.' Having arranged for the nascent movement to be announced by the English poet and critic F. S. Flint in a brief article/ interview entitled 'Imagisme' (spelled in the French manner), Pound demanded, through Flint's introductory synopsis of imagism's precepts, 'Direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective.' The principles of imagism and Pound's further recommendations in 'A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste' had a profound transatlantic influence long after the movement had petered out.
The American poet H. D. (then called Hilda Doolittle) arrived in London in 1911, just in time to become a major figure in the imagist movement. Her poems, written under the influence of ancient Greek lyrical fragments, so impressed Pound that he sent them, signed 'H. D. Imagiste' at his insistence, to Harriet Monroe, the founding editor of Poetry, a Chicago clearinghouse for modern verse. He told Monroe that
H. D.'s poems were 'modern' and 'laconic,' though classical in subject: 'Objective? no slither; direct?no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won't permit examination. It's straight talk, straight as the Greek!' Eventually H. D. and Pound wrote ambitious long poems that broke the mold of the imagist lyric, but even in their more capacious work, imagist compression, immediacy, and juxtaposition remained generative principles. As early as 1914 Pound was tiring of imagism as too static and insufficiently rig
orous. Together with the London-based English painter and writer Wyndham Lewis,
he helped found a new modernist movement in the arts, vorticism, which emphasized
dynamism of content. Pound conceived the vortex?an image of whirling, intensify
ing, encompassing energy?as the movement's emblem. Like imagism, vorticism
lasted for only a few years. Its most raucous embodiment was the 1914 vorticist
manifesto in Wyndham Lewis's journal Blast, and its main aesthetic achievements
were Lewis's paintings and the London-based French artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's
sculptures.
The Blast manifesto is clearly influenced by continental modernism, most visibly
Italian futurism in the experimental layout and the fire-breathing rhetoric of destruc
tion: the vorticists blast conventions, dull people, and middle-class attitudes. The
English-born poet Mina Loy became closely involved with the leaders of the futurist
movement, including Marinetti, while in Florence from 1906 to 1916. She was
excited by futurism's embrace of modernity and its violent rebuke of tradition, but
her typographically experimental 'Feminist Manifesto' also marks a break with the
movement's misogyny and jingoism. Marinetti, Pound, and Lewis?despite their pro
gressive prewar views on many social and artistic matters?later embraced fascism,
believing it would help advance their cultural ideals.
Modernist manifestos take on a variety of different forms. Some are individual statements, such as Hulme's lecture 'Romanticism and Classicism.' Others are meant to be declarations on behalf of an emergent group or movement, such as 'A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste' or the Blast manifesto. Occasionally, and paradoxically, a manifesto is a nonpublic declaration, unpublished in the author's lifetime, as in the case of Loy's 'Feminist Manifesto.' Although the manifesto is not an art form in the same sense as a poem or painting is, manifestos became an important literary genre in the modernist era, and some are more than mere declarations of doctrine. The vorticist manifesto and Loy's 'Feminist Manifesto,' for example, cross poetry with
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poster art, creatively manipulating words on the page for maximum effect. In their jagged typography, wild energy, and radical individualism turned to a collective purpose, these modernist manifestos helped advance and now exemplify elements of innovative art through the twentieth century.
For more documents, images, and contexts related to this subject, see 'Modernist Experiment' at Norton Literature Online.
T. E. HULME Although he published only six poems during his brief life, T. E. Hulme (1883?1917), English poet, philosopher, and critic, was one of the strongest intellectual forces behind the development of modernism. In this essay, probably composed in either 1911 or 1912 and probably delivered as a lecture in 1912, Hulme prophesies a 'dry, hard, classical verse' that exhibits precision, clarity, and freshness. He sharply repudiates the 'spilt religion' of Romanticism, responsible for vagueness in the arts. Hulme sees human beings as limited and capable of improvement only through the influence of tradition. These ideas were an important influence on the thought and poetry of T. S. Eliot. Hulme's views of conventional language, the visual image, and verbal exactitude also shaped the imagism and vorticism of Ezra Pound and others.
Hulme was born in Staffordshire, England, and attended St. John's College, Cambridge, from which he was expelled for rebellious behavior in 1904 without finishing his degree. He lived mainly in London, where, befriending Pound and other poets and artists, he became a central figure of the prewar avant-garde. A critic of pacifism, Hulme enlisted as a private in the army when World War I broke out in 1914, and was killed in battle in 1917. First published posthumously in Speculations (1924), this essay is excerpted from The Collected Writings ofT. E. Hulme (1994), ed. Karen Csengeri.
From Romanticism and Classicism
I want to maintain that after a hundred years of romanticism, we are in for
a classical revival, and that the particular weapon of this new classical spirit,
when it works in verse, will be fancy. * * *
