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From: afilreis@dept.english.upenn.edu (Al Filreis)
Subject: ****we begin on imagism now****
To: 88v@dept.english.upenn.edu
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 14:36:38 -0400 (EDT)
Sender: owner-88v@dept.english.upenn.edu
Precedence: bulk

88'ers:

Let's begin with H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). (By the way, she and William Carlos
Williams and Ezra Pound - and Marianne Moore - hung out together in
Philadelphia and at Penn, where Pound and Williams were students. If this
convergence at Penn interests you, you might read the prefatory bios in the
NORTON anthology for all those poets. Pound and H.D. were really into
classical [Greek in particular] poetry at the time. Classics at Penn then was
very very strong. For H.D. especially, her interest in Greek verse affected
the way she went about being a modernist poet, word by word, line by line.)

H.D. is perhaps the member of the imagist group who took their manifesto
about precision and clarity and economy most seriously - as a function of
line-by-line modern writing.

So let's start with H.D.'s "Sea Rose." Given what you know about the
objectives or goals of the imagist movement (from, for instance, from this
document:

        http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/imagism-def.html )

what about the poem does enact or follow the stricture imagists energetically
imposed upon themselves?

In other words: how (specifically) is this an imagist poem?

--Al

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H.D., "Sea Rose" (1916) 

Rose, harsh rose, 
marred and with stint of petals, 
meagre flower, thin, 
spare of leaf, 

more precious 
than a wet rose 
single on a stem -- 
you are caught in the drift. 

Stunted, with small leaf, 
you are flung on the sand, 
you are lifted 
in the crisp sand 
that drives in the wind. 

Can the spice-rose 
drip such acrid fragrance 
hardened in a leaf?