Imagism – Page 2 – Interesting Literature

‘The Walls Do Not Fall’: H. D.’s Trilogy, Modernism, and War

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads a wide-ranging poem about the Second World War

When H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) and her then-husband Richard Aldington walked into a bomb-damaged house during the First World War, Aldington found an abandoned volume of Robert Browning’s poetry and kicked it across the room. What use was poetry in the face of such destruction? But poetry tends to endure in wartime: T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets would largely be written during the next world war, while H. D.’s own poetry would have a curious and poignant afterlife: sections of her poem ‘The Walls Do Not Fall’ (from her long poem Trilogy) were inscribed by an anonymous graffitist among the ruins of the World Trade Center after 9/11.

As Norman Holmes Pearson notes in his introduction to the Carcanet edition of Trilogy which I own, with this long poem – or trilogy of long poems – H. D. was trying to connect the communal experience of the Second World War with her own history and with history in general.

May Sinclair’s The Dark Night: The Imagist Verse Novel

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reassesses an experimental work from the 1920s by an underrated author

When he reviewed the published facsimile and drafts of The Waste Land in 1971, the poet-critic William Empson remarked that ‘I would never have believed that the Symbolist programme could be made to work at all, if it had not scored a few resounding triumphs, such as this.’

A Short Analysis of Hilda Doolittle’s ‘Oread’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Along with Ezra Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’, the short poem ‘Oread’ by Hilda Doolittle or H. D. (1886-1961) may be the defining poem of the Imagist movement. You can read ‘Oread’ here, before proceeding to our analysis of the poem below.

‘Oread’ was published in the 1915 anthology Some Imagist Poets, which also featured poems by Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, and F. S. Flint – probably the main poets who published under the Imagist banner.

A Short Analysis of Hilda Doolittle’s ‘The Pool’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Pool’ is, along with ‘Oread’, Hilda Doolittle’s finest achievement as an Imagist poet. The poem was first published in the 1915 anthology Some Imagist Poets. You can read ‘The Pool’ here (all five lines of it), before proceeding to our analysis of this curious little poem.

A Short Analysis of Ezra Pound’s ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Modernist poetry in English never had an official manifesto, but there are several documents which conceivably have a claim to the de facto title: T. E. Hulme’s ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ (1908), for instance, or T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919).