Ezra Pound and the Modernist Movements: Imagism & Vorticism
Modernism and Ezra Pound
At the beginning of the 19th century, we find Romanticism, which emerged from the late 18th century and lasted approximately until 1840. Victorianism then took center stage until 1880. A transitional period, known as Fin-de-Siècle, occurred from 1880 to 1890, followed by the Edwardian period at the beginning of the 20th century until 1910. This period ended due to an exhibition in London that profoundly impacted the intellectual class. Virginia Woolf noted that human nature changed that day. From this point until 1930, we have Modernism. During this time, the Great War occurred. Between 1914 and 1918, there was an acceleration of change. Until 1914, we find a pre-war period characterized by intellectual aggression and violence, with a desire to destroy the past. From 1918 to 1930, we find the post-war period, in which the fruits of the modernist period were collected. In 1922, Ulysses and The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot were published. Modernism bore fruit after the war. In the 1920s and 30s, there was a revolution in critical methods, and we find important writers such as T.S. Eliot and I.A. Richards. Modernism encompasses a series of movements, including Imagism, Vorticism, and others.
Imagism
Imagism was born around 1912. The great masters were Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, and Richard Aldington. Imagism is a deeply anti-romantic movement based on the anti-romantic philosophy of Hulme. An imagist poem can be identified by its brevity, short lines, lack of regular rhythm, and rejection of abstraction. Imagism is the opposite of abstraction; it emphasizes concreteness, aiming to be as close as possible to concrete reality. For imagists, the art with which poetry has the biggest analogy is music. The image is the basis of imagist poetry and its rhetoric.
The image was the tool to break with the past, and the imagists wanted to be essential, using only indispensable words for meaning. The poet must evoke visual images, which requires a very precise observation of the poetic object. Similes, metaphors, and comparisons were the tools used by imagists to create poems.
Vorticism
Vorticism was founded in 1914. It is based on the strong personalities of its founders. If they tire of the movement, it disappears. It is not a natural cultural movement. They thought that the image was a static concept and needed movement, energy, and aggression. If we can turn an image into a vortex, we can break with the past. This movement was founded by Pound, who created a journal that had two issues. Its spirit was aggressive and violent. The second issue was that between the real blast came the Great World War, and the movement and the journal disappeared because its founders had to go to war. The aspirations of this movement were: anti-romanticism, meaning not to mix humanity with art because art should be geometrical and precise. Not to mix feelings and emotions with art. So, we have art that is precise, accurate, and mechanic, and nature that is confused, organic, and imperfect.
Modernism as a General Label
Modernism is a general label; Imagism and Vorticism are particular, specific currents. Modernism in Spanish means Vanguardismo. Imagism and Vorticism are concrete movements; Modernism is a blanket term that covers a big number of little movements that went against the 19th-century aesthetic ideology: Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, and so on. Modernism was not created by the contemporaries but by historians retrospectively to categorize the past.