Of the five levels of poetry — the typographical, or visible level; the sonic, or level of language music; the sensory, or emotional level; the ideational, or thematic level, and the fusional, or architectonic level — it was the third that Ezra Pound in 1912 decided was primary. On the sensory level patterns of imagery — figurative language, tropes — come to the fore, and the five external senses of taste, touch, sight, smell, and hearing are expressed, as is the internal "sense" of emotion. However, for this last "sense" would be substituted an "idea," the "objective correlative" of T. S. Eliot, which was nothing more than the "vehicle" or object of a metaphor, for if one were to choose exactly the right "object" (read "image") and place it in the perfect language context, that object would correlate with the "tenor" or subject of the metaphor, an idea or a thought which need not even be mentioned in the poem because it would be contained in the image itself.
It was Pound's invention of the school of "Imagisme" in 1912 that was the inciting moment in the Modernist revolution. Pound evidently took his ideas on the subject from those discussed at meetings of T. E. Hulme's Poets' Club founded in London about 1908. Hulme was a philosopher, a follower of Bergson, who believed that image is the heart of poetry, not mere decoration. Pound added to this precept the "free verse" — that is, the prose — practice of the French Symbolists and of Walt Whitman. Furthermore, as one who chose the whole world as his field of poetic expertise, Pound, together with other members of the school, also was influenced by the practices and traditions of the Chinese and Japanese poets.
Pound in the fall of 1912 dubbed his friend Hilda Doolittle, "H. D., Imagiste," which he wrote beneath her poem "Hermes of the Ways" and sent to Harriet Monroe's new Chicago magazine, Poetry. Shortly thereafter, in November, Pound used the term for the first time publicly when he included in his book Ripostes an appendix, the "Complete Poetical Works" of Hulme, which consisted of five poems. In January Doolittle's work appeared in Poetry with her literary name subjoined.
In the March, 1913, issue of Poetry the British poet F. S. Flint, without naming him, quoted Pound's three tenets of Imagisme, the first of which was, in effect, "No ideas but in things," as William Carlos Williams would subsequently put it. The second was spareness and condensation of language, the ideal of the haikuist, and the third was the "vers libre" requirement derived from the Symbolists and the American Walt Whitman of the preceding generation. A fourth, mysterious, "Doctrine of the Image" also existed, which Flint said the school "had not committed to writing"; however, in the same issue Pound himself defined the Image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time," which is technically the definition of the haiku.
The British Imagistes (the ultimate "e" was soon dropped) originally published their poems in two British periodicals, The New Freewoman and its successor The Egoist, to which the Americans John Gould Fletcher and Marianne Moore also contributed. Pound in 1914 published a seminal anthology, Des Imagistes, which added Richard Aldington and James Joyce to the British contingent, Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams to the American. Amy Lowell soon assumed leadership of this willy-nilly group, and Pound dropped out — disgustedly dubbing the group "Amygism" — in favor of a never well-defined new movement which he called "Vorticism." Lowell kept the "school" alive during 1915-17 by issuing anthologies titled Some Imagist Poets, and in her prefaces she added to the critical and theoretical literature of Imagism even as she herself felt that the movement was being vitiated.
To say that Ezra Pound and the Imagist poets were influenced not only by Walt Whitman's prose poetry but also by Japanese poetry — especially the haiku — is to utter a truism, but the argument can be made that Williams deliberately invented an American accentual stanza in his "triversen" that is the equivalent of the Japanese haiku — or, more exactly, the three-line katauta. In effect, in his earliest poems — those to be found in the first volume of his Collected Poems — Williams adapted to American poetry the syllabic prosody of the haiku and katauta by transmuting it: syllables became stresses; the seventeen syllables of the haiku and the nineteen syllables of the katauta, arranged in three lines of 5-7-5 or 5-7-7 syllables, became a "variable foot," to use Williams' terminology, also arranged in three lines.
Besides the "variable foot," Williams talked about the "breath pause," an accentual prosody version of the katauta. There are actually two forms that are called "katautas"; both are formal, but only one is a stanza form per se, and both are based upon spontaneous "utterances" which, in the Japanese tradition, are sudden, emotive words or epithets. The first form of the katauta is an emotive question or its answer: “Am I in love?” [katauta 1] “Birds are flying.” [katauta 2]. Arranged in parallel this way, the two katautas equal one mondo. Mondos may look like the Western syllogism and appear in similar parallel constructions, but the katauta answer is not derived logically; it is intuited, as in the Zen koan or "unanswerable question," for Zen Buddhism is at the root of the haiku.
The second kind of katauta is a stanza or poem form. It is made up of three parts arranged in lines of 5-7-7 syllables, these lengths being approximately breath-length, or the appropriate lengths in which to ask a sudden, emotive question and respond to it, also emotively. Seventeen syllables — as in the haiku, or nineteen — as in the katauta, are as many as can normally be uttered in one short breath; five to seven syllables are approximately equal to the utterance of an emotive question or its answer.
In Williams' "variable foot" accentual prosody version of this unit, two to four stresses are approximately equal to the utterance of an emotive question or its answer, and six to twelve stresses are the outer limits of the utterance of a question and its intuitive "answer." Arranging these stresses and emotive utterances into lines not exceeding four stresses each, one will have a stanza or poem three lines in length, each line being equal to one phrase. In fact, this system in grammatic prosodies is called "lineating" or "line-phrasing," and there is such a grammatic element in some Japanese forms as well, particularly in the tanka which, like the katauta, takes two forms.
