Imagism is the earliest modern poetry school that appeared in the early 20th century. It was formed in England from 1908 to 1909 and was later introduced to the United States and the Soviet Union. Representative figures include: Hume, Pound, Amy and Yesenin, etc. The emergence of Imagism was initially a reaction against the literary style of poetry at that time. First of all, in the British literary world in the late 19th century, symbolism, aestheticism and romanticism were integrated to form New Romanticism. Imagism evolved on its basis. By the beginning of the 20th century, traditional poetry, especially Romanticism and Victorian poetry, had degenerated into idle moaning, sentimentality and ethical preaching, which were just "imitations of Keats and Wordsworth." Pound and his Imagists proposed an "unconventional" and "innovative" approach to poetry creation. Secondly, Bergson fever was popular in the early 20th century, which was an extension of the influence of irrationalist philosophical thought in the literary world since Schopenhauer. Hume, the founder of Imagism, was directly taught by Bergson. Bergson's intuitionism and philosophy of life were fully accepted by the Imagists and became their main theoretical basis and philosophical foundation. Imagist poetry particularly emphasizes the functions of imagery and intuition. At the same time, the Symbolist poetry school created a new way for the Imagists to create new poems, especially the synaesthesia, color and musicality of poetry, which greatly inspired the Imagists. Since most of the Imagist poets experienced the creation of symbolic poetry, some people in the theoretical circles regard Imagism as a branch of symbolism. In fact, there are great essential differences between Imagism and symbolism poetry. The Imagists are not satisfied with symbolism's need to find the metaphorical hints and symbolic meanings behind the images through guessing. They are not satisfied with finding the mysterious relationship between the representation and the thought. They want the poetry to be reflected in the description of the representation in an instant. . It advocates the use of vivid images to restrain emotions, without preaching, abstract lyricism and reasoning. Therefore, Imagist poetry is short, concise, and vivid. Often a poem has only one image or several images. Although symbolism also uses images, and both regard images as "objective counterparts," symbolism treats images as symbols, focusing on association, suggestion, and metaphor, making the image a code to be translated. The Imagists "moved from symbols to the real world" and focused on the image itself of poetry, that is, its concreteness. Let emotions and thoughts merge into the image, and manifest themselves naturally and without thinking in a moment. In addition, from the perspective of the inherent form of poetic imagery, the Imagists were influenced by Japanese haiku and ancient Chinese poetry. The innovation of Imagist poetry first began with the imitation and study of Japanese haiku. The short poems of Japan's "haiku saint" Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) had a great influence on them. In "Ancient Pond", "In the ancient pond, the frog jumped in, and the water sounded clear." The frog hinted at spring, and the ancient pond symbolized eternity. The frog jumped in, and the sound was pleasant and clear, and then returned to calm. It has the religious philosophy of emptiness and tranquility. The sound here is the best. Silence, the sound breaks through the previous solidification and silence, conveying the eternal Zen spirit of the world and the universe. The intuitive interpretation of the poem's connotation in the haiku fascinated the Imagist poets. Kobayashi Icha, the last poet of classical Japanese haiku, lost his parents when he was young and wandered around. His poems have a sense of humor and compassion, and there is a hint of self-deprecation in his writing about the weak. For example, in "Little Sparrow", "Come and play with me, little sparrow without a father or a mother." The imagery is simple but rich in meaning. Sparrows are small animals. They are not as good as eagles with claws, which can find food by themselves. They are also not as good as poultry, which have enough food and clothing to eat. In the poem, there is no warmth in the world, and the sympathy for the same people is instantly reflected. His imitation of Tao Yuanming's famous line "The frog leisurely sees Nanshan" means that frogs are truly detached and irrational, while Tao Yuanming's detachment is painful, and returning after seeing Nanshan may not be detached. The poet mocked himself and lamented life by using the frog to see Nanshan. The Imagist poets further discovered that Japanese haiku originated from Chinese metrical poetry. In their view, Chinese poetry is a combination of pictures. Ancient Chinese poems are completely immersed in imagery and are pure combinations of imagery, such as Liu Zongyuan's "Snow on the River": "Birds in thousands of mountains have disappeared, and all traces of people have been wiped out. A man with a lone boat and a coir raincoat fishing alone in the snow on the cold river." Wang Wei "Shi to the Fortress": "The solitary smoke is straight in the desert, and the sun is setting over the long river." Ma Zhiyuan's "Autumn Thoughts": "Withered vines and old trees are crows, small bridges and flowing water are people's houses, the west wind is thin and the horses are thin on the ancient road. The sun sets in the west, and the heartbroken people are at the end of the world. "Chinese poetry is completely dominated by imagery, which runs through the whole poem, just like a picture hanging in front of you, where scenes blend and objects and minds wander. The poetic style of Chinese poets from the Wei, Jin, and Tang dynasties, who expressed images without evaluating them, is consistent with the ideas of the Imagist Party.
