• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.2
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• pp.273-298
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• 2018

This paper, postulating that Lowell's Imagism is not some "Amygism" that wobbles with "emotional slither," "mushy technique" and "general floppiness" as Pound once mocked, but another kind of poetic discourse that deserves the fullest re-consideration, goes back to the very scene where Pound left for Vorticism, condescendingly allowing Lowell and her supporters to use the name "Imagism" for three years. There, it tries to illuminate how Lowell, making the most of the opportunity given to her, picked up what Pound had left behind, grafted it on the soil of America, and finally fulfilled her literary passion to awaken the common reading public to the taste for poetry reading. For the purpose, it looks into her critical reviews in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, and stresses her creative critical efforts to re-address Pound's principles of "Imagisme." In particular, given the limit of space, it focuses only on the second principle of her Imagism and examines the modernity of her concepts of "a cadence," "suggestion," and "the real poem beyond." Then it reads "Patterns" in the context of Japanese poetry and Noh drama and analyzes the poetic patterns that Lowell made through a creative adaptation of Japanese aesthetics for Imagist poetics. In doing so, this paper aims to provide reasonable evidences to evaluate the modernity of Lowell's Imagist ars poetica and to consider her a truly serious Imagist poet worthy of a place in the history of American poetic modernism.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.939-958
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• 2011

Ezra Pound has an idea of poetry as a field of energy in which words interact with each other with kinetic energy. The energy field which Pound creates in his poem is analogous to the theory of electromagnetism developed by Michael Faraday and James Maxwell, who look upon the space around magnets, electric charges and currents not as empty but as filled with energy and activity. Pound argues that "words are charged with force like electricity," demonstrating that words charged with their own images or energies of positive or negative valence interact one another. This idea is similar to Faraday's concept of "line of force" which he used to represent the disposition of electric and magnetic forces in space. Pound's concept of "image" as an "intellectual and emotional complex in an instant" is remarkably consonant with the confluence of electric and magnetic fields that are coupled to each other as they travel through space in the form of electromagnetic waves. The instant profusion of conception and perception, much like that of electric and magnetic fields, enables Pound to move beyond the sequential and linear hierarchy in time and space. Particularly, Maxwell's stunning discovery that the electromagnetic waves propagate in space at 'the speed of light' has allowed Pound a relativistic sense of escape from the limitations of Newtonian absolute time and space. Pound's poetry transcends any geographical space and sequential time by rendering and juxtaposing images simultaneously. Pound was fully aware of light and electricity fundamental to what he called his world "the electric world." Pound's experiments in Imagism and Vorticism can be considered an attempt to rediscover a place for poetry in the modern world of science and technology. Almost all the appliances that we think of today as modern were laid down in the closing decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, in response to the availability of electromagnetic energy. This paper explores how Pound responded to the age of modern technology and science, examining his conception of "image" through his many analogies and similes drawn from electromagnetism. Pound's imagist poetics and poetry come to embody, not only the characteristics of the electric age in the early twentieth century, but the principles of electromagnetism the electric age is based upon.