42 - Imagism

Summary

On the evening of 17 July 1914, Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell faced each other from opposite ends of a long dinner-table in the Dieu-donné restaurant in London. The occasion brought together most of the poets included earlier that year in the anthology Pound had titled (in pseudo-French) Des Imagistes: H.D., Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, Allen Upward and Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), among others. The celebratory feeling turned to ritual toasts, but the accomplishments of Imagism(e) gave way in short course to questions about its very identity. Hueffer confessed that he was ignorant of what an Imagist was, or could possibly be (even so, he professed his doubts that Lowell qualified as one). Upward joked that all it took to be an ‘Imagist’ was to be named one by Pound. Aldington then objected that Imagism certainly existed, but only in the signal instance of H.D. (his wife), whose work discovered its proper company, not among the members of the contemporary avant-garde (the Vorticists had also gathered in the Dieu-donné), but with classical prosodists, with archaic Greek poetry in particular.

The scene survives as an emblem of Imagism and, as a narrative for literary history, its parabolic fable. Here Pound and Lowell, sometimes behaving politely in public but usually not, face off in a test of strength for control over an initiative whose identity remains indeterminate. Any representative anthology of Imagism would reflect this uncertainty, showing more as a miscellany than a coherence. Even within the (assignably) Imagist oeuvre of individual poets the inconsistency is striking. Hueffer alternates a verse of horrible doggerel (as bad as the worst barrack-room ballad) with poems of exquisite urban impressionism. Aldington shifts from the songs of a neo- Hellenic ritual myth, which are remarkably adequate to a feeling of ‘primitive’ simplicity and impersonality, to lyrics of the sheerest personal grievance only a few rhythmic beats away from prosaic complaint.