It's All About the Imagery

“All poetic language is the language of exploration. Since the beginning of bad writing, writers have used images as ornaments. The point of Imagisme is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.”

-Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 1916

When reading poetry, I have the tendency to look at a poem and immediately think, “What does this poem mean?” While this is a common reaction among most people, I have learned that trying to discover the meaning of a poem confines and forces the poem to have one particular meaning that maybe the author did not even intend. When I began to read Pound this week, I instantly had to put this thought out of my mind, because quite frankly the more I tried to find the “meaning” behind his poems, the more frustrated I became. Even though they are two different people with two particular writing styles, Pound reminded me a great deal of Gertrude Stein. When I read Gertrude Stein, I could not help to grow in frustration as I pried to discover the meaning of her poetry; I felt those same emotions as I read excerpts of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos. Pound writes with a great deal of historical references, and the more I read of The Cantos, the less I understood. In Pound’s bio excerpt in the Anthology of Modern American Poetry, it is said that only Pound is able to fully understand his own poetry. As a reader, I concur with this statement because Pound’s writing felt too heavy for me. As an amateur poetry reader, I did not feel scholarly enough to even touch one of Pound’s Cantos. I enjoyed that Pound writes with his own particular style, and that he wrote his Cantos in prose style.

Pound is known for uncovering the Imagist movement. It was almost as if through this movement, Pound was trying to say that sometimes one could not find the words to describe images seen, but must find some other way to express the image. Pound writes in his, Gaudier-Brzeska, 1916, “All poetic language is the language of exploration. Since the beginning of bad writing, writers have used images as ornaments. The point of Imagisme is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech. The word is beyond formulated language.” When I first read Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” I knew there was something unique and different about this poem compared to all of his other poetry. After I did more research on the poem, I realized that Pound was using the imagist element in his haiku. This poem was the most interesting poem to me, and I enjoyed how Pound describes an image he saw in the most clear and precise form. Pound writes:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

The background of the poem is that Pound was at a Metro Station in Paris, and he saw a sea of beautiful people, but no way to describe them. After reading three different interpretations of the poem, it seems to be the general consensus that the single word apparition is the primary hinge of the poem. Apparition means: anything that appears, especially something remarkable or startling. With the help of James F. Knapp, I was able to better understand Pound’s poem. Knapp suggests that Pound is using a metaphor for spring through his use of the word apparition. Knapp writes, “And because “apparition” means what it does, he is able to convey the feeling of surprised discovery which such a vision in such a place must evoke.” Out of the three interpretations and understandings of Pound’s poem, I agreed with Knapp the most. Even though all three discussed similar aspects of Pound’s poem, I felt Knapp’s understanding was the most helpful and concise interpretation. Pound’s descriptions (although very concise) in, “In a Station of the Metro,” is unique and I think Pound’s point about imagisme reigns true through this poem, that “the image is itself the speech.”

            After reading Pound’s poem, I went searching for a more contemporary poem with the same type of imagery Pound used, but instead of finding a poem similar to Pound’s, I came across visual poetry. I thought to myself, “does visual poetry still provide imagery without using descriptive language?” I know this is a far, far stretch from Pound’s “In a Station at the Metro,” but whenever I read that Pound struggled putting his thoughts and his sights into words and how he saw only colors before he re-wrote his poem, I felt like visual poetry portrayed that line of thought. Instead of using words to describe what they want to say, the visual poets just use images instead. Now, I think visual poetry can lack the luster of a written poem with words as the primary communicator, but I think it is true that visual poetry can provide imagery just like a written poem. There are lots of types of visual poetry, but the one that caught my eye was haiku #62 by Scott Helmes. Helmes’ poem looks something like this:

I am not quite sure what Helmes is trying to communicate through this poem, but if you go back to the hyperlink on Scott Helmes, you will see that Helmes created this poem in the form of a haiku, and to Helmes these colors and pieces communicate something, although I am not sure what that something is. If you look closely, you will notice that the top line has two pieces put together, the middle line three, and the bottom line three. There are different colors represented in Helmes’ poem and even different types of letters within the blocks of color. These are just simple observations one can make about Helmes’ poem, but overall, this type of visual poetry contains imagery, and can evoke emotions in the “reader” or visualizer. 

It should be made clear, that I am by no means saying that this is how Ezra Pound would write poetry, or that this type of poetry resembles anything of Ezra Pound’s. In fact, it is quite different than any of Pound’s work, it I recognize that it is a stretch to compare this to Pound’s idea of the imagist movement. But when I looked for more information on visual poetry, I realized that this is just another way to communicate a certain image to people, by literally using images instead of words to write a poem. Most people would say that visual poetry is not “true” poetry, and who knows, Ezra Pound may very well say the same thing because he believes that “the image is itself the speech,” but it is true that imagery in poetry can be displayed in a number of different ways and even if visual poetry is “unreadable,” it is still considered poetry, and it also reveals imagery just like a written poem would.