Some Imagist Poets, 1916[1]
Reading edition
Some Imagist Poets, 1916[1]
MARY ALDIS
It is a matter of speculation why six poets of widely dissimilar viewpoints, if similar technique, should choose to band themselves together to publish in a yearly anthology selections from their works.
An examination into the prefaces and poems of the three anthologies sent forth by the Imagists and a study of various articles on the subject by individual members of the group fail to give adequate explanation.
The principle tenets of Imagism, i. e., clear presentation, the abolishing of outworn phrases and extra adjectives, the necessity of rhythm in all poetry, the absence of reflective comment, are those common to most of the modern serious writers of verse; and although the Imagists have done well to lay fresh emphasis on the difficulty and desirability of putting these tenets into practice, this hardly constitutes a new school. As for a definite understanding of the term Imagism, God help the man who thinks he can explain to another its meaning.
The Imagists, all six of them (there were more in the first anthology, but seemingly some fell from grace), write poetry. That they choose to employ a sub-title need not concern us; nor does their exposition of certain theoretical ideals. What does concern us is the quality of the poems they write. If it seems well to these six poets to publish together a collection of chosen poems, let us pay our seventy-five cents for the modest green paper volume, to read and re-read those that please us best; or, let us go our way untroubled, giving our affection to safe and sure collections—Rittenhouse, Braithwaite, or even good Edmund Clarence Stedman.
There is a patient note discernible in the preface of this third volume which seems to say, “Once again we will endeavor to make clear what we are trying to do. Kindly make an effort to understand.” One may question the desirability of any preface, but it is not surprising that the Imagists wish to make clear their aims and purposes. One wonders at the breath expended in attacks on them. There are disadvantages in this banding together: if one of the group makes a misstep the whole six are anathematized; but, after all, it is quite futile, this effort to kill by ridicule. Denunciation, however fierce, has never yet crushed anything which had in it the living flame of beauty, as much Imagist poetry has.
Miss Amy Lowell is represented in this 1916 Anthology by three poems. The first is her Patterns, named by Braithwaite as the first of the five best poems of 1915. It is difficult to quote, as the poem must be taken in its entirety to appreciate its beauty. Here are the first two stanzas:
I walk down the garden paths, And all the daffodils Are blowing, and the bright blue squills. I walk down the patterned garden paths In my stiff, brocaded gown. With my powdered hair and jewelled fan. I too am a rare Pattern. As I wander down The garden paths. My dress is richly figured, And the train Makes a pink and silver stain On the gravel, and the thrift Of the borders. Just a plate of current fashion, Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes. Not a softness anywhere about me, Only whale-bone and brocade.
Studying it again one finds new beauties—the delicacy of the occasional rhyme, used as a musician uses the flute in an orchestra, the curious “pattern” of the rhythm, which cannot be defined and yet fits the theme with inimitable grace; the unforgettable picture of the garden with its stiff paths, its white fountain, its carelessly gorgeous flowers, and the woman walking down the path with slow and stately tread. Her head is straight and high, pink and silver is her stiff brocaded gown, yet one knows that underneath it throbs a human heart for which there is no place in the pattern. Here is certainly a new way of conveying emotion. We are stirred by the passion of the poem up to its terrible climax—“Christ! what are patterns for?”
A masterpiece this poem, one to learn and repeat and make one’s own. There follows by Miss Lowell A Spring Day in polyphonic prose, a series of word pictures scintillating with color and dancing light. The day has five color divisions: the Bath, where “little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, and their reflections wabble deliciously over the ceiling”; the Breakfast Table, where golden coffee, yellow butter and silver and white make another symphony. Then comes the Walk, with more color, from boys with black and red, amber and blue marbles, “spitting crimson” when they are hit, to a man’s hat careering down the street in front of white dust “jarring the sunlight into spokes of rose-color and green.” Next comes Midday and Afternoon, then Night and Sleep. “Wrap me close, sheets of lavender. Pour your blue and purple dreams into my ears.... Pale blue lavender, you are the color of the sky when it is fresh-washed and fair.”
Miss Lowell also includes her amazing paraphrase of Stravinsky’s Grotesques, too amazing for an unmusical person’s comment.
Richard Aldington has seven poems. The finest is a short Elizabethan lyric named After Two Years. It is a lovely bit, but why it should be published in an “Imagist” collection no man may say. Its delicate beauty is indefinable.
After Two Years
She is all so slight And tender and white As a May morning. She walks without hood At dusk. It is good To hear her sing. It is God’s will That I shall love her still As He loves Mary. And night and day I will go forth to pray That she loves me. She is as gold Lovely, and far more cold. Do thou pray with me, For if I win grace To kiss twice her face God has done well to me.
Aldington’s Eros and Psyche has both beauty and distinction, but no one of the seven poems by him can compare with his Choricos in the Anthology of 1915. That is an achievement not easily repeated.