From the descriptive characteristics of Chinese literature, Pound saw the magic of language and imagery, which led to his admiration for the magic of Chinese poetry and Chinese characters. The long poem "Cantos" contains Chinese characters in many places to express some mysterious connotation. , advocates searching for images in Chinese, and proposes that English poetry creation should also strive to immerse the whole poem in imagery. ... There are three main distinctive artistic features displayed in the creation of Imagist poetry. First, the Imagists require poetry to directly present images that can convey feelings, express images through sculpture and painting techniques, and oppose musical and mysterious lyric poems. No comment. Pound summarized the definition of image poetry as: "Image is a complex of rationality and emotion presented in a moment." For example, China's famous modern poem "Life" with only one word: "Net." makes readers in a moment. Feel the full meaning of life. Another example is Amy's masterpiece "Middle Age": "It seems like black ice, / scratched by ignorant skaters, / full of incomprehensible swirls, / this is the dulled surface of my heart." The poem is in " The display of images such as "black ice", "whirlpools" and "blunt surface" instantly conveys the poet's inner feelings about middle-aged helplessness that can only be understood but cannot be expressed. The main ways of composing image poetry are: 1. Image hierarchy: combining images in an orderly and hierarchical manner according to the objective laws of the development of things. For example, the Chinese poem "Chile Song": "Chile River, under the Yin Mountain, the sky is like a dome, covering the four fields. The sky is blue, the fields are vast, and the wind blows the grass, and cattle and sheep can be seen." From the distant mountains to the nearby grass, from the sky to The earth has clear imagery and clear layers. Ezra Pound's "Salute": "Hey, you stylish generation,/You very unnatural generation,/I've seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,/I've seen them with their slovenly families,/I've seen I’ve heard them smile with all their teeth, / I’ve heard their uncivilized laughter, / But I’m just luckier than you, / They’re just luckier than me, / Don’t you see fish swimming in the lake, / There are no clothes at all.” , fish are the freest, they swim freely in the water, unrestrained, without clothes at all; the fishermen are second to the fish, they eat on the ground in the wild, laugh ungentlemanly with their sloppy family members; looking at freedom As a fisherman, I wait and take second place, but I can see through your "fashionable generation" and "extremely unnatural group". In the clear-cut contrast, the poet launched a challenge to those literati who claimed to be noble, elegant and full of style, but they were pretentious, and advocated that modern poets should be like fish roaming freely in the water, getting rid of the stereotypes of poetry and becoming free. creation. 2. Image superposition: images with the same essential meaning are cleverly superimposed together, and the relationships between images are modified, limited, metaphorical, etc. For example, Hume's "On the Pier": "On the quiet pier, / in the middle of the night, / the moon is entangled between the tall masts and ropes, / hanging there, / it looks unreachable, /Actually it’s just a ball, /The child forgot it there after playing with it.” The moon is superimposed on the image of the balloon abandoned by the child, and the moon symbolizes modern people and modern life. After superimposing the image of the balloon with a modified meaning, and the moon. Being entangled between the mast ropes, beauty is desecrated, elegance is ridiculed, and modern people's emotions of melancholy, desolation and loneliness arise spontaneously. Another example is Pound's "Girl" written to his early lover: "The tree entered my hands, / The sap rose up my arms. / The tree grew in my chest and grew downward, / The branches grew out of me, / Like an arm. // You are a tree, / You are a moss, / You are a violet. / You are a child, / and to the world this is all nonsense.” The poem begins with the image of a “tree” full of life. and modify "I", and later superimpose and modify "tree" with moss and violet. Obviously, the image of the tree is a symbol of girls and love, as youthful and beautiful as moss and violets, and as full of vitality as green trees. All these nourish the growth and life course of "my", although these are nonsense in the eyes of secular people. Stupid words. In the superposition of images, we can appreciate the beauty and gentleness of a violet-like girl and the life tension of a moss-green tree. 3. Image juxtaposition: juxtapose two visible images from different times and spaces to inspire and arouse other feelings. Hume said: "The combination of two visible images can be called a visual chord. Their combination allows people to obtain an image that is different from both." The juxtaposition of different images has separated the emotions caused by One of the images has a new meaning.
