Imagism: Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams

The Imagist Movement

The Imagist movement in modernist poetry was a short-lived but highly influential school of poetry. Imagism is
the first of a long series of movements in modernism, or, in modernist-talk, the first of the many “isms.” After
Imagism, poets and authors formed self-conscious schools of thought and styles in keeping with the modernist
creed to “make it new”: Vorticism; Impressionism; Expressionism; Cubism; Objectivism; Surrealism, to name a
few.

Although Imagist poems start to crop up early in the 1900s, Ezra Pound officially founded the movement in a
famous March 1913 edition of Poetry where his “In the Station of the Metro” appeared along with a manifesto
concerning Imagism and several other Imagist poems.

Pound’s poem reads:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

The poem was followed by an essay / manifesto by Pound explaining the goals of Imagism in a succinct
statement of the group’s stance:

1. Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.

2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.

For Pound, an image is “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,” and
asserts that “it is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.” Pound argued that
the prohibitions should not be taken as dogma but as the “result of long contemplation.”

Pound’s manifesto is almost as minimal as Imagist poems themselves. What characterizes most Imagist poems is
the isolation of a single image or moment depicted with as much economy of language as possible. As Pound
would argue, one should not confuse Imagism as a “picture” necessarily, but as a way of depicting experience.
The Imagist poem could capture a mood, an image, a moment, an idea. The most important aspect of Imagism
was a direct apprehension of the “thingness” of things, to capture the essence of objects or experience.

The Imagist movement clearly breaks with poetic tradition, particularly the poetry of the middle to late 1800s up
until Pound’s 1913 manifesto in Poetry. Even by the time that Pound and the other Modernists were making
shockwaves in literary circles, Victorian poets such as Tennyson, Swinburne, and Longfellow remained the
dominant voices. What characterize this poetry are its emotional effusiveness, superfluous description, romantic
haziness, and quasi-medievalism. As we saw with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which was influenced
by Imagism (Ezra Pound helped Eliot edit the poem for Poetry), the Imagist rejects romanticism for a harder,
more classical delineation of representation and for more contemporary subject matter. I had argued that one way
to read “Prufrock” is as a cubist collage in which the stanzas juxtapose and pivot about each other in a
fragmented series of impressions or images projected like the patterns of the magic lantern from Prufrcok’s
consciousness. In fact, the daring advances in visual art of the period directly influenced the Imagist poets. In
particular, Picasso and Braque’s experiments in Cubism gave poets the impetus to reimagine the space of
representation in a different physics of seeing, imagining not only an object from multiple points of view
superimposed at the same time (the face and the profile in an instant), but to discover startling means by which to
juxtapose different forms (the application of a real piece of rope to a painting of a still life). It was no
coincidence that Cubism occurred at the same time as Einstein was writing his revolutionary theories of
relativity, time, space and dimensions. Just as important was the famous Armory Show in Manhattan in February
to March of 1913 that introduced the public to modern art for the first time (with its expected shock value)
exhibiting examples of expressionism, fauvism, cubism, and vorticism in such legendary artists as Van Gough
Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, Matisse, and Picabia.

In the Station of the Metro

“In the Station of the Metro” is, in many ways, the epitome of the Imagist poem. The two lines (or three lines, if
you make the title part of the poem) juxtapose two seemingly disparate images into one moment that captures
visually both mood and the essence of the scenes depicted. Based upon Pound’s own experience walking on the
platform of the Paris subway (the Metro), the poem attempts to capture with as much economy of language
possible the poet’s experience, particularly the isolated moment of a mood. Pound builds the poem around what
he termed an “epigrammatic” style derived from Japanese Haiku (the Cubists, by the way, were very influenced
by Japanese prints, as was Van Gough). The epigrammatic mode attempts to paint a picture with language much
in the same way as Asian ideograms pictorially represent phrases in one character or picture. Pound condenses
the intuitive experience of faces in a crowd into a metaphor. Think of it this way: instead of making the
comparison obvious and manifest, as in a simile—The apparition of these faces in a crowd are like petals on a
wet, black bough—Pound drops the like or as by substituting a semicolon. If he had formed the poem around a
simile, the comparison would have been more obvious at the same time as the impact of the image would remain
deferred. By making it epigrammatic or metaphorical, the image is more immediate and compressed.

Interpreting the poem requires, in many ways, the same associational analysis we would conduct on a line like,
“Let us go then you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table.”
Yet, since Pound isolates his image and frames it by the title, the poem requires more attention on the
phenomenology of the experience itself. It has no other context than the words Pound carefully selects unlike
“Prufrock,” in which the evening spread out like an etherized patient becomes qualified by the half deserted
streets and muttering retreats of one night cheap hotels. The question, then, might be, how are “faces in the
crowd” on the platform of the subway in Paris like “petals on a wet black bough”? How does one connect faces
of passengers with rain-drenched leaves on a stark black branch of a tree?

