Wikipedia:Peer review/Imagism/archive1

Imagism

I've been working on this on-and-off for a while, as an offshoot of Modernist poetry in English and The Cantos. Now I need your suggestions for further improvements. Filiocht | Blarneyman 13:20, Apr 29, 2005 (UTC)

It could probably use a summary sketch of the Imagist poetic program in the lead section (probably just a condensed version of the manifesto's three points), so readers don't have to wait till the middle of the article to see what made Imagism distinctive as poetry rather than as history. Apart from that the article looks really good, and I hope you'll list it as a featured article candidate so I can support it. -- Rbellin|Talk 20:47, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

You may want to consider including a list of key pulications with ISBNs at the end of the article so that readers can easily refer to it for subsequent reading, otherwise it looks really good. --nixie 01:44, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Picky little things: Romantic, not "romantic" in the lead; "'less rhetorical'" rather than "'les rhetorical'" in the Pound quote.

Approach and content: No problems at all. However, in the history of Pound's view of Imagism, I had read and believe (from Donald Hall, I think) that Pound was deeply inspired by the Armory Show of 1913 to create an avant-garde movement that was a print Armory Show. In addition to the idea of a single volume that would shock and dissect bourgeoise expectations of narrative verse and moralizing verse the way the Armory Show exploded narrative, moral, and mimetic art, there was the idea of each volume being a portable exhibition -- a salon between covers. Additionally, Pound got the emphasis on the thing as thing from Cubism's opening up of objects in space and time. While this article isn't on Pound (admirably so, as I had no idea that Imagism existed before him, much less after him), perhaps some indication of the importance of the Armory Show would be called for?

I'm a bit nervous about including this until I get more documentation; after all, Pound was in London at the time. Similarly, I'm tempted to add more on the importance of Pound's relationship with Yeats nad his wish to emulate the Rhymer's club, but much of what I could write would constitute "original research". Can you give me a source in Hall's writings? Filiocht | Blarneyman 13:29, May 4, 2005 (UTC)

The song I always sing: context! What we today simply don't understand about poetry in 1913 is how monstrously moralizing, pedantic, demotic, and heavy-footed it was. That was the age that valued Longfellow above all, Tennyson next. It's the age that had a thousand poetasters in the newspapers writing wretchedly about local train wrecks. Coincidentally, it is also the time when poetry possibly had its widest audience. We have internalized the metaphysical-revivalist Eliot and the Cubist-inspired Pound (and Stephens) and the Futurist-inspired Pound and the Zen-rummaging Williams so much that we can't see what's so thoroughly shocking and radical about emphasizing faces in the crowd petals on a wet, black bough (or a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water). It would be good to have a sentence or two that establishes the Greatest Hits of 1912 to show the contrast the Imagists made. Other than that, I've got nothing to suggest to make the article any better, because it's already fantastic and precious. Geogre 02:51, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

There is only the briefest mention of tanka and haiku without any indication of why the Imagists were interested in these Japanese poetry forms, or how they were influenced by them, or how they even knew about them (since the earliest English translations of Japanese haiku were in the 1980s). I think that I read that Ezra Pound found out about haiku from a French book of haiku translation. Would it be worth mentioning the influence of haiku on Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"? BlankVerse ∅ 09:34, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

• I have tried to address these suggestions; thanks everyone. nixie, I'm not sure what you mean by "key publications"; the works of individual poets are usually listed on their own article pages. For anyone wanting a general overview, the Jones anthology in the References section is the place to start. Filiocht | Blarneyman 08:04, May 4, 2005 (UTC)