For example, in the Chinese poem "The boundless falling trees rustle, the endless Yangtze River rolls in", the images of fallen leaves and rivers have been transformed into the meaning of removing the old and replacing the old with the new and moving towards the future; "The chickens sing in the Maodian and the moon, and the frost on Banqiao" expresses the lonely wanderer traveling to a foreign country. , the hardships of getting up early and staying late. Pound's landmark work of Imagist poetry, "In a Tube Station": These faces appear ghostly in the crowd, many petals on the wet black branches. There are only two images in the poem, the faces in the crowd and the petals on the black branches juxtaposed together. This is completely a momentary image obtained in the hurriedly walking crowd, which describes the poet's visual impression and the momentary mood. Inner feelings. The poet stood among the dense crowd at the subway station. Pedestrians came towards him and hurriedly passed by. The whole atmosphere was gloomy, damp and suffocating. Several pale and beautiful faces of women and children appeared and disappeared, breaking the desolation and dullness, giving people a pleasant feeling and thus feeling some vitality. The two juxtaposed images are reflected in the brain, forming a picture with strong contrast between the vulgar and the beautiful, the dull and the fresh. It not only expresses the busy and mediocre life of urban people, giving people a sense of squeezing, but also depicts the inner anxiety, tension and turmoil of modern people, the busy and monotonous life reality, and at the same time shows the attachment and yearning of the soul for the beauty of nature. . Second, the language of Imagist poetry is concise and clear. It does not use meaningless adjectives and modifiers, removes decorative lace, and opposes showing off words. The lines of poetry are short and there are jumps between images. For example, Pound translated the sentence "Sand and Sea Sun" in Li Bai's "Ancient Wind" as: "Surprise. Chaos in the desert. Sun in the sea." Although mistranslation is inevitable, the simplicity and brightness of the language can also be seen. Another example is "The Red Trolley" by the famous American Imagist poet Williams: "Many things / all depend on / a red / small car / shining brightly in the rain / next to a few / white doves." The concise and fresh lines of poetry, It clearly conveyed the yearning of ordinary Americans for middle-class life, so much so that the poem was recited and recited by many housewives. Third, Imagist poetry pays attention to the inner rhythm and rhythm of the image combination, integrating the image with the thoughts and emotions contained in it. He advocates writing poetry according to the musicality of language and opposes writing poetry according to fixed steps. He believes that even metrical poetry is an isochronous and hypnotic "metronome". The Imagists discovered that Japanese poetry did not rhyme, and Chinese poetry was translated into free-style poetry through word-for-word annotations by sinologists. Therefore, Imagist poetry does not follow rules and is close to free verse poetry. They advocate that the musicality of poetry should be natural and that we should pay attention to the inner rhythm and rhythm of things. This played a role in promoting free verse in English-speaking countries. The generation of images can be divided into two forms: one is subjective image; the other is objective image. The expression of imagery can be divided into two creative tendencies: one is static imagery, represented by Amy, Aldington, and Doolittle, which advocates classical beauty and has a romantic style. It has created many sculpture poems, Landscape poetry. For example, Amy's "Environment": "On the maple leaves, / the dewdrops sparkle red, / but in the lotus, / it is as pale and crystal clear as teardrops." "Autumn Fog": "Is it a dragonfly or a maple leaf? /Falling gently on the water? "The image is peaceful and beautiful, like a beautiful landscape painting. The second is the dynamic imagery school, represented by Pound and Yesenin. In 1914, Pound published