The Imagists’ main gripe with their predecessors was their tendency to seek poetic immortality by dealing with Big Things - symbols, myths and the like, or what the critic Natan Zach calls “anarchic infinitude”. By contrast, the Imagists were dealing with what they called “street emotions” (sounds a bit hip-hop to me), the here and now, which marked an aesthetic shift from the general to the specific, the absolute to the relative, the public to the personal. So in terms of meaning, Pound reckoned the Image “presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” in which the relationship between the writer and subject resembles that of an equation, or a direct correspondence Note also that he proposes a neat  reunion between the intellect and the emotions, with the brain keeping a check on the emotions and the emotions livening up the dry cerebrations of the brain. He may well have lifted the main tenets of this idea from the French poet Stephen Mallarme, who noted some years previously that the aim of poetry is “To establish a precise relationship between images so that a third aspect emerges which is both coherent and clear” - the ‘third aspect’ being meaning. [1]

Pound’s version of this equation-like relationship  between form and meaning was to prove hugely influential in the criticism of TS Eliot. In fact, one of Eliot’s best-known dictums concerned the ‘objective correlative’, which he defines as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. [2] In doing so, the artist is “intensify[ing] the world to his emotions”. What Eliot was setting up as his benchmark for meaning was that;

Þ      form and meaning needed to be entirely separable - the object and its attendant emotion, the trigger and its response must be clearly identifiable

Þ      the nature of their relationship should be completely transparent

Þ      it should be a marriage of the concrete with the abstract

Þ      should be communicable from the writer to the reader

Þ      and should therefore be both transferable and repeatable

Which was pretty much what the Imagists wanted too. [3] You can see quite clearly that the concreteness of Eliot’s vision, its specificity and awareness of locale and geography, showed he was thinking along similar lines. Take the first of his ‘Preludes’ published in 1917:

      
The Winter evening settles down       

With smell of steaks in passageways.                 

Six o’clock.          

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat            

On broken blinds and chimney-pots

And at the corner of the street                 

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.        

And then the lighting of the lamps.

How much more vivid can you get? There’s sights, sounds, smells - everything.

You’re right there, immersed in Eliot’s created world, but a world that is also recognizable as the London Eliot was living in when he wrote the poem. He’s not calling a spade a spade, but he’s not calling a fish a denizen of the finny tribe either. It’s a beautifully poised piece of work.

But with Eliot there’s usually also a mood or ‘emotion’ being evoked, of somehow being aloof from all this detail, of being an observer rather than a participant. Which the more doctrinal Imagists may not wholeheartedly have approved of. But then the drive of Eliot’s aesthetic, while admiring the Imagists’ desire for precision and clarity of expression, was always more inclusive, and raised what was basically a theory into a workable blueprint for writing great poetry.

In fact, Eliot’s conception of the ‘Objective Correlative’ found full expression in the conceits of the Metaphysical Poets, which we briefly examined in Part 1. In his eponymous essay dealing with this ‘school’ of poets, Eliot coined his best-known critical phrase, “the dissociation of sensibility”, a schism in (English) literary meaning between head and heart, thought and feeling, idea and emotion that occurred after the Metaphysicals left the stage. [4] Like Pound, Eliot wanted to reunite these ways of seeing in images that lent free rein to the imagination, while being subject to the iron discipline of rational thought;

 . . . it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience . . .

The intellectual life of the “ordinary man”, says Eliot, is chaotic and fragmented. But a poet’s shouldn’t be; it should be joining, amalgamating, seeing connections even among the most disparate objects and experiences. Above all, it should be “forming new wholes”, new sites and groupings of meaning. In short, re-creating the world.

But this alertness to the possibilities of experience needs a controlling vision, or it won’t join up into anything more meaningful than a bunch of randomly generated, emotionally charged images. The dissociation of sensibility was the result of “crude” thinking, letting emotion off the leash, allowing the heart to rule the head. So what Eliot was really after was a kind of unconscious ordering of meaning that united the best of both worlds - the immediacy of the emotions with the controlling mechanisms of thought. Otherwise you were building your artistic representaion of the world upon the sand and not the rock; you were trading “massive music” for a “pleasing tinkle”.

