Three Imagist Poets

JOHN GOULD FLETCHER

I.

The question is being asked, re-asked and debated, What is Imagism? The fact that this question is constantly raised anew proves that it is not an academic one. For if we are to see clearly the underlying principles of the new poetry, and to understand the relationship of the group which call themselves the Imagists to those principles, we must first disassociate Imagism, strictly speaking, from all that body of verse now being produced in the free-verse forms. As a critic not long ago pointed out, vers libre and Imagism are not to be confused. Vers libre can be produced and has been produced which is not Imagistic, but realistic, symbolistic, or merely dull. Imagism is an attitude of mind which can appear just as well under the guise of metre and rhyme, or prose, as in verse itself. What, then, is Imagism?

Briefly, the doctrine we call Imagism has four cardinal points or principles. The first of these concerns presentation of the subject. The Imagist aims to present his subject as an image; that is to say, he presents the sum-total of the emotions in any given subject in such a way that the reader experiences the self-same emotions from them. To do this it is necessary for the Imagist to regard his subject-matter from its most imaginative aspect, and to present it visually. For the reader, not having experienced the emotion which moved the author to create his poem, is incapable of grasping that emotion save through a direct and complete appeal to his imagination through his higher senses of sight and hearing. By stimulating these senses, through appropriate choice of words, the Imagist aims to arouse the reader to such a pitch that the reader re-creates imaginatively for himself the emotional complex which gave birth to the poem. Imagism is, therefore, first of all a means of arousing the emotions through the imagination. The Imagists must therefore be sharply distinguished from the realistic school, and also from the symbolists of the nineteenth century, from which latter they have, in some sense, derived. Through the constant insistence on emotion as the underlying essence of poetry, the Imagists approach closely to the Elizabethans of the sixteenth and the early romantics of the nineteenth century.

The second principle of Imagism concerns style. The Imagists desire to accomplish that renovation of the English language which is always periodically necessary if good poetry is to continue to be created in it. The Imagists have certain prejudices against inversions, clichés, journalese, highfalutin bombast, literary jargon, messy padding with adjectives. Each word must be an exact word, that is to say the sole word necessary for its particular place and purpose in the poem. This careful consideration for style relates the Imagists to the classicists of the eighteenth century, who undoubtedly rescued the English language from the absurdities of the “metaphysical” school. The Imagists also insist on it as a useful check to too great an exuberance of imagination.

The third principle of Imagism concerns form. The rhythmical form of the poem should not be a mere empty pattern, but should follow, as far as possible, the ebb and flow of the emotion throughout the poem. It should be an integral part of the poem itself, as indissoluble from it as the substance of the words themselves. Therefore the Imagists hold that the theory and practice of vers libre is necessary, although they do not go so far as to demand it in every case, or to say that rhyme and metre have not their uses. In their desire to create a full emotional range of rhythmical nuances, inclusive of both rhyme and metre as well as freer rhythmical figures, the Imagists derive direct from the first great romantic poets of England—Blake and Coleridge.

The last principle of Imagism concerns the attitude of the artist to life. The artist should realize that if he is not to be the slave of life he must not attempt to be its judge. He must not obtrude his petty personal judgments and vanities between the reader and the subject he writes about. He must not, in short, moralise about life, or gush over it, or make others feel anything else except what he has felt about it. In this respect the Imagist poets are in very firm reaction against the sentimental and pious optimism of the mid-nineteenth century, against the equally sentimental and fallacious aestheticism of the eighties and nineties, and—it may be added—against a good deal of the wishy-washy suggestiveness and sex-obsession that seems to be getting the upper hand of so many writers of today. The Imagist does not weight the balance, either for “morality” or “immorality”: he states, and lets the reader draw his own conclusion.

With these four principles in mind, we may now ask ourselves how the Imagists have carried them into practice. For practice is, after all, the supreme test of any theory of art. There are signs that Imagism is getting itself taken more seriously, not as a mere passing fad, but as something that has at least established certain guide-posts and land-marks for future poets, who wish to renew the traditions of good writing. I maintain that it has done more. It has permitted three poets, at least, to start from the same principles and to produce among them a very respectable body of poetry, which in each case is filled with the individual flavour of the personality who wrote it. That the Imagist principles should display such applicability and elasticity is, I maintain, very remarkable. We shall now see who these three poets are.

II.

