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The Sources of The Imagist Aesthetic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Wallace Martin
Wallace Martin*
Affiliation:
University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio
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Abstract

Earlier writers have erroneously assumed that Symbolism exercised a significant influence on the Imagist aesthetic. Hulme and Pound derived their conceptions of the image from the writings of French psychologists and philosophers. In the empiricist-associationist psychological tradition (represented in the writings of Taine and Théodule Ribot), I'image corresponds to David Hume's “impression”: it is the mental representation of sensory experience, the virtues of which are clarity, precision, and complexity (as opposed to the vagueness and simplicity of ideas). Hulme read works by Taine and Ribot, and his “Notes on Language and Style” embodies their theory of the image. Pound's conception of the image is similar to that contained in Ribot's Essai sur I'imagination créatrice. After 1908, Hulme adopted Bergson's organicist theory of the image; for Bergson, l'image was the linguistic embodiment of intuition. Imagism was not the culmination of the Romanticist aesthetic, as some critics have argued; it was the first attempt to transcend the subject-object dichotomy of nineteenth-century poetic theory.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 2 , March 1970 , pp. 196 - 204
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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References

1 “Revue du mois,” Mercure de France, cxi (1915), 355; Stanley K. Coffman, Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modem Poetry (Norman, Okla., 1951), p. 89.

2 The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York, 1950), p. 218.

3 “The Example of Rémy de Gourmont,” Criterion, x (1931), 619; L'Influence du symbolisme français sur la poésie américaine (Paris, 1929), p. 85.

4 Ezra Pound's Poetics and Literary Tradition (Bern, 1966), pp. 70–72.

5 London, 1960, p. 51.

6 Romantic Image (New York, 1964), p. 121.

7 “Le Symbolisme pourra (et même devra) être considéré par nous comme le libre et personnel développement de l'individu esthétique.” L'Idéalisme (Paris, 1893), p. 12. Gourmont employed substantially the same definition of Symbolism in his later writings. In discussing the Imagists (see n. 1), he cited their “horreur du cliché … de la rhétorique et du grandiose” as evidence of their indebtedness to Symbolism; but such similarities hardly entail any specific indebtedness.

8 Letters, p. 218.

9 “Vorticism,” Fortnightly Review, xcvi (1914), 463.

10 The Poet as Sculptor (London, 1965), p. 66.

11 “The Plan for a Book,” Speculations, ed. Herbert Read (London, 1924), p. 263.

12 New Age, ix (1911), 400.

13 Kenneth Cornell, The Post-Symbolist Period (New Haven, Conn., 1958), p. 51.

14 André Lalande, et al., Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (Paris, 1926), i, 339. This definition was first published in the Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, “séance du 2 juillet 1908.”

15 Quoted in Lalande,i, 340.

16 These examples are taken from Théodule Ribot's Essay on the Creative Imagination, trans. A. H. Baron (London, 1906).

17 On Intelligence, trans. T. D. Haye (London, 1871), p. 34. English translations of French works are quoted when there is no reason to suppose that Hulme or Pound read the French edition.

18 “Notes on Language and Style,” Further Speculations, ed. Sam Hynes (Lincoln, Neb., 1962), p. 84. Elsewhere, I have argued that “Notes on Language and Style” and “Cinders” represent the first phase of Hulme's thought, antedating his discovery of Bergson. Later in this paper, I discuss the importance of Bergson in Hulme's subsequent writings.

19 On Intelligence, p. 3.

20 FS designates Further Speculations.

21 A letter from Hulme to Edward Marsh indicates that Hulme read Ribot's Essai sur l'imagination créatrice before Nov. 1912. See A. R. Jones, The Life and Opinions of Thomas Ernest Hulme (London, 1960), p. 209. Hulme alludes to Ribot in Speculations, p. 263. On the importance of Taine and Ribot in French psychology, see Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York, 1929), pp. 606–607, 667–668.

22 A. G. Lehmann, The Symbolist Aesthetic in France, 1885–1895 (Oxford, 1950), pp. 60–67; Karl-D. Utti, La Passion littéraire de Rémy de Gourmont (Paris, 1962), p. 65.

23 Utti, pp. 78–97; p. 272. While Utti acknowledges Gourmont's debt to Ribot, he does not indicate the extent to which Gourmont simply paraphrases Ribot in long passages of Le Problème du style.

