Imagism
By :
Tayf Mohammed
Sultana Ali
Imagism:
• It is a movement in poetry in the early 20th century in England and America that
involved using precise language and painting clear pictures with words
• It is a type of poetry that describes images with simple language and great focus.
It came out of the Modernist movement in poetry.
• Poems are imagist when they are short, compact, and focus on description, not
narration.
Imagism:
• Imagism was born in England and America in the early twentieth century.
• Against modernism, imagism aimed to replace abstractions with concrete
details that could be further expounded upon through the use of figuration.
• Imagism emphasized simplicity, clarity of expression, and precision
through the use of exacting visual images.
• Poems written by James Joyce that use clear, concise language to
create pictures are an example of imagism.
Imagism:
• Though Ezra Pound is noted as the founder of imagism, the movement was rooted
in ideas first developed by English philosopher and poet T. E. Hulme, who, as early
as 1908, spoke of poetry based on an absolutely accurate presentation of its
subject, with no excess verbiage.
Goal of Imagism:
• Its goal was to move away from long poems that told a story. Imagism, in contrast,
often tried to capture the look and feel of a single image.
• An image is something you experience with one or more of your five senses:
seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, or tasting. A typical imagist poem is short,
more like a painting than a story and often, like a painting, very visual.
• You look at the poem as you would a painting and try to see in your mind's eye
what the poet is describing.
• Imagist poems tend to use few verbs because they are not trying to depict an
action but rather describe an object.
Characteristics of Imagism:
• Direct treatment of the subject. That is, the poem should deal directly with what's
being talked about, not try to use fancy words and phrases to talk about it.
• Use no word that does not contribute to the presentation. Use as few words as
possible.
• Compose in the rhythm of the musical phrase, not in the rhythm of the
metronome. (regular in rhythm) In other words, create new rhythms instead of
relying on the old, boring ones.
Famous representatives of Imagism:
 Ezra pound
 Amy Lowell

T.S. Eliot

F.S. Flint
 Hilda Doolittle

James Joyce

William Carlos
 John Gould Fletcher
 Ford Madox
“In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound
• The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
• Petals on a wet, black bough.
• It is one of the first imagist poems to be written, ‘In a Station of the Metro’ bears out what Pound
himself urged should be the main tenets of imagism: direct treatment of the thing, to use no word
that does not contribute to the presentation, and to avoid overly regular rhythms that remind one of
the monotony of a metronome.
• This poem is just two lines long and was inspired by Pound’s own experience in the Paris Metro
(opened 1900), where he saw one beautiful face, then another, and then another, standing out to
him among the large mass of crowds. His poem, which puts us in mind of the Japanese haiku, was
originally some thirty lines long but Pound gradually cut away all of the extraneous lines until he was
left with just this: the poem’s central image.
Thank you