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.’ The Imagist programme, too, seemed to have burned itself out by 1917, when Amy Lowell, who had taken lead of the movement after Ezra Pound’s defection to Vorticism (‘Every kind of geyser from jism bursting up white as ivory, to hate or a storm at sea’), ceased publication of the annual anthologies that had appeared since 1914. Imagism as a movement seemed to be a spent force, having declined, in Pound’s punning compound, into ‘Amy-gism’.
But not quite. That’s the official narrative, and where most accounts of Imagism tend to end. Yet May Sinclair (1863-1946) proved that the tenets of Imagism could be put to use for a longer project, much as T. S. Eliot has shown, in The Waste Land, that the shorter Symbolist poems of Laforgue and Mallarmé could help to inspire a modern epic, albeit a fragmentary one.