Ezra Pound's Tenets of Imagism and the parameters of Imagism

We read about Ezra Pound's Three Tenets of Imagism in Pericles Lewis's article "Moderism" and I liked that in this article Lewis seems to be distinguishing parameters or laying down the rules of modernist writing. Ezra Pound's three tenets state "Direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective, to use no word that does not contribute to the presentation and to compose it [rhyme] in the sequence of the musical plane, not the sequence of the metronome" (Lewis 83). Later Lewis tells us that "the imagists wrote poetry that closely resembled everyday speech, focused on the description of objects and facts, used irregular meters and short lines, and avoided traditional stanza forms" (84). I just find these rules (for lack of a better word) of imagism fascinating.  One can easily see how they connect back to the arts and impressionism, cubism, and even dada. The impressionist painters broke all the rules of the traditional school of art, the Royal Academy. Some of those rules included perspective, depth, and subject matter. Imagists, and impressionist or modernist writers followed their lead, playing with perspectives, time, and space.  Cubism strove to break everything down into smaller shapes, so as to get to the heart of the thing itself, which makes sense.  We can see this in some of these poems. One of the lines that I thought captured cubism well was "Between bandy legs/Jerk patches of street" from "The Costa San Giorgio" by Mina Loy (11).  I think the emphasis here is on the patches of the street.  It's taking a view of between a cat's legs and just giving us a cut up chunk of pavement.  This is exactly what the cubist would do. It's not looking at the whole entire street, (which traditional perspective would have done) it's just taking one chunk of it and showing it to us. Dada, which Lewis references was everyday ordinary stuff, made into art, and I think that this is what the writers are trying to do as well.  What could be more ordinary than a patch of pavement, yet Mina Loy is presenting it artistically.  

This is Degas's painting "Ballet-School c 1873" and here we can see that he is playing with all sorts of divergent techniques.  He has moved away from "realism," he captures several perspectives at once through use of the mirror in the back, and he captures the experience through the various things going on.

 Picasso's Guernica is obviously an example of cubism and it takes all these different images, breaks them up into basic shapes and throws them on the page almost haphazardly; except that it isn't haphazard at all. He is trying to make us feel overwhelmed and confused-  feelings that often come from war. In the same way Ezra Pound suggests that writers use no word that doesn't contribute to the presentation- Picasso is using specific, limited images to create his presentation.  He isn't adding any fluff. 

Raoul Hausmann's Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Age) is an example of Dada.  He took these everyday objects (in this case mechanical objects) and attached them to this wooden head. This reminds me of how Lewis said that the Imagists wrote poetry that resembled everyday speech.  Hausmann used everyday objects to create his piece and it's the arrangement of these everyday objects that makes the viewer step back and wonder why he has placed them where he has and what that could possibly mean. In the same way the impressionist writers, the modernist writers, the imagists, whatever they wanted to call themselves and whatever they evolved to become... they used these techniques in their writing.