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The Sources of The Imagist Aesthetic

1970; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 85; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1261393

1938-1530

Wallace Martin,

Visual Culture and Art Theory

Earlier writers have erroneously assumed that Symbolism exercised a significant influence on the Imagist aesthetic. Hulme and Pound derived their conceptions of the image from the writings of French psychologists and philosophers. In the empiricist-associationist psychological tradition (represented in the writings of Taine and Théodule Ribot), I'image corresponds to David Hume's “impression”: it is the mental representation of sensory experience, the virtues of which are clarity, precision, and complexity (as opposed to the vagueness and simplicity of ideas). Hulme read works by Taine and Ribot, and his “Notes on Language and Style” embodies their theory of the image. Pound's conception of the image is similar to that contained in Ribot's Essai sur I'imagination créatrice . After 1908, Hulme adopted Bergson's organicist theory of the image; for Bergson, l'image was the linguistic embodiment of intuition. Imagism was not the culmination of the Romanticist aesthetic, as some critics have argued; it was the first attempt to transcend the subject-object dichotomy of nineteenth-century poetic theory.