# The Conservative (Lovecraft)/July 1919/Imagism

Imagism
By Maurice Winter Moe
The essence of imagism, aside from the deliberate casting away of all restraint as to form and taste, is an intense concentration on the percept of every sensation. The imagist concentrates his attention on any object or phenomenon he happens to select for description and then, turning his mind in upon itself, strives to capture the exact image of every sensation at the very instant it registers on his brain. After it has been assimilated and classified as a concept, it no longer interests him.
Now I must confess that this is not the easiest thing in the world to do, for the economy of our mental life has through long yers taught us to combine into concept groups the multitudes of perceptions that are constantly impinging on the consciousness. Life is too short to deal with each of these percepts lightly. If we did, we should have no time for the larger units of thought that constitute real intellection; we should be living on a plane just one degree removed from that of the unthinking animal. But it can be done. There is a trick about it, and the novelty of the effort, childish as it is, at first proves rather fascinating, just as it proves exhiliarating for grown-ups occasionally to cut loose in the antics of boyhood days and play leap-frog and prisoner’s base. One “poem” I discovered recently describes the imagist as a child sitting in a sunny corner and letting the brightly-coloured pebbles of life trickle through his fingers. And that’s it exactly: he is playing with his sensations, watching them sparkle and glance in the sun, but not using them for any real purpose in the business of existence.
This—even if we forgive the imagist his anarchy of form, which I do not—lays bare the fundamental weakness of the whole cult: there is absolutely no attempt at interpretation. Amy Lowell herself takes pride in admitting this. We take the exact picture and present it to the reader without comment, she says, it is for him to put his own interpretation upon it. But images are in quality—not in content—all alike; stark, bare, and lacking any touch of personality. It is the interpreting touch of the artist that gives to a word-picture the subtle touch of his personality. In the volume of imagistic poems entitled “Others,” almost any one of the poems might have been turned out by any one of the “Others,” so lacking are these formless attempts in ​style and personality. That such otherwise sane critics as William Stanley Braithwaite and such otherwise sane publications as the New Republic bow down at the new fane, is utterly beyond me.
If this be poetry, then anyone, even I, can be a poet. To prove this I wrote one of these things myself. I never thought I should be guilty of such a thing, but I did it in the interests of good literature. One morning as I was “coming to the surface,” my first thought was that it would be a good experiment to scrutinise my waking sensations one by one. So I took about five minutes to wake up, noted carefully every sight and sound that trickled in upon me, then rose and hastened to record the whole hodge-podge. “Seven O’Clock” is the result. Maybe is isn’t real imagism, but if it isn’t, the distinction is beyond a poor ordinary reader like me. If this is the new poetry, Lord help literature!