Imagism
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Imagism
Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism has been termed "a succession of creative moments" rather than a continuous or sustained period of development. The French academic René Taupin remarked that "it is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principles".Taupin, René (1929). ''L'Influence du symbolism francais sur la poesie Americaine (de 1910 a 1920)''. Paris: Champion. Translation (1985) by William Pratt and Anne Rich. New York: AMS. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of Romantic and Victorian poetry. In contrast to the contemporary Georgian poets, who were generally content to work within that tradition, Imagists calle ...
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Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an List of poets from the United States, American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, collaborator in Fascist Italy (1922–1943), Fascist Italy and the Italian Social Republic, Salò Republic during World War II. His works include ''Ripostes'' (1912), ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'' (1920), and ''The Cantos'' (–1962). Pound's contribution to poetry began in the early-20th century with his role in developing Imagism, a movement stressing precision and economy of language. Working in London as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped to discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as H.D., Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. He was responsible for the 1914 serialization of Joyce's ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'', the 1915 publication of Eliot's "Th ...
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Modernist Poetry In English
Modernist poetry in English started in the early years of the 20th century in literature, 20th century with the appearance of the Imagism, Imagists. Like other modernists, Imagist poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian era, Victorian poetry, and its emphasis on traditional formalism (literature), formalism and ornate poetic diction, diction. In ''Preface to the Lyrical Ballads'', published in 1800, William Wordsworth criticized what he perceived to be the gauche and pompous nature of English poetry, British poetry over a century earlier, and instead sought to bring poetry to the layman. Modernism, Modernists saw themselves as looking back to the best practices of poets in earlier periods and other cultures. Their models included ancient Greek literature, Chinese poetry, Chinese and Japanese poetry, the troubadours, Dante Alighieri, Dante and the Italy in the Middle Ages, medieval Italian philosophy, philosophical poets, such as Guido Cavalcanti, and the En ...
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Free Verse
Free verse is an open form of poetry which does not use a prescribed or regular meter or rhyme and tends to follow the rhythm of natural or irregular speech. Free verse encompasses a large range of poetic form, and the distinction between free verse and other forms (such as prose) is often ambiguous. History Though individual examples of English free verse poetry surfaced before the 20th-century (parts of John Milton's '' Samson Agonistes'' or the majority of Walt Whitman's poetry, for example), free verse is generally considered an early 20th century innovation of the late 19th-century French ''vers libre''. T. E. Hulme and F. S. Flint first introduced the form to the London-based Poets' Club in 1909. This later became the heart of the Imagist movement through Flint's advocacy of the genre. Imagism, in the wake of French Symbolism (i.e. vers libre of French Symbolist poets) was the wellspring out of which the main current of Modernism in English flowed. T. S. Eliot later ...
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William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. His '' Spring and All'' (1923) was written in the wake of T. S. Eliot's '' The Waste Land'' (1922). In his five-volume poem '' Paterson'' (1946–1958), he took Paterson, New Jersey as "my 'case' to work up. It called for a poetry such as I did not know, it was my duty to discover or make such a context on the 'thought.'" Some of his best known poems, " This Is Just to Say" and " The Red Wheelbarrow", are reflections on the everyday. Other poems reflect the influence of the visual arts. He, in turn, influenced the visual arts; his poem "The Great Figure" inspired the painting '' I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold'' by Charles Demuth. Williams was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for '' Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems'' (1962). Williams practiced both pediatrics and general medicine. He was affiliated with Passaic General H ...
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Literary Modernism
Modernist literature originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is characterised by a self-conscious separation from traditional ways of writing in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new". This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of the time. The immense human costs of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century. In ''Modernist Literature'', Mary Ann Gillies notes that these literary themes share the "centrality of a conscious break with the past", one that "emerges as a complex response across continents and disciplines to a changing world". Modernism, Romanticism, Philosophy and Symbol Literary mo ...
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Ideogrammic Method
The ideogrammic method was a technique expounded by Ezra Pound which allowed poetry to deal with abstract content through concrete images. The idea was based on Pound's reading of the work of Ernest Fenollosa, especially ''The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry'', composed by Fenollosa but edited by Pound after the author's death, 1908. Pound gives a brief account of it in his book '' The ABC of Reading'' (1934). He explains his understanding of the way Chinese characters were formed, with the example of the character 'East' (東) being essentially a superposition of the characters for 'tree' (木) and 'sun' (日); that is, a picture of the sun tangled in a tree's branches, suggesting a sunrise (which occurs in the East). He then suggests how, with such a system where concepts are built up from concrete instances, the (abstract) concept of 'red' might be presented by putting together the (concrete) pictures of: This was a key idea in the development of Imagis ...
