Ezra Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste"

In Ezra Pound’s article “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” he writes, “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”. He writes that the presentation of the “complex” is what gives the reader the experience of, “freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth”. These statements can be applied to poetry, music, or the visual arts, which are all included the interdisciplinary movement of Vorticism. Although Ezra Pound advocates certain guidelines to writing Imagist poetry in his article, to me it seems as though Pound advocates a poetry style that is subject to less analyses and more aesthetics. He asks the reader to ignore critics a few times in the article, and writes that if the reader is captivated by “the finest cadences he can discover”, the content of the words will not matter to the reader and will not need to be dissected into syllables, iambs, vowels and consonants, etc. The reader will simply respect the movement of the words on the page, “if he can dissociate the vocabulary from the cadence”.

On a different subject, just as Cubism defied the beauty norms of the visual arts of its time, Pound advises his reader, “Don’t be ‘viewy’ – leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays”. It’s as if Pound is mocking beauty and branding it as a characteristic of prose rather than poetry. In fact, while reading Mina Loy’s poem “July in Vallombrosa”, I realized that the words used were not always comfortable, familiar, or particularly beautiful. They were, however, captivating. In stanza five the words “ineffable”, “Rigor Mortis”, and “Divest” caught my eye, as they create a captivating stanza but are not beautiful words on their own. The other poems, including Pound’s, contain hard but captivating language, so that they may not appear beautiful or contain beautiful ideas or meanings, but they are lovely to read.