A Language of Concrete Things

 H.D.'s draft of 'Helios'

Following on from our discussions last week - you can find more on Hulme, Imagism, and the philosophy of language (Wittgenstein, Russell, Ogden) in the following, which you can access via EBRARY (which you can access at the university library webpage):

Thacker, Andrew (2006). "A Language of Concrete Things: Hulme, Imagism and Modernist Theories of Language" in T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism (Abingdon, Oxon: Ashgate), pp. 39-55

Thacker also discusses the influence of the French philosopher Henri Bergson on T.E. Hulme, and Georg Lukács' critique of commodification, published in 1922 (for those of you interested in the Frankfurt School).

I'd also recommend having a look at Project Gutenberg. You can read or download for free the Imagist anthologies there, including Some Imagist Poets (1915), which has a very short, very informative 'Preface' by the poets who contributed (They argue for a "poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite"). You can also find at least two of H. D.'s poetry collections, Hymen and Sea Garden, to read online or download for free. H.D.'s poems have the virtue of mostly being very short - in fact, this is true of virtually all Imagist poems.

I also found at Project Gutenberg T.S. Eliot's essay on Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry. This is a key text for understanding how Pound and the Imagists influenced Eliot.  Eliot writes there:

"Pound's verse is always definite and concrete, because he has always a definite emotion behind it [...] no word is ever chosen merely for the tinkle".