Imagism is a literary movement that had its origin in the artistic world and reinvented the traditional conventions in art and poetry. This movement emerged in the early 20th century and its main representatives are Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, and James Joyce among others. The main characteristics of Imagism were written down by Ezra Pound in an article published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1913 with the title of: ‘A Few Dont’s by an Imagiste’ in which Pound describes the steps to follow and to avoid when writing an imagist poem. Some of the rules are: use of a concrete language in which no word is meaningless, create a picture with words so that the reader could imagine the image; and to break with the previous traditional
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The image that it shows is a gold painted number five over a fire truck. As many other imagist poems it appeals to the senses of hearing (line 10 “to gong clangs” and line 11“siren howls”) and sight (line 3 “I saw the figure 5”). The language that William Carlos Williams used in this poem is of common use, there are no longer complex words that need to be looked up in a dictionary. W.C. Williams was a near friend of Charles Demuth, a painter who after reading Williams poem painted the painting “I saw the Figure 5 in Gold” which is a representation of the number 5 Williams describes in his poem.
It is important to know that these three poets lived in a time of big changes such as the I World War and many technological processes. They felt stuck in the tradition and while the world was moving faster they created this new literary movement that ended up affecting English and American poetry to escape from the old
The image that it shows is a gold painted number five over a fire truck. As many other imagist poems it appeals to the senses of hearing (line 10 “to gong clangs” and line 11“siren howls”) and sight (line 3 “I saw the figure 5”). The language that William Carlos Williams used in this poem is of common use, there are no longer complex words that need to be looked up in a dictionary. W.C. Williams was a near friend of Charles Demuth, a painter who after reading Williams poem painted the painting “I saw the Figure 5 in Gold” which is a representation of the number 5 Williams describes in his poem.
It is important to know that these three poets lived in a time of big changes such as the I World War and many technological processes. They felt stuck in the tradition and while the world was moving faster they created this new literary movement that ended up affecting English and American poetry to escape from the old