File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_2000/phillitcrit.0008, message 247


Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 08:03:09 -0400 (EDT)
From: David Langston <dlangsto-AT-mcla.mass.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Wonderful, lovely




Thanks for the endorsement; those are kind words which brighten the day.

On Thu, 17 Aug 2000, Thad Q. Alexander wrote:

> What other poets or poems would you say are Imagist that I may look up? 
> What comes to mind is Sandburg's "Fog" 

Yes, "Fog" makes use of some imagist techniques, but it departs from
imagist poetics by including quite a bit of "connective tissue" which the
earliest advocates of imagism believed should be omitted.  Since we have
been discussing _The Waste Land_ already on this list, you might look at
the facsimile version where you can see Ezra Pound's editorial hand at
work, excising the narrative connective tissue and giving TWL a stronger
imagist flavor.

Other imagist poets you might be interested in reading (a list of
titles would be too long for a brief message):
  William Carlos Williams
  H.D.  (Hilda Doolittle) 
  Ezra Pound --> see especially his "Station in the Metro" and his account
                 of how he wrote that poem plus his 
                 list of instructions for writing an imagist poem
  Amy Lowell --> (Pound didn't like her stuff and called it "amygism")
  T. E. Hulme
  Richard Addington
  D. H. Lawrence (George Trail might identify which poems to consult)
  
As a program for poetry, imagism didn't hold the allegiance of its early
practitioners for very long, but it has had a huge impact on how poetry
has been written since then.  It is fun to study because its techniques
play off a larger aesthetic question of our time, the "aesthetics of the
fragment," which has played a role in just about every twentieth century
art form.

Best, David Langston



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