意象派诗三首

Imagism (1912-1917)

Places: England, Britain, Europe, USA, North America.

Imagism was a poetic movement which flourished in London between 1910 and 1917 and had an enduring and pervasive influence on English-language poetry in the twentieth century. The Imagists published four annual anthologies from 1914 to 1917, with a final anthology in 1930. They were led by Ezra Pound who first called them "Les Imagistes", chosing a French term to associate the group with the various French avant-garde movements which became the all the rage following Roger Fry's influential Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1910. The group included H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell, Richard Aldington, and, marginally, D. H. Lawrence, but they had only a loose and shifting affiliation and it was mainly Pound's talents as a promoter and critic that gave a semblance of unity. Nonetheless, Pound's ascerbic but well-judged criticism of his contemporaries, his accurate sense of what was good in verse, and his own aphoristic brilliance, gave this small movement (which was not really even a movement outside of Pound's rhetoric) a formative role in defining the twentieth-century poet as someone who was in the intellectual avant-garde, purifying the language of the tribe, spurning flaccid and self-important and merely derived patterns of language use, and generally breaking with the idea of fixed metrical rules. Many of these principles were clearly articulated in the essay "Imagisme"in Poetry (March 1913) which was offered as a interview-cum-report by F. S. Flint but shows the hand of Pound throughout. According to Flint, the principles of Imagism were

1. Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective.

2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.

3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

Six Principles：

1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.

2. To create new rhythms -as the expression of new moods -- and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. We do not insist upon "free-verse" as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. In poetry a new cadence means a new idea.

3. To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject. It is not good art to write badly of aeroplanes and automobiles, nor is it necessarily bad art to write well about the past. We believe passionately in the artistic value of modem life, but we wish to point out that there is nothing so uninspiring nor so old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 1911.

4. To present an image (hence the name: "Imagist"). We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art.

5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.

6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.

From On Imagism，from Amy Lowell, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry