Glimpse The Reasons For The Decline Of The Imagist Poetry

Imagist movement was a poetic movement initiated by some poets both from England and America at the beginning of the 20th century. It arose in reaction against the late romanticism at the end of the 19th century. lmagist poets inherited the ideas from romanticism and intuitionism respectively and their oppositions to the former lies in how to write the poetry. In general, their greatest contributions to English poetry lie in two aspects. Firstly, they broke the rigid rules of rhythm in the traditional poetry. Secondly, they promoted the use of images in the poetry. At the same time, they found great inspirations and supports in the Chinese ancient poetry. However, in addition to the fact that the use of images in poetry was just in the beginning stage among them, they had some misconceptions about the Chinese ancient poetry, which resulted in the drawbacks in their poetry. This paper, through analysis of some imagist poems and with some Chinese poetic theories, elaborates the drawbacks of them and reveals the reasons for the failure of imagism.