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Amy Lowell
Amy Lawrence Lowell (February 9, 1874 – May 12, 1925) was an American poet of the imagist school. She posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. Life Amy Lowell was born on February 9, 1874, in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lowell. A member of the Brahmin Lowell family, her siblings included the astronomer Percival Lowell, the educator and legal scholar Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and Elizabeth Lowell Putnam, an early activist for prenatal care. They were the great-grandchildren of John Lowell and, on their mother's side, the grandchildren of Abbott Lawrence. School was a source of considerable despair for the young Amy Lowell. She considered herself to be developing "masculine" and "ugly" features and she was a social outcast. She had a reputation among her classmates for being outspoken and opinionated. At fifteen she wanted to be a photographer, poet, and coach racer. Lowell never attended college because her fam ...
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Avant-garde
In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an ''advance guard'' identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus, the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times. As a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists promote progressive and radical politics and advocate for societal reform with and through works of art. In the essay "The Artist, the Scientist, and the Industrialist" (1825), Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues's political usage of ''vanguard'' identified the moral obligation of artists to "ser ...
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Poets' Club
The Poets' Club was a group devoted to the discussion of poetry. It met in London in the early years of the twentieth century. It was founded by Henry Simpson, a banker. T. E. Hulme helped set up the group in 1908, and was its first secretary. Hulme wrote a charter document: "Rules 1908". The group comprised mainly amateurs and met once a month, excluding the summer months of July, August, and September, for dinner, the reading of poems, and the presentation of short (20 minute) papers on various topics relating to poetry. Around the end of 1908 Hulme read the Club his '' A Lecture on Modern Poetry.'' The Club produced several anthologies; the first two being — ''For Christmas MDCCCCVIII'' (January 1909) and ''The Book of the Poets' Club'' (December 1909). Two of Hulme's poems were included in the first, "Autumn" and "A City Sunset," and another two in the second. These are regarded as the first examples of Imagism. In 1909, Hulme began a side-project with F.S. F ...
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Haiku
is a type of short form poetry that originated in Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases composed of 17 Mora (linguistics), morae (called ''On (Japanese prosody), on'' in Japanese) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern; that include a ''kireji'', or "cutting word"; and a ''kigo'', or seasonal reference. However, haiku by classical Japanese poets, such as Matsuo Bashō, also deviate from the 17-''on'' pattern and sometimes do not contain a ''kireji''. Similar poems that do not adhere to these rules are generally classified as ''senryū''. Haiku originated as an opening part of a larger Japanese genre of poetry called renga. These haiku written as an opening stanza were known as ''hokku'' and over time they began to be written as stand-alone poems. Haiku was given its current name by the Japanese writer Masaoka Shiki at the end of the 19th century. Originally from Japan, haiku today are written by authors worldwide. Haiku in English and Haiku in languages other than Japanese, ...
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Japanese Poetry
Japanese poetry is poetry typical of Japan, or written, spoken, or chanted in the Japanese language, which includes Old Japanese, Early Middle Japanese, Late Middle Japanese, and Modern Japanese, as well as poetry in Japan which was written in the Chinese language or ''ryūka'' from the Okinawa Islands: it is possible to make a more accurate distinction between Japanese poetry written in Japan or by Japanese people in other languages versus that written in the Japanese language by speaking of Japanese-language poetry. Much of the literary record of Japanese poetry begins when Japanese poets encountered Chinese poetry during the Tang dynasty (although the Chinese classic anthology of poetry, ''Classic of Poetry, Shijing'', was well known by the literati of Japan by the 6th century). Under the influence of the Chinese poets of this era Japanese began to compose poetry in Chinese (''kanshi (poetry), kanshi''); and, as part of this tradition, poetry in Japan tended to be intimately ass ...
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Victorian Era
In the history of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, the Victorian era was the reign of Queen Victoria, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. Slightly different definitions are sometimes used. The era followed the Georgian era and preceded the Edwardian era, and its later half overlaps with the first part of the ''Belle Époque'' era of continental Europe. Various liberalising political reforms took place in the UK, including expanding the electoral franchise. The Great Famine (Ireland), Great Famine caused mass death in Ireland early in the period. The British Empire had relatively peaceful relations with the other great powers. It participated in various military conflicts mainly against minor powers. The British Empire expanded during this period and was the predominant power in the world. Victorian society valued a high standard of personal conduct across all sections of society. The Victorian morality, emphasis on morality gave impetus to soc ...
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