Imagism was a literary movement that began in the early 20th century. This movement has its roots in the artistic world where its main aim was to avoid the old conventions and find new ways of creativity. Poets such as Ezra Pound, H.D. and William Carlos Williams tried to create a way of expressing the imagism in painting through words in poetry. This movement as contemporary art repudiates ‘beauty’ standards, and the Romanticism of the 19th-century while it admires the quotidian, the perceptual and a new industrial and urban world. Consequently, imagism completely changed the way in which poetry was written; there was no concrete pattern to follow so that the free verse was widely used. The rhyme patterns disappeared and the words used were
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Ezra Pound in ‘A Few Dont’s by an Imagiste’, which appeared in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 1913, describe the process that a poet needs to follow in order to produce a good poem that follows the conventions of …show more content…
W.C. Williams parodies the romantic tradition from Romanticism as he uses an everyday language register to describe a lady. In the poem he calls for the painter Fragonard, this is why we can say that the lady that he describes in his poem is the woman pictured in “The Swing”, a rococo picture from 1767. This poem does not follow a special rhyme meter, but the repetition of sounds rhyme. As Ezra Pound said in his article ‘A Few Dont’s by an Imagiste’:
“Don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs. Don’t make each line stop dead at the end, and then begin every next line with a heave. Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause.”
If we base the poem of W.C. Williams on Pounds criteria the Rhythm and Rhyme follows perfectly the intention of Imagism. However, the questions that appear in the poem break the traditional form and helps us to identify the two characters that speak in it; two narrators in one single poem is a way of breaking with the traditional, the main aim of Imagism. Although, the poem is not short and condensed in language; it fulfils with the rest of conventions that are important in Imagism, it pictures us a clear image with the power of words and breaks with the old traditional rules that governed poetry since Shakespeare’s
Ezra Pound in ‘A Few Dont’s by an Imagiste’, which appeared in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 1913, describe the process that a poet needs to follow in order to produce a good poem that follows the conventions of …show more content…
W.C. Williams parodies the romantic tradition from Romanticism as he uses an everyday language register to describe a lady. In the poem he calls for the painter Fragonard, this is why we can say that the lady that he describes in his poem is the woman pictured in “The Swing”, a rococo picture from 1767. This poem does not follow a special rhyme meter, but the repetition of sounds rhyme. As Ezra Pound said in his article ‘A Few Dont’s by an Imagiste’:
“Don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs. Don’t make each line stop dead at the end, and then begin every next line with a heave. Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause.”
If we base the poem of W.C. Williams on Pounds criteria the Rhythm and Rhyme follows perfectly the intention of Imagism. However, the questions that appear in the poem break the traditional form and helps us to identify the two characters that speak in it; two narrators in one single poem is a way of breaking with the traditional, the main aim of Imagism. Although, the poem is not short and condensed in language; it fulfils with the rest of conventions that are important in Imagism, it pictures us a clear image with the power of words and breaks with the old traditional rules that governed poetry since Shakespeare’s