Imagism

The imagists (lat. Imago "picture") were supporters of an Anglo-American literary movement that emerged around 1912 and disappeared again after the First World War. The writer Thomas Ernest Hulme was one of the first to propagate these ideas in her work.

In poetry in particular, the imagists wanted to leave behind the tradition of romantic and Victorian literature, whose exuberance of feeling and artificiality they rejected; at the same time they turned against the so-called Georgian poets . Instead, the imagists relied on the inclusion of colloquial language , precise imagery and clear, sharp expression. The rules of rhetoric and metrics should no longer be given any meaning. A free rhythm up to prose found more and more popularity.

The group had its center in London , where it also accepted poets from Ireland and the United States in its ranks and also several women, which was noticeable in the literature of the time. The importance of the group for the literature of the early 20th century. can hardly be overestimated. This is made clear, for example, by the saying of TS Eliot , who later stated:

"The point de repère [the pivot point, the landmark], which is usually and customarily used as the starting point of modern poetry, is the group that was called imagists in London around 1910. "

In a literary environment that valued moralizing texts such as those by Longfellow and Tennyson , the Imagists advocated a return to what they saw as classic values ​​such as direct representation, the economy of language and the willingness to use non-traditional forms experiment. With the tendency to view the “thing” as a “thing”, i.e. to isolate a single image in order to reveal its essence, imagism corresponds to contemporary developments in avant-garde art, especially cubism , although the imagists try to isolate them by means of “illuminating details” ( Ezra Pound ), whereas the Cubists pursue a synthesis of the individual image from different perspectives.

Richard Aldington was the editor of the avant-garde magazine The Egoist . She was u. a. as the mouthpiece of the imagists.

After 1917 , some of these theses remained relevant and influenced u. a. TS Eliot .

The following writers are considered to be imagists or their epigones:

• Richard Aldington
• John Cournos
• HD (Hilda Doolittle)
• John Gould Fletcher
• FS Flint
• Ford Madox Ford
• Thomas Ernest Hulme
• James Joyce
• DH Lawrence
• Amy Lowell
• John Masefield (Early Works)
• Ezra Pound
• William Carlos Williams

literature

• Thomas Ernst Hulme: Comments on language and style. (= The new Lot. 9). Translated by Rudolf Wittkopf, David John Marshall. Henssel, Berlin 1962. (Engl. Notes on language and style)
• Stanley K. Coffman: Imagism. Octagon Pr., New York 1977, ISBN 0-374-91793-0 .
• Glenn Hughes: Imagism and the imagists. Biblo & Tannen, New York 1972, ISBN 0-8196-0282-5 .
• William C. Pratt: The imagist poem. Duton, New York 1963, ISBN 0-525-47126-X .
• Flemming Olsen: Between positivism and TS Eliot: imagism and TE Hulme. Univ. Press of Southern Denmark, Odense 2008, ISBN 978-87-7674-283-6 .