the "Vortex" poems, marking the birth of the newly founded "Vortex School". Pound advocated that under the principle of image poetry, more emphasis should be placed on the movement and vitality of poetry. He believed: "Image is not a point of view, but a section or a group that shines. It is what I can and may have to call a vortex. Through It means that thoughts are constantly flowing in and out. "Pursue the fluidity of intention, and pursue the complex effect of multiple image jumps in creation." Although the aesthetic concepts and artistic styles of the Imagist writers are different, they have formed some consistent tendencies in their creations. Whether it is Pound, Amy, or Yesenin, Imagist poetry expresses a sentimental, depressed and hopeful mood. Imagist poetry is short, fresh, delicate and affectionate. "Abstract" is the relative concept of "concrete". It extracts the most common points from various things and synthesizes them into a new concept. This concept is called "abstraction". "Abstract Painting" generally refers to the painting style that wanted to break away from "imitating nature" in the 20th century. It includes many schools and is not the name of a certain school: its formation is a long-term continuous evolution. But regardless of its genre, its most common feature is its attempt to break the traditional concept that painting must imitate nature.
In the 1930s and after World War II, various forms derived from abstract concepts became the most popular and distinctive art style in the twentieth century. Abstract painting takes intuition and imagination as the starting point for creation, rejects any symbolic, literary, and illustrative expression techniques, and only synthesizes and organizes shapes and colors on the picture. Therefore, the pure forms and colors presented by abstract paintings are similar to music. The development trend of abstract painting can be roughly divided into: (1) Geometric abstraction (or cold abstraction). This is based on Cezanne's theory and developed through Cubism, Constructivism, New Plasticism... It is characterized by a geometric tendency. This school of painting can be represented by Mondrian. ﹝2﹞Lyric abstraction (or hot abstraction). This is based on Gauguin's artistic concept as a starting point, developed through Fauvism and Expressionism, and has a romantic tendency. This school of painting can be represented by Kandinsky. Representative painter W. Kandinsky (1866-94), a representative painter of lyrical abstraction, "the father of abstract painting", was once the leader of the German Expressionist group "Blue Rider". Representative works "Composition No. 4 (War)" (1911, Rhine Westphalia Art Collection Room, Dusself), "Composition No. 7 Study" (1913, Moscow Tretyakov Gallery), "Between Lights·No. 599" Number". P. Mondrian (1872-1944), a representative painter of geometric abstraction, combined horizontal and vertical lines on a plane to form right angles or rectangles, and arranged the three primary colors of red, yellow, and blue in them, but sometimes also He used gray, a leader of the Dutch De Stijl group, whose representative works include "Composition of Yellow and Blue" (1929) and "Broadway Jazz" (1942-43, Museum of Modern Art, New York). K.C. Malevich (1878-1935), an advocate of Russian Constructivism and a geometric abstract painter, is famous for his representative works "Plane Takeoff" (1915, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and "Cyan Triangle and Black Rectangle" (1915). F. Kupka (1871～1957), Czech painter. The use of color theory and musical harmony created a unique geometric style, such as "Drawing Composition Theme 2" (1911-12, National Gallery of Art, Washington) and "Vertical Line Study" (1911). P. Klee (1879～1940), Swiss painter. Using color harmony and abstract techniques, he created many works that are philosophical and full of naive interest, such as: "Goldfish" (1925, oil and watercolor, paper mounted on cardboard, 48.5×68.5cm, Hamburg Museum), "Main and Branch Roads" (1929, oil on canvas, 83×76cm, Cologne, Riebolds Museum), "Death and Fire" (1940, oil on canvas, 83×67cm, Cologne, Riebolds Museum)