So, to sum up: what we’re looking at here is a mindset that could be typified by the following adjectives: hard, personal, unequivocal, disciplined, particular - and perhaps most importantly for the study of meaning, Controlled. In William Faulkner’s novel ‘The Mansion’, the attorney Gavin Stevens muses that:

Man must have light. He must live in the fierce, full constant glare of light, where all shadow will be defined and sharp and unique and personal.

On that showing, Stevens is an Imagist. But he’s also a figure of (legal) authority whose mind deals, as far as it can, in certainties. The attorney needs to know, understand and be able to express all the pertinent facts of the case he’s presenting. So it’s no surprise, then, that it’s often pointed out that Stevens is really an artist figure. He’s a compiler and narrator of stories, just like the artist who created him. And his need for certainty in controlling the world within each individual brief is really not that different from what the artist’s doing when writing; the disparate writers we’ve looked at so far in this section ultimately like to be in control, to represent each of their chosen worlds in as detailed and compelling a way as they can, so that meaning will be reinforced and authenticated both by their omniscience and the vividness of its artistic realization. As little as possible will be left to chance, or the case will be lost through ambiguity and equivocation. And the discipline implied by this need for accuracy finds an excellent metaphor in the way the artist responds to the physical world of form and shape, and the play of light and shadow over its surfaces.

It’s been remarked that in Imagist poems, meaning aspires to the condition of sculpture, which isn’t a bad way to think about it. Because - and here’s yet another related theme - sculpture tends to last longer than most forms of art. Keep your meaning unequivocal and it will endure. Which, along with clarity of vision, was what the Imagists were all about. Hemingway’s Frederick Henry noted that concreteness was most necessary in times of war - in other words, when the world’s collapsing round your ears, it’s useful to have something to hang on to. And there can be no doubt Hemingway, in common with just about every other artist, wanted his work to last. And, as we’ve already noted, the early years of the 20th century were regarded by those living through them as an era of unparalleled intellectual and social change.

So is it any wonder artists wanted to create something with a bit of stability?

William Faulkner, Hemingway’s contemporary, also noted the connection between solidity, meaning - and sculpture. In his novel ‘The Wild Palms’, the sculptress Charlotte Rittenmeyer wants “to make things, take the fine hard clean brass or stone and cut it, no matter how hard, no matter how long it took, cut it into something fine . . . “ The flip side of this emphasis on substantiality in art occurs when Faulkner wants to describe evil or worthless aspects of his created world. For example, when we first meet Popeye, the gangster villain and rapist of ‘Sanctuary’, the appearance of his face is contrasted against a natural setting, having “that vicious depthless [itals mine] quality of stamped tin.” Similarly, in the story ‘Barn Burning’, the arsonist Ab Snopes has no depth - he’s rather ”a shape, black, flat and bloodless as though cut from tin.” And this can extend to buildings too; Faulkner, no great fan of Los Angeles, characterizes the brand-new jerry-built houses there as “lighter even than dust and laid lightly in turn upon the profound and primeval lava, which one good hard rain would wash forever from the sight and memory of man.”

Footnotes:

1. Actually, he might also have nicked it from the philosopher Henri Bergson, or even his Imagist colleague TE Hulme, both of whose aesthetic philosophies embrace variations on this theme.

2. He then continues by deeming ‘Hamlet’ a failure because Shakespeare’s depiction of Hamlet’s ’madness’ isn’t objective enough.

3. In his novel ‘The Wild Palms’, William Faulkner gave a good account of the objective correlative through his character Harry Wilbourne who puzzles, “Surely memory exists independent of the flesh. But this was wrong too. Because it wouldn’t know it was memory, he thought. It wouldn’t know what it was it remembered. So there’s got to be the old meat . . . for the memory to titillate.”