Mr Richard Aldington, the first of the three to be considered, has recently brought together some thirty of his poems in a small volume, entitled Images. That this selection does not represent all of Mr Aldington’s work, must be apparent to all who are familiar with it. His long poem, Childhood, is not here; nor is his other long poem on the war, which surely deserves mention as being one of the few really humorous war poems ever written. To come to the shorter pieces, surely all admirers of Mr Aldington’s talent must deplore the absence of Daisy, Round Pond and The Poplar—the latter one of the most beautiful poems he has ever written. But whether Mr Aldington has omitted these pieces from a too severe critical judgment, or whether because they seem to interfere with the unity of his book, the fact remains that they were omitted, but that enough is left to give nearly all sides of his achievement.

Mr Aldington is a sophisticated, a cultivated, even a bookish poet. He has translated Anyte of Tegea, the Latin Poets of the Renaissance, and even that astounding farrago of poetry and buffoonery called Les Chansons de Maldoror. Recently he has given us, in the columns of The Egoist, a glimpse at his library which ranges from Euripides, via Apuleius, Hooker and Crowley, to Ford Madox Hueffer! “And is it for this I have laboured?” he cries. “To be the object of derision of some bibliophile looking at his books as cynically and disgustedly as I look at mine?”

No, it is not for this. It is for a handful of strange and satisfying poems that Mr Aldington has laboured. Every artist knows that it takes a great deal of life, an immense amount of experience and appreciation, to make even a little art. Life is like a many-faceted prism. We must walk around it, observe it on every side, see it not as we ourselves would care to see it, but as others have seen it, before we can induce it to show a new side to our efforts, to cast a few rays which it has not already cast before. Matthew Arnold, who was one of the few English critics able to look at literature from the standpoint of its historical development, declared that poetry was a criticism of life. And so it is. The task of a modern poet is not to shut his eyes to the past, but to see the work of the generations that preceded him as an uncompleted structure, the living intention of whose builders is again born in him, and seeks fruition in the additions he can make to it. In this sense Mr Aldington is a modern poet. He is a poet for the well-read, intelligent, cultivated man or woman.

The first poem of his I can remember seeing in print was the one entitled Choricos:

There is nothing in all the literature I know which can be safely set beside this poem (of which I have only quoted a few fragments) except a few lines of Leopardi:

Other than that, it is unique. And since it is the fashion to despise a poet because he does not write of aeroplanes and locomotives and socialism, but of the eternal verities of life, death, beauty, irony, let us first of all brush away the shallow assumption that Mr Aldington is an imitator of the classics and that all his work seems a derivation from the Greek.

The mood of the poem from which I have just quoted is not a mood which can be found in any Greek poet, or which any Greek would ever have understood. I have quoted enough to show what that mood is. It is a mood of mutability, of the sadness that arises in us when we see the instability of all earthly things. The first Occidental poet who ever expressed this mood, to my knowledge, was François Villon. In the East, of course, it was felt and expressed much earlier. For one must have seen kingdoms pass away and empires crumble to the dust and “the owl sing his watch-song from the towers of Afrasiab” before one can feel this mood, which Mr Aldington has here so beautifully and poignantly expressed.

Throughout his poetry Mr Aldington has frequently given us this emotion of a civilized man, a modern, brought face to face with some beautiful fragment of the past. Thus he cries to a Greek marble:

Surely no one would contend that a Greek could ever have said this! And in some quite recent poems we have the same feeling applied to the Renaissance, and even to modernity:

Or take this:

London, (May, 1915)

Such a poet is not what we vulgarly choose to call an optimist. No! Let us admit once for all, Mr Aldington is a pessimist. (So, by the way, were Sophocles and Leopardi and Shakespeare when he wrote King Lear, and Mr Thomas Hardy, to mention only a few; but I have never heard they were worse poets for it.) At times he gives us a very bitter dose indeed to swallow, as in his Childhood, Cinema Exit, or In the Tube. Yet he is not devoid of humour, playful and fantastic. Witness The Faun Sees Snow for the First Time, the Interlude, the Evening (a beautiful grotesque which I am tempted to quote), or for a grimmer note the conclusion of Lesbia. He will not admit that life is altogether without compensations. Herein he is honest. He even admits sentiment as a compensation, and he treats it delicately, fastidiously, with an unexpected touch of purely fourteenth-century feeling in the following piece:

After Two Years.

Altogether an unusual poet. One who never takes up the pen except when he has something individual to say, and whose utterance is at times so varied as to make him almost bafflingly individual. But not a Greek, although he has written finely on Greek themes. A modern? Yes; and not only a modern but, au fond, a Romantic. Remember the conclusion of the beautiful Night Piece:

“Very faint and shrill and far away the whistle sounds—more like a wild bird than ever. And all my unsatisfied desires and empty wishes and vague yearnings are set aching by that thin tremulous whistle—the post-horn of the Coach of Romance.”

(For lack of space, Mr Fletcher’s article will be concluded in the June issue.)