THE ESSENCE OF AN IMAGE IN ENGLISH-AMERICAN IMAGISM: SINGULAR VERSUS UNIVERSAL

Abstract

The paper is aimed at filling the gap in learning the formative image peculiarities of the English and American Imagistic poetry by analyzing the correspondence of the internal and the external and their correlation. This is where the answer lies, why T.S. Eliot called Imagism “an opening salvo” of English/ American Modernist poetry. It also explains the reason for a long-term effect of this short-term “school” in the English poetry of the twentieth century. Imagism hasn’t left any extended or profound theory as far as the criteria for producing “hard, dry images” (T.E.Hulme) are concerned. Since then the problem has been under-studied and calls for more in-depth analysis. The modern theoretical background of the paper includes the ideas of S. Averintsev and M. Gasparov, Paul Ricoeur and Gaston Bachelard; the criticism of the Imagism founders (T.E. Hulme and E. Pound) as well as its present-day English and American researchers. The major theoretical points highlight the important features of image transformation in Imagism: the dual (semantic and psychological) nature of an image (P. Ricoeur); loss of its axiological constituent thus forfeiting its wholeness (M. Girshman); its non-permanent essence (G. Bachelard). All these “new” sides underlie too general and vague definition of an image as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” given by Ezra Pound, his definitive denial of using images as “ornaments” and the emphasis on the image affiliation with speech, not language. The fight doesn’t have to be limited only to opposing Romanticism (as in Hulme’s “Romanticism and Classicism”). Equally significant and far more sophisticated is the distinction between Symbolic and Imagistic essence of an image (Pound’s “Retrospect” and “Gaudier Brzeska”). For Pound, the main criterion is the receptive potential of an image, its semantic openness which offsets its meaning as finally fixed in some symbol. The paper examines the possibility to apply Roland Barthes’s idea (“L`imagination du signe”, 1962) of the crucial influence of the interior (symbolic) relationship and two exterior (paradigmatic and syntagmatic) relationships on the formation of both single image and the total imagery of a certain type of art conscience – consequently, of Symbolism, Romanticism and Imagism. In the early period of Imagism development (the poetry of F. Flint, E. Storer, to a lesser extent, of T.E. Hulme) the images still preserve the inner affinity with the signified objects (concepts) as seen in Romantic and Symbolic image “patterns”. And throughout Imagism development, this inner affinity is being weakened until a distant outer resemblance is left. It is clearly seen in Hulme’s “Autumn”, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”, H.D.’s “Oread”, “Hermes of the Ways” et al. The close reading of the W.C. Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” is carried out in front of the “Tall Nettles” by Edward Thomas (1878–1917), his contemporary, who is now considered to be one of the “non-Modernist modern” poets. It is stated that the central image of the red wheelbarrow in its every detail constitutes a modern pastoral while Thomas’s nettles stand for psychological matrix of personal melancholy and despair. Syntagmatic relations also involve the further interaction of signs in the form of “superposition”, forming montage as one of the important Мodernist techniques not only in poetry, but also in Мodernist prose. And it becomes evident that it is not a mechanically borrowed cinema technique, as it is commonly viewed, but a deeper, “syntagmatic” similarity. The result of the research, based on the analysis undertaken, seems to prove its initial point: the poems of T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, W. Carlos Williams, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) taken as models, manifest that the image in Imagism is every time constructed as a new actual syntagma of the common imagination of a poet and a reader to become the unique image for every single poem without its further “universal” use in any virtual paradigm.