360 Making It New: 1900–1945ending, was not so much the movement itself as the beliefs it articulated. It provided
a focus: not, like Harriet Monroe’s little magazine Poetry, a practical focus but an
ideological one. It crystallized tendencies, certain notions about the nature of poetic
experiment, which had been developing in a piecemeal fashion over the previous
decade – to organize, define, and so promote them as to supply a convenient basis
for modernism.
The character of these tendencies can be glimpsed by the three “rules” for Imagists
that one member of the group, F. S. Flint, drew up in an essay published in Poetry in- The rules were:
Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective.
To use absolutely no word that did [sic] not contribute to the presentation.
As regarding the rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase not in sequence
of the metronome.“The point of Imagism,” Pound wrote in 1914, “is that it does not use images as
ornaments. The image itself is the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated
argument.” That remark, corresponding to the first of Flint’s rules, suggests the
primary Imagist objective: to avoid rhetoric and moralizing, to stick closely to the
object or experience being described. The image, as what Pound elsewhere called
“an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,” could do all the work
of suggestion, evocation; and the poet, or any writer, need hardly ever, if at all, move
into explicit generalization. That slotted in neatly with the second Imagist “rule”
which Pound, in 1917, summed up by advising, “Use no superfluous word, no
adjective which does not reveal something.” This advice was perhaps what Amy
Lowell had in mind when she said that the Imagist principles “are not new; they
have fallen into desuetude. They are the essentials of all great poetry.” Be that as it
may, this “ridding the field of verbiage” became one of the central activities in mod-
ern American poetry. “Cut and cut again wherever you write,” William Carlos
Williams was to suggest to his fellow poet Denise Levertov, “– while you leave by
your art no trace of your cutting – and the final utterance will remain packed with
what you have to say.”
And then there was the third “rule” promulgated by Flint and expanded on by
Pound when he declared: “Rhythm MUST have meaning. It can’t be merely a careless
dash off, with no grip and no real hold to the words and sense, a tumty tum tumty
tum tum ta.” The free verse of the Imagists was one aspect of their work to which
contemporary critics took special exception. One reviewer, for example, claimed to
see no difference between Amy Lowell’s free verse and the prose of the British
novelist George Meredith: to which Lowell replied, “there is no difference. Whether
a thing is written as prose or verse is immaterial.” Pound did not put things quite as
categorically as Lowell. As he saw it, poetry should be at least “as well written as
prose,” but there was a difference because in poetry, he believed, words are infused
with something more than their prose meaning. “To break the iamb, that was the
first heave,” as he put it in his Cantos: the poet should first shake off the tyranny ofGGray_c04.indd 360ray_c 04 .indd 360 8 8/1/2011 7:53:50 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 50 AM