Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.

(in
Language)
the natural object is always the adequate symbol. (language)
I believe that the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object, that if a
man use 'symbols' he must so use them that their symbolic function does not
obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to
those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a
hawk is a hawk. [Credo]

Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound

Pg 1: Understanding Ezra Pound has never been easy. His erudition and experimentation, not to
say his orneriness, have constantly challenged readers.
Pg 2: Pound found an anchor in the work he labelled Imagist...Imagism evolved as a reaction
against abstraction in favour of precision, replacing Victorian generalities with the clarity found
in Japanese haiku and ancient Greek lyrics. In A Few Donts by an Imagist (1913), Pound
outlined the new aesthetic: an image was the presentation of an intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant time, treated acorrding to certain rules: [the three rules]
He sought to objective presentation of material which he believed would stand on its own,
without the need for symbolist, expressionistic or romantic attributes.
He sought to objective presentation of material which he believed would stand on its own,
without the need for symbolist, expressionistic or romantic attributes.

Pg 30: The first announced direct treatment, concise wording, and flexible rather than mechanical
rhythm as key principles of the new movement, while the second defined an image as that
which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time (LE,4). While
intellectual and emotional identifies the Image as focus for a range of thoughts and feelings, the
phrase instant of time in that definition anticipates the static quality that Pound came to see in
Imagism and that propelled him toward Vorticism.

Pg 31: ...most famous Imagist work, the two-line in a station of the metro. Its Haiki-like
terseness, meter, and subject exemplified the imagist principles he was promulgating.
Pg 48: Imagism is probably the most important single movement in English-language poetrty of
the twentieth century....nowadays can be called minimalist. It emhpasized a romantic return to
origins, a simplification of needless complexities.

The image of Imagism was not just a verbal evocation of sensory experience. Often spelled by
Pound with a capital I, it has a quasi-mystical without the mediation of language. Pound said, it
gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that
sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art (LE,
4).
Pg 49: in a station of the metro, with its epiphany of beauty in a crowded Paris undergroundrailway station. Pounds metaphoric leap from luminescent faces to petals on a wet, black bough
generates, that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freemdom from time limits and space
limits to which Imagist revelation aspires, (LE, 4).

Cambridge introduction to Pound

Pg 15: Ezra Pound loved to jump from idea to idea, from culture to culture,
from lyric to epic.
Pg 24: Pound was both a part of, and instigator of, these broader poetic
changes from the old order to the new. As he redrew the lines of poetry, from
the rhetorical and metrically rigid to natural speech and the image, often
through the narrative use of a persona.
The complexity of cultural exchange, however, saw modernism try to undo its
elitism, although with mixed success [pg25]
Pg 26: Yet the modernism that emerged between roughly 1912 and 1922,
between Imagism and the publication of Ulysses, was unusual in its efforts to
establish elitist texts, either by accessibility, cost or complexity.
The allusive, experimental and fragmented style of the works would make
reading difficult.
Pg 27: Pounds vigorous attack on complacency and convention was initially
literary. He challenged English poetry, especially Victorian, and the
entrapment of poets by iambic pentameter.
Pound began to remake his language on or about 1910, recognizing that he
had been obfuscated by the Victorian language {LE 193-4). He needed a
new language to think in.
By 1912, Pound offered his own corresponding set of rules,
1) Direct treatment of the thing whether subjective or objective

2) To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation

3) As regarding rhythm; to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase,
not in sequence of a metronome. {LE 3}

What became clear to Pound was the need to cut directand discover as he
would state in his account of the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, that the image is
the poets pigment [GB, 19, 86] (page 27)

Page 27: Pounds quest became to make it new (LIII/265)

Italy was an important influence on his work...for its literary ethos.
Furthermore, a shared poetry of tension, flux and alteration between the
scattered and gathered -the way Petrarch composed his Canzoniere
-influenced Pounds method of composition and The Cantos.
Page 37: Distorting perspective through juztaposition, whether through image
or language, also placed Pound within the scope of the Surrealists, Dadaists
and even Constructivists.
What he undertook -revitalizing language, restructuring the long poem, and
restructuring a culture on its future via its past -was happening through
Europe, expressed by an aesthetic that challenged conventions through
multiple perspectives, a Bergsonian sense of simultaneity and the creation of
verbal collage where terms like past and present seem irrelevant.
But his treatment of fragmentation and anti-mimetic bias reflected
developments in other modernist forms as well, especially art, music and
prose fiction.

Chapter 3: Works
Pg 38: The poets job is to define and yet again define till the death of
surface is in accord with the root in justice -Pound 1935 (SL 277)
Pg 47: Beginning in 1912, Pound was exploring another line of poetry in an
effort to break free from the mimetic. He named this new form Imagism as he
presented new conventions of non-representational art.
The process excluded inessential details in the pursuit of significant
particulars. Symbolism, by contrast, dealt with association and allusion; the

image is immediate and direct and is the furthest possible remove from
rhetoric (GB 83). Symbolists symbols have a fixed value but Imagists
images have a variable significance.
Pounds account of how he wrote In a Station of the Metro crystallizes the
Imagist method. The process began in 1911 when he emerged from the Metro
at La Concorde in Paris and saw a series of beautiful faces.
I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me but he could
not -nothing equal that sudden emotion. That evening, almost
unconsciously, he found the expression, actually splotches of color, a word,
the beginning, for me, of a language in colour (GB 87). He realized that
there was as much pleasure in an arrangement of planes or in a pattern of
figures, as in painting portraits of fine ladies (GB 87)
The single-image poem was his escape, or rather his discovery of how to
make the Imagist poem. He originally wrote a thirty-line Metro poem but
destroyed it. Six months later, he fashioned a poem half that length, (pg 48):
a year later formulated into:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough.
He explains, is an attempt to record, the precise instant when a thing
outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and
subjective {GB 89}
The Image is not an idea but a radiant node or cluster [GB 90]
&&
1920: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Section 1
-addresses his confiction that modern life is incapable of depicting that which
came in previous ages. Charts the disullisionment of a young poet who is
struggling against the weight of victorian and poetic forms, but still unable to
find a voice suitable for the modern age. Section 2:
-it would be lovely to impitate those in old period, Greece -doesnt fit into the
modern age.
-no point in repeating what people did long ago.
-attaking the group known as the georgian poets

&&
Casting off the past Dedicated to trying new ways of the future.
-not about making something great but something new
- juxtapositions, destructed rhyme and rhythem, depicitions of modern
cityscapes
-Pound dedicated most of his life to Imagism before rejecting it for vorticism
Two are quite similar. Image was the central point in which meaning flowed in
all directions. Imagism founded by Pound himself.
Essay appered: brief manifesto for his poetry.
We shouldnt be neat but break conventions.
Basically; style shouldnt be over romate, rhythm shouldnt be rigid and the
central subject matter should be approached directly, not descreatly -dont
talk around your point.
Short and to the point -doesnt mean transparent and easy to read though
-Impact of length -wow, short
Less concerned with accurism and grammar, more so creating effects in the
mind of the reader. Doesnt have an actual verb.
Striking, applied association with the random and annoumous faces in the
crowd. Metro station -typical modern space.
-enoble modernity, beauty and digitnty of the natural. Metro busy -not a nice
place, unsettling. Associating it with a lovely image.
Interst in chinese culture, not a haikun, an ideogram -an image of stuff in
words
-using what he learned and trying to apply it.
-one image, nothing else.
Rhythm: get away from iambic pentameter; really hes trying to find different
links in forms