Imagism and Imagery in the Selected Poems of Major Imagist Poets

Abstract

This paper explores imagism and studies the intrinsic literary features of some poems to show how the authors combine all the elements such as style, sentence structure, figures of speech and poetic diction to paint concrete and abstract images in the mind of the readers. Imagism was an early 20th century literary movement and a reaction against the Romantic and Victorian mainstreams. Imagism is known as an Anglo-American literary movement since it borrows from the English and American verse style of modern poetry. The leaders of the movement set some rules for writing imagist poems. The authors of the group believed that poets are like painters; what the painters can do with brush and dye, poets can do it with language i.e. painting pictures with words. The poems are descriptive; the poets capture the images they experience with one or more of the five senses. They believed that readers could see the realities from their eyes because the texts are like a painting. In this paper, six poems by six prominent leaders of the movement will be scrutinized according to the main principles of the formalistic approach which is the interpretation and analysis of the literary devices pertained to the concrete and abstract images drawn by the poets. The poems are: In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound, Autumn by T. E. Hulme, November by Amy Lowell, Oread by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), and Bombardment by Richard Aldington