The two images are seemingly disparate. The first line depicts the ubiquitously urban image of a subway
platform, busy and indicative of industry, work, noise, and speed. The second line depicts a scene divorced from
the frenetic subway platform, an image abstracted from landscape, the country, the outdoors, above ground, open
to the elements. How do faces in a crowd look like petals sagging with raindrops? How does the human become
personified into the natural? Why? and to what affect? One could, perhaps, imagine faces crowded together
looking like a cluster of damp petals; and one could imagine, perhaps, that the rectilinear subway platform
correlates to the stark outcropping of the black branch of a tree. Faces in a crowd on a subway, then, dissolves
like film montage into clusters of rain soaked petals on the branch of a tree. The word “petals,” of course,
connotes something more delicate, floral, and aesthetic than “leaves.” Perhaps Pound associates something
demure and vulnerable about the faces of passengers during rush hour, which is surprising. We do not generally
associate commuters jockeying for space on a platform with flowers in the rain. One could, perhaps, argue that
faces in the crowd look blurred and watery from the window of a train as it pulls into a station and people shuffle
for the doors. Perhaps what is being conveyed then is the impression that a visual moment makes upon
consciousness. Or, as in stream of consciousness, one image or object might convey associatively to something
else completely different but no less important in the streams and eddies of our mind, as in daydreams. The poem
captures the ephemeral moment amongst currents of moments indicative of a daydream. At the same time as
Einstein introduced relativity to physics in 1900, Freud wrote his groundbreaking The Interpretation of Dreams,
which was beginning to have a great deal of impact on poets and artists by 1913, particularly surrealism, a
natural extension of the cerebral objectivity of cubism, which reaches its height in the 1920s and early 30s.

However, my free play of interpretive speculation above does not take into account the word “apparition” in the
first line of the poem. In fact, I purposefully delayed addressing this word. Pound’s choice of the word
“apparition” goes to the heart of Imagist economy and condensation of language. No interpretation of the poem
could remain persuasive without taking into account how the poet does not just see “faces in the crowd” but an
“apparition of faces in the crowd.” Apparition means specter, a ghost, a revenant. The word conveys or
associates the faces in the crowd to something left over or returning from death. The apparition will often appear
as either a reminder or act of remembrance, as a haunting, something dead or lost that refuses to go away, cannot
be forgotten, or remains too stubborn to know its dead. There is not just one metaphor in the epigrammatic
poem, therefore, but two. The faces in the crowd look like ghosts.

The figural, of course, trumps the literal in poetry, and Pound is obviously not asking us to entertain the poem as
a ghost-encounter. Imagism might treat objects and things directly, but, in a paradox of poetry, it does so
obliquely. The ghostly faces in a crowd create a concrete visual image of presence and absence, the crowd
dithering on a margin of here and not here in the frozen moment of a dissolve as in the montage-like, metonymic
movement from the first line to the wet petals on the branch in the second line. Considering the scenario of the
poem, the crowd in fact does inhabit a threshold on the platform awaiting transport from one place to another.
The train itself that will conduct the crowd somewhere else is, interestingly, not present, but it is present in the
expectation we have—a subway will come. Or perhaps we are in the subway looking out. It is, then, on this level
of being here and not being here, neither coming nor going, in the middle and on the verge of transit where the
poem exists. Something that is lost remains behind and displaces into something else concrete but fuzzy in its
inherently impressionistic connotation imaged forth by the raindrops hanging from petals on a branch.

Faces in a crowd on a subway platform do not remain still, and subways are screeching dynamos—in fact, the
subway, the train, the machine, become the dominant images for Vorticist poets, like Pound himself, who
attempt to depict in poetry the swirling vortex of movement of the modern, mechanized, and industrial world.
Yet, “In a Station of the Metro” is a resoundingly quiet poem, like a still-life, despite the movement and noise of
a Metro station contrapuntal to the delicacy of petals and raindrops. Therefore, the comparison of faces in a
crowd to apparition connotes the afterimages of an experience, the memory of something that was immediate
and becomes ghost images of surroundings that remain on the retina after one closes one’s eyes. The poem
captures the immediacy of the daydream, the impression left behind like a rubbing, but that immediacy is
paradoxically depicted in and results from the delay between seeing and experiencing, between the moment and
its afterimage, the deferral of experience and expression required of the poet to represent the world. The poem
ultimately represents, paradoxically, the immediacy of a memory.

