A History of American Literature

Making It New: 1900–1945 359

bridge erected over a vacuum. He recalls his audience to the thought that all human

ceremonies are shadow play, no more than fragile defenses against the time when, as

we inevitably must, we shed our humanity, returning to the earth, our origins.

The Inventions of Modernism

Imagism, Vorticism, and Objectivism

The beginnings of Imagism can be traced back to the first few years of the twentieth

century and to the feeling common among young writers of the time that poets were

for the most part playing for safety and sentimentality. In reaction to this a group

began to gather in London dedicated, among other things, to the aim of reproducing

“the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons

of the virgin-prairie” – and to the belief that “poetic ideas are best expressed by the

rendering of concrete objects.” They were joined, in April 1909, by the young expa-

triate Ezra Pound, whose own ideas about poetry had been outlined in a letter to

William Carlos Williams six months earlier: “1. To Paint the thing as I see it. 2.

Beauty. 3. Freedom from didacticism. 4. It is only good manners if you repeat a few

other men to at least do it better or more briefly.” In 1911 Pound then renewed

acquaintance with Hilda Doolittle, newly arrived from the United States and calling

herself H.D. By now, Pound was looking around for good poetry to send to Harriet

Monroe in Chicago and found it both in the work of H.D. and in that of a young

British writer, Richard Aldington. Then, in 1912, Pound informed them, apparently

to their surprise, that they were Imagists. The next step was to produce an anthology,

which duly appeared in 1914. The anthology was poorly received, and Pound him-

self moved on to Vorticism, a stricter form of Imagism that emphasized the dynamic

nature of the image. “The image is not an idea,” he declared while campaigning on

behalf of Vorticism: “It is a radiant node or cluster ... a VORTEX, from which, and

through which, and into which ideas are constantly rushing.” With Pound abandon-

ing Imagism, the way was left clear for Amy Lowell (1874–1925), descendant of a

distinguished New England family, to assume control of the movement. Under her

auspices, two more anthologies were published in 1916 and 1917. After that, Lowell

declared, there were to be no more collections since the movement had “done its

work.” As far as Pound was concerned, the announcement came none too soon. For

him, Imagism had already become “Amy-gisme,” an excuse for mediocrity. This was,

incidentally, unfair to Lowell, who was an accomplished and various poet. She could

write intense emotional vignettes in the Imagist vein, like “Wakefulness” (1919),

“polyphonic prose” (that is, writing that is prose in its typography and poetic in its

density), and longer poems such as the piece addressed to “The Sisters” (1925), the

“strange trio” of her fellow female poets: Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and

Emily Dickinson. Above all, in her collection Pictures of the Floating World (1919),

she could produce a series of stories and longer love poems, woman to woman, that

are notable for both their passion and their discipline. But what mattered about

Imagism, as Pound sensed and indeed Lowell acknowledged as she assumed its

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