Imagism
 
     
    Ezra Pound  
                                Charles Reznikoff 
         Hilda Doolittle 
                                          Carl Sandburg 
 
 
What is imagism?

1. The defenition of imagism

2. good definition, with reference to Ezra Pound (1)  (2)

3. Related online essay about Harriet Monroe and the publication of Imagist poems
 
 


 
 
Ezra Pound  
(1885-1972) 

 
photo taken from The Spotlight on Voices & Visions 
copy right (c) 1998 The Annenberg/CPB Project

 biographical information and bibliographies 

relevant links:  (1) (2) 

poems:“I"In a Station of the Metro"   online discussions 

                In a Station of the Metro 

               The Apparition of these faces in the crowd; 
               Petals on a wet, black bough. 

 
 H. D. and Ezra Pound's relationship 
 

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Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) 
(1886-1961) 

  
photo credit: Jennifer Benavidez

 Brief biography  (1)  (2) 

relevant links (1)  (2) 

poems:  "Oread"  online text 
 

        Oread  
 
Whirl up, sea-- 
Whirl your pointed pines, 
Splash your great pines 
On our rocks, 
Hurl your green over us, 
Cover us with your pools of fir. 
Janice Robinson writes, "Nature is not a manifestation of the poet; it would 
be truer to say that H.D. sees herself as a manifestation of nature." She explains 
that, "These male and female life energies in union give H.D.'s poetry its 
dynamic vitality, as in the union of tree and sea in 'Oread.'" 
 

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Charles Reznikoff 
(1894-1976) 


This photo is taken from 
Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet, 
edited by Milton Hindus
(Orono, Maine: National Poetry 
Foundation, 1984)
 

 Brief Biography 

Poems: 
         "Scrubwoman" 
         "Machine Age"
         "She sat by the window opening into the airshaft"
         "She would have taken the hairpins out of her carefully coiled hair"
         "The sun was low over the blue morning water"
         "The girls outshout the machines"
         "Old men and boys search the wet garbage with fingers"
         "The pedlar who goes from shop to shop"
         "Her work was to count linings"
         "They have built red factories along Lake Michigan"
         "The house-wreckers have left the door and a staircase"
         
 
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Carl Sandburg  
( 1878-1967 ) 

  
photo credit:  
Roger Blackwell Bailey 
from SAC LITWEB

 biographical information:  brief biography 
                                       drawing of Sandburg and biography with pictures 
 
poems:   the text of all of Sandburg's 1918 book of poems Cornhuskers
 
 

the Selected Poems of Carl Sandburg on Talk of the Nation Book Club 
of the Air, from NPR News. (To listen to the real audio, you have to install 
Real Player in your computer) 

"Fog" : Sandburg's reading of this poem
" The Walking Man of Rodin" (from e-text of Sandburg's first book Chicago 
 
 
  

"The Walking Man"  (1)  (2) 
by Auguste Rodin 
 The photo is taken from musee RODIN

 THE WALKING MAN OF RODIN 

LEGS hold a torso away from the earth. 
And a regular high poem of legs is here. 
Powers of bone and cord raise a belly and lungs 
Out of ooze and over the loam where eyes look and ears hear 
And arms have a chance to hammer and shoot and run motors. 
     You make us 
     Proud of our legs, old man. 

And you left off the head here, 
The skull found always crumbling neighbor of the ankles.
                 "Monotone" 
 
           MONOTONE 

     THE monotone of the rain is beautiful, 
And the sudden rise and slow relapse 
Of the long multitudinous rain. 

     The sun on the hills is beautiful, 
Or a captured sunset sea-flung, 
Bannered with fire and gold. 

    A face I know is beautiful-- 
With fire and gold of sky and sea, 
And the peace of long warm rain. 
 
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