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Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. Imagism has been described as the most influential movement in English poetry since the activity of the Pre-Raphaelites.〔Preface: Hughes, Glenn, Imagism and the Imagist, Stanford University Press, New York 1931〕 As a poetic style it gave Modernism its start in the early 20th century,〔Pratt, William. ''The Imagist Poem, Modern Poetry in Miniature'' (Story Line Press, 1963, expanded 2001). ISBN 1-58654-009-2.〕 and is considered to be the first organized Modernist literary movement in the English language.〔T.S. Eliot: "The ''point de repère'', usually and conveniently taken as the starting-point of modern poetry, is the group denominated 'imagists' in London about 1910." Lecture, Washington University, St. Louis, June 6, 1953〕 Imagism is sometimes viewed as 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any continuous or sustained period of development.〔Pratt, William. ''The Imagist Poem, Modern Poetry in Miniature'' (Story Line Press, 1963, expanded 2001). ISBN 1-58654-009-2.〕 René Taupin remarked that 'It is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principles'.〔Taupin, René, ''L'Influence du symbolism francais sur la poesie Americaine (de 1910 a 1920)'', Champion, Paris 1929 trans William Pratt and Anne Rich AMS, New York, 1985〕 The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry, in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets, who were generally content to work within that tradition. In contrast, Imagism called for a return to what were seen as more Classical values, such as directness of presentation and economy of language, as well as a willingness to experiment with non-traditional verse forms. Imagists use free verse. Imagist publications appearing between 1914 and 1917 featured works by many of the most prominent modernist figures, both in poetry and in other fields. The Imagist group was centered in London, with members from Great Britain, Ireland and the United States. Somewhat unusually for the time, a number of women writers were major Imagist figures. A characteristic feature of Imagism is its attempt to isolate a single image to reveal its essence. This feature mirrors contemporary developments in ''avant-garde'' art, especially Cubism. Although Imagism isolates objects through the use of what Ezra Pound called "luminous details", Pound's Ideogrammic Method of juxtaposing concrete instances to express an abstraction is similar to Cubism's manner of synthesizing multiple perspectives into a single image.〔Davidson, Michael (1997). ''(Ghostlier demarcations: modern poetry and the material word ).'' University of California Press, pp. 11–13. ISBN 0-520-20739-4〕 ==Pre-Imagism== Well-known poets of the Edwardian era of the 1890s, such as Alfred Austin, Stephen Phillips, and William Watson, had been working very much in the shadow of Tennyson, producing weak imitations of the poetry of the Victorian era. They continued to work in this vein into the early years of the 20th century.〔Grant, Joy (1967). ''Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop'', London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 28.〕 As the new century opened, Austin was still the serving British Poet Laureate, a post which he held up to 1913. In the century's first decade, poetry still had a large audience; volumes of verse published in that time included Thomas Hardy's ''The Dynasts'', Christina Rossetti's posthumous ''Poetical Works'', Ernest Dowson's ''Poems'', George Meredith's ''Last Poems'', Robert Service's ''Ballads of a Cheechako'' and John Masefield's ''Ballads and Poems''. Future Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats was devoting much of his energy to the Abbey Theatre and writing for the stage, producing relatively little lyric poetry during this period. In 1907, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Rudyard Kipling. The origins of Imagism are to be found in two poems, ''Autumn'' and ''A City Sunset'' by T. E. Hulme.〔Brooker, p. 48.〕 These were published in January 1909 by the Poets' Club in London in a booklet called ''For Christmas MDCCCCVIII''. Hulme was a student of mathematics and philosophy; he had been involved in the setting up of the club in 1908 and was its first secretary. Around the end of 1908, he presented his paper ''A Lecture on Modern Poetry'' at one of the club's meetings.〔McGuinness, xii.