DR ROSE LUCAS Imagism. Victorian Poetry Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Lady of Shalott’: On either side the river lie Long fields of barley and of rye, That.

DR ROSE LUCAS

Imagism

Victorian Poetry

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Lady of Shalott’:

On either side the river lieLong fields of barley and of rye,That clothe the wold and meet the sky:And thro’ the field the road runs by

To many tower’d Camelot;

Imagism

Imagism was a literary movement begun in the early twentieth century by the American poets Ezra Pound, Hida Doolittle (H.D.) and Amy Lowell.

Its key rationale was to break with what they saw as the florid and excessive style of Victorian poetry.

Imagism

In an essay on Imagism, Pound wrote that Imagist poetry required three things”

1. That is should involve ‘direct treatment of the subject.’

2. That it should ‘use no word that does not contribute to the presentation.’

3. That the Imagist poet should ‘compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.’

Imagism

The Imagist poem thus tends to be:Short and direct, not using excessive

adjectives or sentimentality;Making use of the rhythms of ordinary

speech and free verse;A focus on the precision of the image as the

key vehicle for the poem’s ‘meaning’ – shearing away any distracting description or elaboration.

Imagism to Modernism

The tight and crystallised image of the Imagist poem, with its emphasis upon newness/a break with the old, became the basis for the emergence of literary Modernism.

Poetic Modernism as an extended version of Imagism, using the building blocks of Imagism to construct new views of a new and confronting world.

Poets such as Pound, H.D. William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot.

Factors behind Modernism

Modernism was a literary, artistic and cultural ‘movement’ which began in the first decade of the twentieth century and continued until the beginning of the second world war in 1939.

Key Literary Proponents:• James Joyce• Ezra Pound• Hilda Doolittle• Virginia Woolf• T.S Eliot

Influences

A response to:• Formalism and traditionalism of much 19thC

art• Darwin 1859 Origin of the Species• Marx 1867 Das Kapital• Freud 1891 The Interpretation of Dreams• Einstein 1916 Theory of Relativity• World War I, 1914-1918

Modernism

Ezra Pound, from ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,’ 1920:

‘The age demanded an imageOf its accelerated grimace…’

Aspects of Modernism

• A reappraisal of art forms – on the understanding that art needs both to reflect and be meaningful to a contemporary audience.

• A response to fundamental challenges to ways of thinking about the social, the religious, even the idea of the self and of the mind.

• A tendency to deconstruct narratives and styles of the past – and then to put them back together into different shapes

• A re-using of classical sources: eg Dante, Shakespeare, Greek, Chinese, Japanese literature

Aspects of Modernism

• Techniques of literary collage, juxtaposition, multiple voices and/or simultaneous perspectives

• Use of a ‘stream of consciousness’ (William James, Freud, Woolf)

• A loss of absolute meaning – but a concommitant struggle to re-establish meaning (in contradistinction to postmodernism)

Modernism

William Carlos Williams wrote, in a review of Marianne Moore’s poetry, that the modernist poem developed from the ‘flaw, the crack in the bowl’ of previous literary style.

To consciously change poetic style, was an attempt to both reflect and embody a changing world (WWI, post Darwin, Freud, revolution…), and to critique it.

‘A love song’

What have I to say to youWhen we shall meet?Yet—I lie here thinking of you.

The stain of loveIs upon the world.Yellow, yellow, yellow,It eats into the leaves,Smears with saffronThe horned branches that leanHeavilyAgainst a smooth purple sky.

There is no light—Only a honey-thick stainThat drips from leaf to leafAnd limb to limbSpoiling the coloursOf the whole world.

I am alone.The weight of love

Has buoyed me upTill my headKnocks against the sky.

See me!My hair is dripping with nectar—Starlings carry itOn their black wings.See, at lastMy arms and my handsAre lying idle.

How can I tellIf I shall ever love you againAs I do now?

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19911

Modernist Art

Georges Braques ‘Still Life with Guitar,’ 1936

Modernist Art

Pablo Picasso, ‘Three Muscians,’ 1921

Modernist Art

Pablo Picasso, ‘Three Muscians,’ 1921

Piet Mondrian, ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’ 1942

Mondrian’s visual art reflecting the image and pulse of NYC, being the thing, as well as commenting on it.