24 “Cinders,” Speculations, p. 229.

25 EIG designates L'Evolution des idées générales.

26 “Cinders,” Speculations, p. 229.

27 ECI designates Essay on the Creative Imagination, trans A. H. Baron (London, 1906).

28 “AI” designates Pound's “As for Imagisme,” New Age, xvi (1915).

29 ECI, pp. 195–196. Pound wrote a poem entitled “Revolt against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modem Poetry,” in which he proposed to substitute “shapes of power” and “men” for the vague “shadows” and “dreams” in the poetry of his contemporaries.

30 An article that Hulme wrote on Gaultier is reprinted in FS; Séailles is mentioned in Speculations, p. 263.

31 Elsewhere, I have discussed the distinction between l'image and l'idée, and that between “la littérature des images” and “la littérature des idées,” in nineteenth-century French criticism: “ ‘The Forgotten School of 1909‘ and the Origins of Imagism,” A Catalogue of the Imagist Poets (New York, 1966), pp. 27–28. Georges Renard and (through him) Gourmont reinterpreted these distinctions, which Renard discovered in the writings of Balzac; for a discussion of Balzac's use of the terms, see Marc Eigeldinger, La Philosophie de l'art chez Balzac (Geneva, 1957), pp. 127–141.

32 Glen S. Burne, in Rêmy de Gourmont (Carbondale, 111., 1963), and Karl-D. Utti discuss Gourraont's conception of l'image and touch on its relevance to Pound and Hulme; Donald Davie and N. Christoph de Nagy, in their books on Pound, treat Gourmont's influence on his thought. Taupin's assertion that Gourmont influenced Hulme is cited without comment by Burne and Utti. In “Imagism: A Unity of Gesture,” which appears in American Poetry, ed. Irvin Ehrenpreis (London, 1965), Alun R. Jones asserts that Hulme read Gourmont in 1907 (p. 116). Jones has apparently come to this conclusion since writing his book on Hulme, but he does not note the evidence on which it is based.

33 Matter and Memory (London, 1911), pp. vii-viii. Hulme may have read this work in French.

34 Paris, 1889, p. 11. The information concerning when Hulme read this work is from an interview with F. S. Flint.

35 An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (London, 1913), p. 14.

36 New Age, ix (1911), 400–401.

37 Poetry Review, i (1912), 355.

38 See my “Freud and Imagism,” NàrQ, viii (1961), 470–471, 474. Walter Sutton discovered the source of Pound's “complex” independently; see his discussion in Modern American Criticism (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1963), pp. 4–5. I am grateful to Prof. Sutton for many helpful suggestions regarding this paper.

39 “Vorticism,” p. 467.

40 In Subconscious Phenomena, ed. Hugo Miinsterberg (London, 1911)—a work which Pound alludes to in the Imagist manifesto—Ribot makes a similar distinction between the static and dynamic subconscious.

41 In “The New Therapy,” New Age, xxx (1922), to cite only one instance, Pound discusses Louis Bernan's thesis that the glands are the primary determinants of human behavior and concludes that this theory “offers us a comforting relief from Freudian excess” (pp. 259–260).

42 The Symbolist Movement (New York, 1967), p. 101.

43 The influence of Symons, Dowson, and Yeats on Pound's early poetry and its resultant symbolism are discussed in detail by de Nagy, The Poetry of Ezra Pound: The PreImagist Stage (Bern, 1960), pp. 27–53; pp. 85–104. Neither de Nagy nor Thomas H. Jackson—The Early Poetry of Ezra Pound (Cambridge, Mass., 1968)—suggests that any French poet influenced the symbolism of Pound's early poetry.

44 The thesis that the Imagists and their successors inaugurated a new tradition that leads to Objectivism is brilliantly presented in J. Hillis Miller's Poets of Reality (Cambridge, Mass., 1965) and L. S. Dembo's Conceptions of Reality in Modern American Poetry (Berkeley, Calif., 1966).

45 The Symbolist Aesthetic, p. 72.

46 Behaviorism has been undermined by rigorous application of the very logical premises upon which it is based. See Sigmund Koch's demolition of Behaviorist theory, and B. F. Skinner's melancholy reply, in Behaviorism and Phenomenology, ed. T. W. Wann (Chicago, 1965), pp. 1–45.