The New Poetry Series

PUBLISHED BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

IRRADIATIONS. SAND AND SPRAY. John Gould Fletcher.

SOME IMAGIST POETS.

JAPANESE LYRICS. Translated by Lafcadio Hearn.

AFTERNOONS OF APRIL. Grace Hazard Conkling.

THE CLOISTER: A VERSE DRAMA. Emile Verhaeren.

INTERFLOW. Geoffrey C. Faber.

STILLWATER PASTORALS AND OTHER POEMS. Paul Shivell.

IDOLS. Walter Conrad Arensberg.

TURNS AND MOVIES, AND OTHER TALES IN VERSE. Conrad Aiken.

ROADS. Grace Fallow Norton.

GOBLINS AND PAGODAS. John Gould Fletcher.

SOME IMAGIST POETS. 1916.

A SONG OF THE GUNS. Gilbert Frankau.

MOTHERS AND MEN. Harold T. Pulsifer.

SOME IMAGIST POETS, 1916

SOME IMAGIST POETS
1916

AN ANNUAL ANTHOLOGY

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1916

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published May 1916

THIRD IMPRESSION

PREFACE

In bringing the second volume of Some Imagist Poets before the public, the authors wish to express their gratitude for the interest which the 1915 volume aroused. The discussion of it was widespread, and even those critics out of sympathy with Imagist tenets accorded it much space. In the Preface to that book, we endeavoured to present those tenets in a succinct form. But the very brevity we employed has lead to a great deal of misunderstanding. We have decided, therefore, to explain the laws which govern us a little more fully. A few people may understand, and the rest can merely misunderstand again, a result to which we are quite accustomed.

In the first place “Imagism” does not mean merely the presentation of pictures. “Imagism” refers to the manner of presentation, not to the subject. It means a clear presentation of whatever the author wishes to convey. Now he may wish to convey a mood of indecision, in which case the poem should be indecisive; he may wish to bring before his reader the constantly shifting and changing lights over a landscape, or the varying attitudes of mind of a person under strong emotion, then his poem must shift and change to present this clearly. The “exact” word does not mean the word which exactly describes the object in itself, it means the “exact” word which brings the effect of that object before the reader as it presented itself to the poet's mind at the time of writing the poem. Imagists deal but little with similes, although much of their poetry is metaphorical. The reason for this is that while acknowledging the figure to be an integral part of all poetry, they feel that the constant imposing of one figure upon another in the same poem blurs the central effect.

The great French critic, Remy de Gourmont, wrote last Summer in La France that the Imagists were the descendants of the French Symbolistes. In the Preface to his Livre des Masques, M. de Gourmont has thus described Symbolisme: “Individualism in literature, liberty of art, abandonment of existing forms.... The sole excuse which a man can have for writing is to write down himself, to unveil for others the sort of world which mirrors itself in his individual glass.... He should create his own aesthetics—and we should admit as many aesthetics as there are original minds, and judge them for what they are and not what they are not.” In this sense the Imagists are descendants of the Symbolistes; they are Individualists.

The only reason that Imagism has seemed so anarchaic and strange to English and American reviewers is that their minds do not easily and quickly suggest the steps by which modern art has arrived at its present position. Its immediate prototype cannot be found in English or American literature, we must turn to Europe for it. With Debussy and Stravinsky in music, and Gauguin and Matisse in painting, it should have been evident to every one that art was entering upon an era of change. But music and painting are universal languages, so we have become accustomed to new idioms in them, while we still find it hard to recognize a changed idiom in literature.

The crux of the situation is just here. It is in the idiom employed. Imagism asks to be judged by different standards from those employed in Nineteenth-Century art. It is small wonder that Imagist poetry should be incomprehensible to men whose sole touchstone for art is the literature of one country for a period of four centuries. And it is an illuminating fact that among poets and men conversant with many poetic idioms, Imagism is rarely misconceived. They may not agree with us, but they do not misunderstand us.

This must not be misconstrued into the desire to belittle our forerunners. On the contrary, the Imagists have the greatest admiration for the past, and humility towards it. But they have been caught in the throes of a new birth. The exterior world is changing, and with it men's feelings, and every age must express its feelings in its own individual way. No art is any more “egoistic” than another; all art is an attempt to express the feelings of the artist, whether it be couched in narrative form or employ a more personal expression.

It is not what Imagists write about which makes them hard of comprehension; it is the way they write it. All nations have laws of prosody, which undergo changes from time to time. The laws of English metrical prosody are well known to every one concerned with the subject. But that is only one form of prosody. Other nations have had different ones: Anglo-Saxon poetry was founded upon alliteration, Greek and Roman was built upon quantity, the Oriental was formed out of repetition, and the Japanese Hokku got its effects by an exact and never-to-be-added-to series of single syllables. So it is evident that poetry can be written in many modes. That the Imagists base much of their poetry upon cadence and not upon metre makes them neither good nor bad. And no one realizes more than they that no theories nor rules make poetry. They claim for their work only that it is sincere.

It is this very fact of “cadence” which has misled so many reviewers, until some have been betrayed into saying that the Imagists discard rhythm, when rhythm is the most important quality in their technique. The definition of vers libre is—a verse-form based upon cadence. Now cadence in music is one thing, cadence in poetry quite another,