Ezra Pound in the Imagist Movement

Ezra Pound in the Imagist Movement In the beginning of the 20th century, a poetry style called Imagism was growing. Imagism is derived from Modernism and was created in response to Romanticism. Contrary to Romanticism, Imagist poems consist of brief sentences of dry clarity which painted an exact visual image and poetic statement. Thence leaving little to no room for interpretation due to it’s candidness expressing of ideas. Imagism was also a conferrer to the french Symbolist movement, but antithetical to it in that Symbolism analyzes more in music and Imagism more in art and sculpture.

In the Imagist Movement belonged a group of poets called Imagists. The main contributors to the poetic style were John Gould Fletcher, Harriet Monroe, Ezra Pound and many others. The most influential poet in the Imagist movement and the most famous was Ezra Pound. Pound, born in Ohio in 1885, completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. His work had a major influence in famous poets such as Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot. After graduation, Pound taught for a short time at Wabash College in Indiana and then left for

Europe,where he lived most of his life. His first sum of poetry, “A Lume Spento”, (In which he carried copies to distributed when he moved to London later that year) was published in Venice in1908. His second, “The Personae of Ezra Pound”, was published in London in 1909 and was immediately acclaimed by critics. Pound wrote more than seventy books, contributed to seventy others, and published more than 1,500 articles. Being an Imagist, Pound had many strict rules to his style of writing. One of which he stressed lyricism and was selective in use of words.

A lyrical poem is “strongly marked by imagination, melody, and emotion, and creates a single, unified impression” (Holman, 1986, p. 283). Pound, as well as all other Imagist poets followed other rules such as using direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective, using absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation, and as regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. Another important aspect of Pound’s literary career was his large promotion of other writers and artists. He persuaded Harriet Monroe to publish T.

S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” He was also an early supporter of the Irish novelist James Joyce and helped him in publishing his work in literary magazines before they were published in book form. Pound praised other poets while they were still fairly unknown such as D. H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway. In all of the Imagist movement, there has been many contributors, poets, and poems. Though Ezra Pound doesn’t regard his work to any significant level, it is evident that his work is held at the highest respect of imagist movement and well after his death.