4. To present an image (hence the name: “Imagist”). We are not a
school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render
particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however
magnificent and sonorous.
5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred or
indefinite.
6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is the very
essence of poetry.
It does not seem possible that these six obvious and almost
platitudinous principles, which the Imagists so often neglected in their
poetry, could have evoked the storm of argument, fury and downright
vilification that broke as soon as the militant Amy Lowell began to
champion them. Far from being revolutionary, these principles were not
new; they were not even thought so by their sponsors. The Imagists
themselves realized they were merely restating ideals which had fallen
into desuetude, and declared, “They are the essentials of all great
poetry, indeed of all great literature.” And yet many conservative
critics, joined by the one hundred per cent reactionaries, rushed wildly
to combat these “heresies”! They forgot that, in trying to protect the
future from such lawlessness as “using the exact word,” from allowing
“freedom in the choice of subject,” from the importance of
“concentration,” they were actually attacking the highest traditions of
their enshrined past.
The controversy succeeded in doing even more than the work of the
Imagists themselves. “H. D.” remained in England, perfecting her
delicate and exquisitely finished designs. John Gould Fletcher, a more
vacillating expatriate, continued to strengthen his gift and shift his
standards; his later and richer work is in almost flat opposition to the
early pronouncements. Miss Lowell was left to carry on the battle
single-handed; to defend the theories which, in practice, she was
beginning to violate brilliantly. By all odds, the most energetic and
unflagging experimenter, Miss Lowell’s versatility became amazing. She
has wielded a controversial cudgel with one hand and, with the other,
she has written Chaucerian stanzas, polyphonic prose, monologs in her
native New England dialect, irregular _vers libre_, conservative
couplets, translations from the French, echoes from the Japanese, even
primitive re-creations of Indian folk-lore!
The work of the Imagists was done. Its members began to develop
themselves by themselves. They had helped to swell the tide of realistic
and romantic naturalism—a tide of which their contribution was merely
one wave, a high breaker that carried its impact far inshore.