Perhaps H. D. is the purest Imagist of the group. To the uninitiated she is the most obscure because the most abstract. She loves the sea and high, windy places and her poems catch something of the freshness one feels standing on a headland, beaten and buffeted by the wind and the salt spray. Nature is to her as a living presence, sometimes gentle, more often cruel. She vibrates to beauty as sensitively as a Greek dryad, and in reading her poems one has a curious sense of a worshipper offering incense to the gods. Here are some lines from the last one of the four poems she contributes. It is called Temple—The Cliff:
High—high and no hill-goat Tramples—no mountain-sheep Has set foot on your fine grass. You lift, you are the world-edge, Pillar for the sky-arch. The world heaved— We are next to the sky. Over us, sea-hawks shout, Gulls sweep past. The terrible breakers are silent. Shall I hurl myself from here. Shall I leap and be nearer you? Shall I drop, beloved, beloved. Over me the wind swirls. I have stood on your portal And I know— You are further than this, Still further on another cliff.
In their passion for clearness, for the exact word, Imagists often use certain words which sound ugly. In this poem of fourteen stanzas, the word “lurch” occurs three times. It is not a pretty word, it does not suggest a graceful action, yet apparently no other will do.
John Gould Fletcher is, first of all, pictorial. His conception of Imagism differs slightly, it would seem, from his confreres. His imagination is so strong he sees significance in every changing image of this changing world. His rhythm is so vague that sometimes it is hardly discoverable. His poetry could be printed about as well in block as in line, as doubtless he would admit. He loves color—revels, glories, riots in color; and he has a way of seeing resemblances to dragons and serpents and other ungodly things in the simplest of natural phenomena—trees or clouds or rain or even sunrise. His vocabulary is astonishing. He plunges into a sea of words and plays with them, tossing them up like jewels to sparkle in the sun, or burying them in pits to see if they will still shine. He loves words, caresses them with a lover’s touch, kisses them for luck, and then hurls them together in such an incredible combination that the critics blink. A serious workman withal, with much to say seething in his mind and a determination to say it in his own way. There is perhaps no line in the six poems in this Anthology equal to the much-quoted “Vermillion pavilion against a jade balustrade.” The Mexican Quarter is a poem of forty-two lines wherein is depicted and symbolized the very spirit of Mexican life and love. It ends with an unexpected little lyric. One can almost hear the twang of the guitar. Here is Fletcher’s picture of An Unquiet Street:
By day and night this street is not still: Omnibuses with red tail-lamps, Taxicabs with shiny eyes, Rumble, shunning its ugliness. It is corrugated with wheel-ruts, It is dented and pockmarked with traffic, If has no time for sleep. It heaves its old scarred countenance Skyward between the buildings And never says a word. On rainy nights It dully gleams Like the cold tarnished scales of a snake: And over it hang arc-lamps, Blue-white death-lilies on black stems.
I think only a poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling could see in our municipal arc lamps “blue-white death-lilies on black stems,” but I am going to look more carefully after this.
F. S. Flint has given us more beauty in his earlier work, notably in London My Beautiful and The Swan, than is to be found here, save perhaps in Chalfont Saint Giles, which has simplicity and dignified stateliness. It is a picture of village folk gravely filing into church, past ivy and lilac, as the bell rings. The sadness of England in war-time is in the picture. Here are two stanzas:
Walk quietly along the mossy paths; the stones of the humble dead are hidden behind the blue mantle of their forget-me-nots; and before one grave so hidden a widow kneels, with head bowed, and the crape falling over her shoulders. The bells for evening church are ringing, and the people come gravely and with red, sun-burnt faces through the gates in the wall.
D. H. Lawrence contributes what may be considered, except for Patterns, the most notable poem in the book, Erinnyes, although again why it should be called Imagism is a mystery. It is certainly, however, a poem, and a profound and beautiful one. In its form and its long, slow, melancholy rhythm it suggests Aldington’s Choricos, and the theme is the same—Death. Here are five stanzas:
There are so many dead, Many have died unconsenting, Theirs ghosts are angry, unappeased. They come back, over the white sea, in the mist, Invisible, trooping home, the unassuaged ghosts Endlessly returning on the uneasy sea. What do they want, the ghosts, what is it They demand as they stand in menace over against us? How shall we now appease whom we have raised up? Must we open the doors, and admit them, receive them home, And in the silence, reverently, welcome them, And give them place and honour and service meet? For one year’s space, attend on our angry dead, Soothe them with service and honour, and silence meet, Strengthen, prepare them for the journey hence, Then lead them to the gates of the unknown, And bid farewell, oh stately travellers, And wait till they are lost upon our sight.
There is another poem of Lawrence’s called Perfidy that gives an elusive sense of horror and calamity. This effect lies partially in the five-line stanza formation with the first, third, and fourth lines rhyming. There is no particular reason for calling this poem Imagism either; but we have agreed by now, I trust, that is not our first consideration. No less a person than Miss Lowell herself gives us justification in this viewpoint, for in a review of the poems of Aldington and Flint in the June Poetry Review she says, “Let us take these little volumes as poetry pure and simple, forgetting schools and creeds.”
There are thirty-two poems in all in the book. One person will like this one best, another that. Suffice that the book is a valuable contribution to contemporary literature.