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

No Imagist poem intrigues, baffles, frustrates, and infuriates the reader more than William Carlos Williams’
poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Students generally think Williams is being coy, or pulling a fast one on them.
Certainly he can’t be serious; certainly this is not considered a poem, let alone a great one! If this is poetry, one
might assert, certainly it is a particularly lazy or infantile poem.

No doubt Williams was being provocative to a certain extent with this and other Imagist poems of his. But this
poem is neither lazy nor infantile. Far from it. In fact, it is a highly sophisticated poem that takes Pound’s
emphasis upon the essence of objects in direct apprehension with an economy of language to another level by
focusing on things themselves. Williams himself argued (probably contra Stevens) that poetry should address
“Not ideas but things!” Whereas Pound was influenced by Cubist art, Williams was influenced by Dada,
particularly Marcel Duchamp, who created collages and installations called “ready-mades” constructed out of
“found art,” such as objects lying around the house or at junkyards. He famously installed a urinal in a museum
and called it a statue. He did the same with a bicycle wheel. Like the title of the movement—Dada—the
practitioners could willfully devolve into the juvenile, such as the reproduction of the Mona Lisa on which
Duchamp painted a mustache and titled, “She has a hot ass.” Although these are extreme examples of readymade
art—Duchamp did paint far more sophisticated pieces, such as “Woman Descending a Staircase” shown at the
Armory—they illustrate the correlation to Williams picking and choosing from objects and things from the
diurnal stuff of living. He abstracts these things from their natural environment, and places them within the
“frame” or the form of a poem.
So how do we boil down all of the hundreds of various interpretations of Williams’ wheelbarrow poem? If you
look at the link to Modern American Poets online, you will see just how many various and intricate close
readings have been conducted on this poem. First, I think we should establish that the poem has been wrenched
from a particular context. It is part of a poem sequence embedded in prose in his book Spring and All (1923),
where it was titled simply, “XXII.” Now that the poem has been anthologized numerously, editors have given it
the title, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which frames the poem in ways that Williams probably did not intend. In fact,
abstracted from the sequence and its context within prose, the poem takes on a different and isolated sort of life.
The poem is, in some ways, even more ruthlessly Imagist sitting by itself on the page.

Secondly, for those who argue after a first reading that it is hardly a poem, notice that it has fairly rigid form
despite its simplicity: four two line stanzas. Further, the second lines of all four stanzas are two syllables. More
complexly, the second lines of stanza two and three form an enjambment that separates compound words,
forcing one to see objects either more precisely or more directly: wheel / barrow; rain / water. Despite its brevity,
the poem plays with rather nuanced internal rhymes that conspire to form a condensed quality to the poem,
making it feel more finished than a fourteen-word sentence fragmented by lineation. For instance, “so” in the
first line rhymes with “barrow” in the fourth line while “depends” forms a slanted rhyme with “chickens,”
allowing the first line to coordinate with the middle and the end of the poem. Further, the “red” of the
wheelbarrow contrasts the “white” of the “chickens,” the two vibrant colors foregrounding the most tangible
objects at the same time as machine contrasts animal and stillness contrasts movement. Cleverly, the first stanza
is non-descriptive, whereas the rest of the stanzas that follow are descriptive and denotative. The suspicion that
Williams is playing with the reader seems reinforced by the superlative assertion of the first stanza: “so much
depends / upon” seems to raise expectations that are not fulfilled. We read on, and say, “oh, I get it. We’re being
toyed with.”

The Poem as a Snapshot

Instead of seeing the first stanza as an ironic raising of expectations, however, a more fruitful path to
understanding the poem is to take it at face value. “So much depends upon” is a statement that asserts a claim,
and then the next three stanzas describe the objects in a scene that fulfill that claim. It does not claim that the
world or the universe depends upon a wheelbarrow and chickens, but asserts that, for this poem as an isolated
object for contemplation, everything does depend upon the scene. To this extent, then, the first stanza serves as
the sort of frame for the poem, a frame that circumscribes the universe of the poem isolated to itself.
The idea of a “frame” suggests a “picture,” which is what this Imagist poem presents. A frozen image in one
moment in time encapsulated and framed. Another art-form that Williams was inspired by is photography. In a
way, this poem marks a particular phenomenon unavailable to poetry before the late 1800s: the snapshot. The
poem reads like the description of a snapshot, a Polaroid taken of one scene. By the 1920s, the camera became
more ubiquitous, and means for taking snapshots was far more easy and available to the average person than the
old and time consuming silver-plated method. Photography, or the mechanical reproduction, causes great
paradigm shifts in the way we see the world in the early 20th-century. For instance, for the first time in history,
great works of art could come to the viewer rather than the viewer going to great works of art. The camera could
wrench artwork from its habitat—the museum, the mansion, the chapel, the castle—and bring it to anyone’s
living room. The result is that art could be viewed and used by anyone by the 20th-century as opposed to an elite
who would have the money and the wherewithal to travel to the locations of art installations.

