ABSTRACT
The first Futurist Exhibition in London opened at the Sackville Gallery on 1 March 1912 and the movement's leader, Marinetti, lectured on the nineteenth. Although Pound was never a Futurist and either indifferent or opposed to most of their principles, he shared with them a common pugnacity in aesthetic matters and a common feeling that the artist had to ‘break up the surface of convention’ and art be made to speak with the voice of the present. That such a feeling was ‘in the air’ we may deduce from the fact that even Henry Newbolt in the January–March English Review wrote: ‘We are witnessing the natural recovery from a period of decadence … Poets are bent on getting nearer to the inward melody, on moving faithfully to the inward rhythm.’ When we consider Pound's desire to ‘break up clicW, to ‘escape from lines containing two very nearly equal sections’, and his search for ‘hardness’, ‘directness’ and ‘simplicity’; when we observe the desire for change that was already abroad at the time, as well as economic and political currents working parallel; and, not least, when we remember that the five poems comprising ‘The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme’ appeared in The New Age of 25 January 1912, we shall see immediately that for one of Pound's temperament the way was open to the formation of a new ‘movement’ in poetry. And so it was that one day probably in April, Pound, Aldington and Hilda Doo-little decided they were agreed upon three principles of good writing: (1) direct treatment of the subject, (2) to allow no word that was not essential to the presentation, and (3) in their rhythms to follow the musical phrase rather than strict regularity. Then, or within a month or so, Pound gave to the members of this new movement the title Les Imagistes. The first use of this title in print was in Pound's Ripostes, in a note he placed at the back to accompany the publication in book-form of Hulme's ‘Complete Poetical Works’:
In publishing his Complete Poetical Works at thirty, Mr Hulme has set an enviable example to many of his contemporaries who have had less to say.
They are reprinted here for good fellowship; for good custom, a custom out of Tuscany and of Provence; and thirdly, for convenience, seeing their smallness of bulk; and for good memory, seeing that they recall certain evenings and meetings of two years gone, dull enough at the time, but rather pleasant to look back upon.
As for the ‘school of Images’, which may or may not have existed, its principles were not so interesting as those of the ‘inherent dynamists’ or of Les Unanimistes, yet they were probably sounder than those of a certain French school which attempted to dispense with verbs altogether; or of the Impressionists who brought forth:
‘Pink pigs blossoming upon the hillside’; or of the Post-Impressionists who beseech their ladies to let down slate-blue hair over their raspberry-coloured flanks.
Ardoise rimed richly — ah, richly and rarely rimed! — with framboise.
As for the future, Les Imagistes, the descendants of the forgotten school of 1909, have that in their keeping.