〕 Writing in A. R. Orage's magazine ''The New Age'', the poet and critic F. S. Flint (a champion of free verse and modern French poetry) was highly critical of the club and its publications. From the ensuing debate, Hulme and Flint became close friends. In 1909, Hulme left the Poets' Club and started meeting with Flint and other poets in a new group which Hulme referred to as the "Secession Club"; they met at the Eiffel Tower restaurant in London's Soho〔Blakeney Williams, Louise (2002). ''Modernism and the Ideology of History: Literature, Politics, and the Past''. Cambridge University Press, p. 16. ISBN 0-521-81499-5〕 to discuss plans to reform contemporary poetry through free verse and the tanka and haiku and the removal of all unnecessary verbiage from poems. The interest in Japanese verse forms can be placed in a context of the late Victorian and Edwardian revival of interest in Chinoiserie and Japonism as witnessed in the 1890s vogue for William Anderson's Japanese prints donated to the British Museum, performances of Noh plays in London, and the success of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta ''The Mikado'' (1885). Direct literary models were available from a number of sources, including F. V. Dickins's 1866 ''Hyak nin is'shiu, or, Stanzas by a Century of Poets, Being Japanese Lyrical Odes'', the first English-language version of the ''Hyakunin isshu'', a 13th-century anthology of 100 waka, the early 20th-century critical writings and poems of Sadakichi Hartmann, and contemporary French-language translations. The American poet Ezra Pound was introduced to the group in April 1909 and found that their ideas were close to his own. In particular, Pound's studies of Romantic literature had led him to an admiration of the condensed, direct expression that he detected in the writings of Arnaut Daniel, Dante, and Guido Cavalcanti, amongst others. For example, in his 1911–12 series of essays ''I gather the limbs of Osiris'', Pound writes of Daniel's line "pensar de lieis m'es repaus" ("it rests me to think of her") (from the canzone ''En breu brizara'l temps braus''): "You cannot get statement simpler than that, or clearer, or less rhetorical".〔Reprinted in: 〕 These criteria of directness, clarity and lack of rhetoric were to be amongst the defining qualities of Imagist poetry. Through his friendship with Laurence Binyon, Pound had already developed an interest in Japanese art by examining Nishiki-e prints at the British Museum, and he quickly became absorbed in the study of related Japanese verse forms.〔Arrowsmith, Rupert Richard. (''Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African and Pacific Art and the London Avant Garde'' ). Oxford University Press, 2011, pp.103–164. ISBN 978-0-19-959369-9 *Also see Arrowsmith, Rupert Richard. ("The Transcultural Roots of Modernism: Imagist Poetry, Japanese Visual Culture, and the Western Museum System" ), ''Modernism/modernity'' Volume 18, Number 1, January 2011, pp. 27-42. ISSN: 1071-6068.〕〔(Video of a Lecture discussing the importance of Japanese culture to the Imagists ), ''London University School of Advanced Study'', March 2012.〕 In an article in ''La France'', 1915, the French critic, Remy de Gourmont described the Imagists as descendants of the French Symbolistes〔Preface to ''Some Imagist Poets'' , Constable, 1916〕 and in a 1928 letter to the French critic and translator René Taupin, Pound was keen to emphasise another ancestry for Imagism, pointing out that Hulme was indebted to a Symbolist tradition, linking back via William Butler Yeats, Arthur Symons and the Rhymers' Club generation of British poets to Mallarmé.〔Woon-Ping Chin Holaday. "From Ezra Pound to Maxine Hong Kingston: Expressions of Chinese Thought in American Literature". MELUS, Vol. 5, No. 2, Interfaces, Summer, 1978, pp. 15–24.〕 and the Symbolist source was amplified further in Taupin's study published in 1929,〔Taupin, René, ''L'Influence du symbolism francais sur la poesie Americaine(de 1910 a 1920)'', Champion, Paris 1929〕 in which he concluded however great the divergence of technique and language 'between the image of the Imagist and the 'symbol' of the Symbolists there is a difference only of precision'.〔Taupin, René, L'Influence du symbolism francais sur la poesie Americaine(de 1910 a 1920), Champion, Paris 1929 trans William Pratt and Anne Rich AMS , New York 1985〕 In 1915, Pound edited the poetry of another 1890s poet, Lionel Johnson for the publisher Elkin Mathews. In his introduction, he wrote 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Imagism」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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