The camera also meant that any visual experience in the world could be captured and preserved, abstracted from
the flow of time and made available for numerous different purposes. So it is not just high culture, like visual
arts, that can be preserved and disseminated; the camera can also capture low culture, or anything that is of
particular use to anyone at a particular time. “The Red Wheelbarrow” is a poem that creates a snapshot with
words. The picture itself may not seem particularly important to anyone else, but it is important nonetheless as
an image preserved in the flow of time. It captures something important to the poet. The poem is a snapshot, a
piece of readymade or found-art. The poem itself is a thing that has been framed like the border around a
Polaroid.

As frozen as the image is, like most Imagist poems, it plays in the tension of movement and stillness. For
instance, the chickens, we assume, are moving beside the still wheelbarrow. But the poem also suggests a
temporality that remains in the background. Time might be frozen in the poem, but the wording connotes a
duration. The word “glazed” to describe the rain water is particularly important. The word means something that
has a sheen and that creates light. A glaze also, to signify the sense of frozenness, covers something, and is itself
a preservative. So if the rain water is casting a “sheen” connoted by “glazed,” we can assume something is
causing that light: the sun. Yet, since the wheelbarrow is covered in a sheen of rainwater, we can assume the sun
has come out quite recently in the aftermath of rain. Chickens normally take cover when it rains and return to
their business when the sun comes out. So the poem, as frozen as it is, exists in a temporal duration that the
diction connotes: there had recently been a passing shower or thunderstorm, and now the world has returned to
sunlight. Therefore the image itself that the poem captures takes on a different hue with this knowledge. What
does a backyard or a farmland scenario look like after it has rained? The lighting would be subtly different from
a scene in which it had not recently rained. All of this suggests that the poem has far more pigmentation and
movement than meets the eye. And, following the Imagist program, Williams treats the scene with as little
wording as possible in order to allow the imagination to apprehend the “things” that the poem as a snapshot
captures.

William carlos williams ppt

1. William Carlos Williams Art and Healing

2. “Only medicine, a job I enjoyed, would make it possible for me to live and write as I wanted to” -William
Carlos Williams

3. Outline: • • • • • Early life The world around William Carlos Williams Early Works and Imagism The
relationship between medicine and art Conclusions

4. Beginnings • Born in Rutherford, New Jersey in 1883 • Father was an Englishman from the West Indies;
Mother was of Spanish and French heritage, also from West Indies • Studied abroad before enrolling in Horace
Mann High School in NYC • Attended Medical School of Pennsylvania, during which time he befriended Hilda
Doolittle and Ezra Pound

5. An Everyday Life • Graduated from medical school in 1906 • Interned in New York City • Married Florence
Herman (“Flossie”), and had 2 sons, Paul and William • Published his first book of poetry in 1909 • Worked in a
very busy primary care practice • Edited several magazines and began to write fiction and plays

6. The Political Climate • Russian Revolution • Transportation Revolution • World War I • Prohibition •
Women’s Suffrage

7. The Artistic Climate • Marked by man’s realization of his own fragmentation and an almost complete break
from former styles • Cubism: Picasso, DuChamp • Ballet: Balanchine • Music: Stravinsky

8. Georges Braque – “Woman With Guitar”

9. Marcelle DuChamp – “Fresh Window” (1920)

10. George Balanchine

11. Stravinsky Works featured adventurous harmonies with a focus on dissonance

12. Imagism • Rejected the effusive nature of Romantic and Victorian poetry • Focused on directness of idea and
economy of language • Contemporary with and in harsh contrast to Georgian poetry • Contemporaries: Ezra
Pound, T.S. Eliot

13. Basic Tenets of Imagism • To use the language of common speech • To create new rhythms – a new cadence
means a new idea • To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject • To present an image • To produce
poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite • Concentration is the very essence of Poetry

14. The Red Wheelbarrow so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white
chickens

15. Williams eventually broke with the imagist movement because he felt that the brevity of the imagist poem
caused it to lose “structural necessity”

16. Basic Premises of Williams’ Poetry • “Modern man has no measure” • Insisted on the value of newness,
inefficacy of old forms • Sought a voice and style that was truly American • Rejected the necessity of religion or
contrived mythologies • Believed in the contribution of the individual to a continuum of humanity

17. “Medicine was the thing that gained me entrance to these secret gardens of self… I was permitted by my
medical badge to follow the poor, defeated body into those gulfs and grottos”