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A degenerate Englishman may be brutal and coarse, but he could never be guilty of the inane or the outrageous things which the Cubists, the Imagists, the Futurists, and the other Ists among the French have turned out. The degenerate Frenchman is like our species of smilax which looks fresh, shining, and attractive, but when it blooms gives out an odor of dead rats.
If, as I believe, emotional thought rather than imagery is the essence of poetry, then the modern school of imagists and their French forbears among the "Parnassiens" are mistaken. Their effort comes in the end to a revival of the old thesis ut pictura poesis, the attempt to make poetry a vision of nature rather than an expression of the inner life.
Moth and snail and skylark, daisy and field-mouse and water-fowl, seized by an eye that is quick to their poetic values, their interest to men, furnish material enough for lyric feeling. The fondness of Romantic poets for isolating a single object has been matched in our day by the success of the Imagists in painting a single aspect of some phenomenon
It is here that the life of reason enters into the life of mere sensation, transforming the reports of the nerves into ideas and thoughts that have coherence and general human significance. It is possible, certainly, as the experiments of contemporary "imagists" prove, to write poetry of a certain type without employing the "loop-line."
Then the illusion is lost in the next turn of the reel. Perhaps it would be a sound observance to confine this form of motion picture to a half reel or quarter reel, just as the Imagist poem is generally a half or quarter page. A series of them could fill a special evening. The Imagists are colorists. Some people do not consider that photographic black, white, and gray are color.
In fact, Claire learned that there may be an almost tolerable state of existence without gardenias or the news about the latest Parisian imagists. She dropped suddenly from the vast, smooth-swelling miles of wheatland into the tortured marvels of the Bad Lands, and the road twisted in the shadow of flying buttresses and the terraced tombs of maharajas.
But here for instance are seven colors which the Imagists might use: The whiteness of swans in the light. The whiteness of swans in a gentle shadow. The color of a sunburned man in the light. His color in a gentle shadow. His color in a deeper shadow. The blackness of black velvet in the light. The blackness of black velvet in a deep shadow.
What has this got to do with his poetry? It has everything to do with it. It gives him the key to the hearts of children; to the basic savagery of a primitive black or a poor white; to peripatetic harvesters; to futurists, imagists, blue-stockings, pedants of all kinds; to evangelists, college professors, drunken sailors, tramps whose robes are lined with vermin.
What an art-critic said of the painter W. M. Chase applies equally well to many contemporary Imagists who use the forms of lyric verse: "He saw the world as a display of beautiful surfaces which challenged his skill. It has no time for epic breadth of detail, for the rich accumulation of harmonious images which marks Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum" or Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes."
Amy Lowell a patrician a radical her education her years of preparation vigour and versatility definitions of free verse and of poetry Whitman's influence the imagists Patterns her first book her rapid improvement sword blades her gift in narrative polyphonic prose Anna Hempstead Branch her dramatic power domestic poems tranquil meditation an orthodox poet Edgar Lee Masters his education Greek inspiration a lawyer Reedy's Mirror the Anthology power of the past mental vigour similarity and variety irony and sarcasm passion for truth accentuation of ugliness analysis a masterpiece of cynicism an ideal side the dramatic monologue defects and limitations Louis Untermeyer his youth the question of beauty three characteristics a gust of life Still Life old maids burlesques and parodies the newspaper humourists F. P. A. his two books his influence on English composition.
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