Both forms of the tanka are externally alike in that they are quintet poems with lines, in this order, of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. In the first tanka form, called the waka, one subject is treated in the first two lines, another in the next two, and the last line is a refrain or paraphrase or restatement: 5-7, 5-7, 5. The first two lines are a dependent clause or a phrase, the last three an independent clause. Grammatically, Williams often did similar things with his stanzas. The second type of tanka consists of two parts. The first three lines are an independent unit ending in a noun or verb after which a turn takes place: 5-7-5, 7-7. The triplet is an observation, the couplet is a comment on the observation.
The tanka developed from an older form, the choka, which was a poem written in alternating 5-7-syllable lines. The conclusion of the choka would be, often, an envoy that doubled the last 7-syllable line: 5-7-7 — the katauta — or that consisted of two choka couplets with a doubled last line: 5-7-5-7-7 — the tanka. One can see the katauta is the base of the tanka, and one can see the haiku growing out of the first three lines of the tanka. But it was from the renga chain — a sequence of tankas by two poets who would alternately write the triplet and couplet stanzas — that the hokku developed. The word is Chinese in origin, and it came to specify in Japanese poetry the first triplet of a renga chain. This first verse set the theme of the chain and was the most important part of the poem, the rest of which, beginning with the succeeding 7-7-syllable hanka couplet, served to elaborate upon or gloss the hokku. The hokku of a renga chain ended with a full stop — it was complete by itself.
By various stages the term "haiku" — a corruption and blending of the dissimilar words "hokku" and "haikai" (from the "haikai no renga" or humorous renga chain) — came to denote an independent tercet of 5-7-5 syllables. The haiku dropped all hankas, glosses, comments, and elaborations. It became a poem which had as its basis emotive utterance, an image, and certain other characteristics as well, including spareness, condensation, spontaneity, ellipsis, and a seasonal element.
Ideally the haiku, though complete in itself, would be open-ended in that its statement would "reverberate" beyond itself into overtone. The haiku has perhaps been best described as a moment of intense perception. A distinction is sometimes made between the senryu and the haiku, though both have the same syllabic form. The senryu was originally a parodic haiku, but in its serious aspect it has been characterized as an inquiry into the nature of man; the haiku, an inquiry into the nature of the universe.
The Imagists, but in particular Williams, were particularly successful in adapting to American poetics not only Japanese metrical theory, but also the spirit of the haiku to the American sensibility. Many Western poets have been notably unsuccessful in writing good image poetry, and this failure has to do with their attempting what Williams did not attempt to do: naturalize Zen Buddhism, of which the haiku is a relatively recent outgrowth.
Haiku translated into English often appear to members of Occidental cultures to be overly sentimental. The Zen poet attempts to put the self into the thing perceived, to do more than empathize with it and "become one" with the thing; thus, by extension, with all things. In Western traditions empathizing with objects is sentimental; there is even a term, "the pathetic fallacy," to describe the state of excessive personification or over-empathy. If American poets try to become one with the object of their perception, their work will appear to be self-indulgent and egocentric. It was T. S. Eliot, though, who produced the theory that Williams put into practice, the theory of "the objective correlative": the poet must choose that object which will be the idea, not merely the symbol of the idea, which was the theory of another Modernist school, the Symbolists.
As an illustration of the thesis that the Japanese forms are analogous to Imagist poetry in English, and specifically that the Japanese 5-7-5-syllable count is analogous to Williams' phrasal-accentual prosody, here is Williams 1916 Imagist poem "Marriage," originally published in Poetry:
So different, this man
And this woman:
A stream flowing
In a field.
The original version of poem is a sentence that has been line- phrased; that is to say, the sentence has been broken into phrases and each phrase has become a line. However, if the lines of this poem are rearranged in syllabic lengths of 5-7-5, the poem becomes a perfect three-line senryu:
So different, this
man and this woman: a stream
flowing in a field.
The prosody Williams developed from Japanese sources has become widely dispersed among American poets since its early appearances in short, haiku-like poems written by the Imagists. Williams himself soon used it as a stanza pattern, developing out of the haiku a triplet, each line of which equals one phrase, the whole triplet equal to one independent clause, each line containing no more than four stressed syllables and generally no fewer than two.
In Williams' work there are literally dozens of poems that fit this description. The triversen stanza first showed up in section VII of the 1923 Spring and All, and thereafter it occurred with increasing frequency in his work, though it cannot be claimed that it became his mainstay strophe.
To list examples of the triversen stanza and of pseudo-haiku in the work of other Imagists would be an endless task, but one other poet who did fine things in the Japanese tradition — once only, and atypically — was Wallace Stevens in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Bird," his only truly Imagist, as distinguished from Symbolist, poem. But in "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself" Stevens not only wrote a poem in triversen stanza, he glossed Williams' Imagist credo as well.
Bibliography:
Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961.
Yoel Hoffman, ed. & tr., Japanese Death Poems, Rutland and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1986.
Stephen Tapscott, American Beauty: William Carlos Williams and the Modernist Whitman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Lewis Turco, ""Williams' Prosody," The Cloverdale Review, 1992/1993, pp. 37-49.
Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets from the Puritans to the Present, Boston: Houghton, 1968; rev. ed., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984.
William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems, Vol. I, 1909-1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan, New York: New Directions, 1986.
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This essay is an expansion of my essay on “Imagism” to be found in The Encyclopedia of American Literature edited by Steven R. Serafin, New York: Continuum, copyright 1999. This version copyright 2007.
Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, UArkansasPress 1986. Paperback, $12.95. 1986 Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America. ORDER FROM AMAZON
