'Notes sur la Technique Poetique'-, but in an American one takes that at least for granted, otherwise why does one get born upon that august continent!
Ezra Pound
5. Charles Vildrac (1882-1971), French poet, worth (1770-1850), English poets. playwright, and critic, and Georges Duhamel 7. Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1342-1400), English (1884?1966), French novelist and critic, cowrote poet. Heinrich Heine (1797?1856), German poet. Notes sin la Technique Poetique (1910). 'Vide': Theophile Gautier (1811 ? 1872), French poet. consider. 8. Noted by Mr. Flint [Pound's note]. 6. John Milton (1608-1674) and William Words-9. But first it is necessary to be a poet (French). AN IMAGIST CLUSTER:
T. E. HULME, EZRA POUND, H. D. At the inception of imagism in London, the key imagists included the English poet philosopher T. E. Hulme and the expatriate American poets Ezra Pound and H. D. The paths of these three writers were densely interconnected at this juncture. In his poetry volume Ripostes (1912), Pound published an appendix of five poems, 'The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme,' prefaced by a note that printed the term imagistes for the first time. That year, in a London teashop, Pound had announced to the English poet Richard Aldington and the American poet H. D. that they were 'imagistes,' and two years later he included their and his work in the first imagist anthology, Des Imagistes. Although imagism began in London, with a French-styled name, the American poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925), derided by Pound for watering
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2008 / MODERNIST MANIFESTOS
down imagism's principles, helped disseminate its ideas in the United States, where she publicized and promoted imagism in anthologies, lectures, and readings.
In spare, hard-edged poems the imagists sought to turn verse away from what they saw as the slack sentimentality and fuzzy abstraction, the explanatory excess and metrical predictability of Victorian poetry. Imagism owed a debt to the symbolism of Yeats and nineteenth-century French poets, but it shifted the emphasis from the musical to the visual, the mysterious to the actual, the ambiguously suggestive symbol to the clear-cut natural image. The imagists looked to models from East Asia (haiku for Pound's 'In a Station in the Metro') and classical Europe (Greek verse for H. D.'s 'Oread'). Their poetry is compressed, achieving a maximum effect with a minimum of words. It is often centered in a single figurative juxtaposition, conjoining tenor and vehicle without explanation. And it typically relies not on strict meters but on informal rhythms or cadences.
H. D. (1886?1961) was born Hilda Doolittle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and educated at Bryn Mawr College. In 1911 she went to Europe for what she thought would be a brief visit but became a lifelong stay, mainly in England and in Switzerland. After her initial imagist phase she wrote more expansive works, including the three long, meditative poems that make up Trilogy (1973), precipitated by the experience of the London bombings in World War II. T. E. HULME: Autumn A touch of cold in the Autumn night?
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
5 I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.
1912
EZRA POUND: In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.1
1913,1916
1. Pound describes this poem's genesis in Gaitdier-Brzeska (1916): 'Three years ago in Paris I got out of a 'metro' train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening .. . I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation . . . not in speech, but in little splotches of colour. . . . The 'one-image poem' is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it. . . . Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-Vike sentence.' 'Hokku': another term for haiku.
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BLAST / 2009
H. D.: Oread1 Whirl up, sea? Whirl your pointed pines, Splash your great pines On our rocks,
s Hurl your green over us, Cover us with your pools of fir.
1914
H. D.: Sea Rose Rose, harsh rose, marred and with stint of petals, meagre flower, thin, sparse of leaf,
5 more precious than a wet rose, single on a stem? you are caught in the drift.
Stunted, with small leaf,
10 you are flung on the sands, you are lifted in the crisp sand that drives in the wind.
Can the spice-rose 15 drip such acrid fragrance hardened in a leaf?
1916
1. Greek nymph of the mountains. BLAST
The journal Blast was published only twice?on June 20, 1914, though released on July 2, one month before Great Britain entered World War I, and a year later, during the war that would bring its short life to an end. But its initial preface and two-part manifesto, printed in the first pages of the first number and excerpted below, are among
