The Decline Of Imagism

As the starting point of Modern British and American Literature,Imagism lasts no more than 4 years in the world's poetic arena.The mismatch between its historical significance and short life makes this thesis take its decline as the subject.By setting Imagism into its “tradition” of spatial turn,this study shows that the spatial turn tendency of Imagist poetry in medium,techniques,and effect directly causes Imagism to decline.The thesis contains six chapters.The first chapter is an introduction to the research question,literature review,and relevant theories,etc.Chapter two focuses on the “tradition” from which Imagism arises.It is illustrated that Imagism arises from the “tradition” of spatial turn.Imagists observe this “tradition” and develop it by spatializing the medium,adopting spatial techniques,and pursuing spatial effects.Chapter three focuses on the spatialization of medium and its consequences.The traditional medium of western poetry is vocal language,which is a temporal medium.Imagists tried to make the medium spatial first by decomposing regular metre and adopting free verse,next by breaking grammatical rules and eliminating functional words,finally by decomposing words into letters and rearranging them into two dimensional pictures.In this way,Imagists transformed the temporal medium of western poetry into spatial visual medium.Thus the spatialization of medium leads to the decline of Imagism and the appearance of concrete poetry.Chapter four is about the spatial techniques Imagists adopted and the consequences.The traditional technique of creating poetry is to imitate action.As action has an temporal character,imitation is in nature a temporal technique.Influenced by Impressionism,Cubism and Chinese poetry,Imagists adopted the techniques of “direct treatment of the ‘thing'”,“juxtaposition” and “superposition” of images,etc.Dissatisfied with the fact that images are presented asunder in imagist poetry,W.C.Williams advocates the technique of “variable foot”,which is in line with that of the Objectivist poets and thus lead Imagism to decline into Objectivism.Chapter five is about Imagists' pursuit of spatial effects and the consequences.The traditional effect of poetry is to make the reader gain knowledge or truth.As knowledge and truth is gained by using thinking and logic,both of which has a linear character,knowledge or truth is in fact temporal effect.However,the effect of poetry is spatial effect: the juxtaposed or superposed images are supposed to form a visual chord in the reader's mind,to trigger his attention toward intuition,or to to evoke in the reader an emotion.However,as it is impossible to evoke in the reader the exact emotion the poet intends to express,T.S.Eliot proposes that poetry should express “impersonal emotions” with “objective correlative”.His poetic practices lead to the decline of Imagism and the appearance of symbolism.Chapter six is the conclusion: spatial turn is the intrinsic cause of the decline of Imagism;the significance of the decline is that it testifies such an assertion: it is impossible for poetry to turn from temporal mode to spatial mode.Spatial turn is a popular term in modern criticism.Most critics held that spatial turn occurred at the beginning of twentieth century,mostly in fiction.However,this study shows that the spatial turn in poetry has a longer history.It is initiated in Romanticism,further developed in Aestheticism and Symbolism,and completed in Imagism.This view may provide a new perspective for us to evaluate the achievements of Imagism,and the position of Imagism in the history of western literature.